A Malaysian soap opera that reduced a furious woman's 30-second tirade to just four words of closed captioning, a musical stripped of all its songs, and a very multilingual Skippy — Australians have been swapping stories about the moments when the language barrier on foreign television produced results ranging from the baffling to the hilarious.
The Caption That Said It All — and Nothing
The tale that perhaps best captures the absurdity of cross-language television comes from Tim Ingall of Scottsdale, Arizona, who was travelling in Singapore on business when he found himself watching a Malaysian soap opera on his hotel television. With limited channels available, he settled in and was grateful to find English closed captioning — until it became clear the subtitles were running on their own schedule entirely.
An actress delivered what Ingall describes as a full 30-second verbal tirade directed at an unfortunate male character. Not a single word of translation appeared on screen while she raged. Only when she paused to draw breath did the caption finally materialise — and it read, in its entirety: "She is angry with him."
"It was a case of 'No shit, Sherlock' on my part," Ingall recalled drily, adding that he suspected the station's budget could only stretch to what he called "synopsis closed captioning".
When a Musical Loses Its Music
A different kind of translation mishap awaited Bryce Templeton of Mudgeeraba, Queensland, who sat down to watch the classic Western musical Paint Your Wagon while in Italy — only to find the film had been dubbed into Italian and, inexplicably, had every single song cut out.
"This kinda took the edge off it," Templeton noted with considerable understatement. "After all, it is a musical." Admirers of the film will know that among the casualties of such an edit would be Clint Eastwood's famously earnest rendition of I Talk to the Trees — a loss that, depending on one's musical sensibilities, may or may not qualify as a hardship.
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo — Bilingual Icon
Australian television exports have long made the journey overseas, sometimes with surprising results for locals watching from abroad. Margaret Collins of Terrigal recalls being an exchange student in West Germany in 1972 when her host family proudly showed her something remarkable on television: Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, chattering away in fluent German.
"I have to say, I was surprised, too!" Collins wrote.
The experience of hearing beloved Australian voices transformed by dubbing also resonated with Frederika Steen of Chapel Hill, Queensland, who watched Ein Krokodil zum Kussen — the German-dubbed version of Crocodile Dundee — in a cinema in Basel, Switzerland. Steen found Paul Hogan delivering his lines in fluent German thoroughly amusing, though she noted the local Basel audience was "not laughing a lot".
Other Observations Making the Rounds
Beyond the language barrier stories, readers have been sharing a few other colourful asides. Chris McKimm of Karangi reports that a platypus — spotted in the creek bordering his property some years ago — has become a regular presence, with his wife having seen the creature, affectionately named "Polly", as recently as last week. McKimm describes it as "an absolute privilege to have a monotreme in our stream."
And Paul Hunt of Engadine connected recent talk of underwater hockey to the 1959 comedy classic Some Like It Hot, recalling the scene in which Marilyn Monroe's character asks Tony Curtis whether water polo is dangerous — to which he replies, with great confidence, that he had "two ponies drowned under me." Hunt called it simply: "Wonderful."
