Among the crazy translations and dubbings that have been made in the history of Spanish television, the one that has touched me the most because of my age was undoubtedly the one made for the series Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

The translation and dubbing of this Antena 3 midday series followed a domestication translation strategy that, while hilarious, is not usually recommended unless we are making content for children.

If you want to see some examples of the translation of this series you can check out the Sabrina en Español Twitter Account, where a fan is compiling the great moments of the series, usually starring Salem, the main character’s black cat.

The examples are hilarious: Salem singing Soy minero, commenting that he is going to spend the weekend reading Raphael‘s memoirs or a guy inviting Sabrina to an Estopa concert, but what’s the point of a girl who lives in Boston going to an Estopa concert? or knowing Aznar? or Chiquito de la Calzada?

Here you can see the hand of some very creative translators without a doubt, but the fact that you can “see the hand” I’m afraid means that they didn’t do a good job. The best translations are the ones where you can’t tell that the translator has been there, the ones that are fluent, without misunderstandings, without questions…

In the 90’s this trend of adapting American sit-coms to the Spanish market reached very high levels (although Will Smith doesn’t know it, he even imitated Chiquito de la Calzada in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). In a certain sense, I can understand the thinking behind those strategists when deciding how to translate a comedy series. If the objective is to laugh, what difference does it make if there are shocking or nonsensical comments considering the context in which the action takes place?

There are several reasons why this strategy can be unwise: it diminishes the credibility of the character, of the series itself, it can rub many speakers the wrong way, and the jokes can expire very quickly.

An example of this expiration is the dubbing of the first Shrek movie, in which Cruz y Raya were chosen to dub the main characters and at one point the character of Donkey said to Shrek: “Now you go and spoil it”. The joke, which was a very famous joke of this humorous duo at the beginning of the 2000’s, 20 years later is not funny anymore…

Going back to Sabrina, I’m sure you are asking yourselves, what’s the point of introducing these cultural references in this series? The reason is that in the original there were probably references to American culture that the average Spaniard would not know, and there is nothing more boring than listening to jokes you don’t understand.

There are several ways to solve it: generalize, eliminate… but I must admit that none of them are as funny as planting a Raphael joke.