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Kinger's "seven years of computer science" isn't the same in other languages

Digital Discussion

I was taking advantage of the show's extensive selection of dubs by rewatching the latest episode in different languages, starting with Spanish and French (the two languages that I have the most experience in outside of my native language, English). I was fascinated to learn that in the scene where Kinger originally says, “Seven years of computer science for this, huh?”, he instead says:

“¿Cuatro años en computación para esto, eh?” (Spanish)

Quatre années de science informatique juste pour ça, hein?” (French)

Four years of computer science. Not seven.

I asked around on Tumblr about this, and a few other people shared that when they listened to the Japanese, Russian, and Portuguese dubs, they also heard Kinger say four years. This made me curious, so I've gone through every dub myself to see which say "seven" and which say "four."

For the many languages I don't know, I used Google translate so that I could learn and recognize the phrases "four years" and "seven years." I listened closely to the audio tracks and examined the subtitles to confirm a match. For a few of the languages, I also backed this up (only after doing my previously mentioned steps!) by using Google Translate through my phone camera, so that it could automatically translate what the subtitles were saying. (Not being able to copy-paste YouTube subtitles is so annoying)

Here are my results:

"Seven years": English, German, Vietnamese

"Four years": Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Dutch, Filipino, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Korean, Polish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian

Inconclusive due to lack of knowledge: Arabic (The dub sounds like he's saying "four years", but when I used Google Translate through my phone camera on the subtitles, it said "seven years." I'm too inexperienced with Arabic to even try and recognize individual written/typed words, so I'll leave this one for other people to translate)

EDIT: Reddit user u/TheThunder20 has pointed out that Arabic Kinger does indeed say "four", while the subtitles say "seven." As far as I can tell, this is the only language where this mismatch between audio and subtitles happens.

Now I'm more curious how German and Vietnamese managed to match English Kinger's "seven years" and not ALL the other language dubs. What do you guys think happened?

EDIT: u/Iamproudofreddit clarified the whole thing! According to this user, the first version of the episode had Kinger say "four years," but that piece of dialogue was then changed further down the line. The German team was able to catch this change and re-record the line to say "seven years", but it's very likely that the other dub teams either didn't catch it or couldn't re-record.

Edited

Hey, German translator here to shine some light on this! In the first version we were given to dub the episode, the line was intended to be "four years" and we recorded it as that. The line was changed later down the line. We were lucky enough to catch this and to be able to re-record it quickly with out VA, but I assume that some other languages either didn't notice it or didn't have enough time to just re-record that line, which is why quite a lot of them have it wrong :)


Oh god this made it to Film Theory- Glitch please don't come after me I did not intend to break any NDA please tell me that this does not count as a breach of contract Comment Image

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Oh wow, thank you so much for providing the answer to this question! I really appreciate it. :3 It's interesting to hear just what kinds of things can happen during the production and dubbing of a cartoon.

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Edited

Oh yes! I'm very happy we caught the change and managed to redo it on time! I think it's probably not the biggest issue though. I remember a similar thing happening with the final season of The Umbrella Academy where one of the final lines mentioned the release date of the season and only the German got it wrong - my assumption is that the show was originally meant to release on a different date and it wasn't worth it for the German team to get the VA in the studio just for that one line change.

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