Cultural Translation

From gritty to moe, the world truly is a wonderful place.

"If eating pork cheeks in English is an atrocious and disgusting experience, then I cannot talk about pork cheeks being cooked; because we cook them sublimely and enjoy them here. [...] The important thing is that the reader feels the same as the original reader, not that the words are the same. If [a character] ate pork cheeks and he has to eat skewered worms in the Castilian version, skewered worms they shall be."

— Cristina Macia, Spanish translator of A Song of Ice and Fire

When a show is redubbed for release in another country, the dubbers will often replace the cultural references with others more easily recognized by the foreign audience.

In the best of cases, Cultural Translation will change obscure cultural references that many viewers would not "get" into related, but more familiar, footnotes without interrupting the flow. In the worst of cases, it can come off as a pandering attempt to edit anything vaguely foreign or potentially offensive out, even when the images make it blatantly clear that the characters aren't, and were never, in [insert home country here]. Willing Suspension of Disbelief gets a hard day from overzealous Cultural Translation in a Foreign Remake.

On the other hand, if the work is set somewhere other than where it was created, this trope could help to correct Creator's Culture Carryover if done in the same country of setting.

Compare with Woolseyism, where the changes are generally made for aesthetic reasons, and rather than translating the concept, instead replace the original with something completely different but which fits better with the new target audience.

For subtropes, see Accent Adaptation, American Kirby Is Hardcore, Dub Name Change, Dub Personality Change, Keep It Foreign. For when this trope is attempted to the point of trying (and often failing) to hide its true country of origin, see Thinly-Veiled Dub Country Change.

The Other Wiki has a page on this.

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Example subpages

• Anime & Manga
• Video Games

Other examples:

Advertising

• In a Multigrain Cheerios commercial that ends with "The box says 'Shut up, Steve'" — the British-accented voices of the two actors are dubbed over into American English for American audiences (both versions are aired in Canada, which is surprising the first time you see whichever you haven't seen before).
  • It can happen the other way around, too. This Just for Men commercial was given the British-English dub treatment.
• Advertisements are often redubbed to fit the local accent, such as redubbing American ads with Australian voice actors, or German ads with Swiss voices.

Art

• Many artworks of Classical or Biblical themes depict their characters in clothing contemporary to the artist, and frequently give characters who are clearly Middle Eastern/Mediterranean in appearance a Race Lift.
  • See the many paintings of Andromeda that depict her with pale skin.^note She was from "Aethiopia", which may not correspond to modern Ethiopia, but definitely doesn't refer to anywhere in Europe.
  • Ares or King David in medieval armor.
  • Being Jewish, King David would have been circumcised, but the sculpture David by Michelangelo, a Christian, depicts him uncircumcised. Likewise, Jesus would also have been circumcised, but most depictions of him nude (usually in baby form) do not.^note You could argue that they show him in the 7 days before his bris, but then you get into the problem of a Three-Month-Old Newborn.
  • Medieval artwork of the ancient Jews and Israelites often depicts them anachronistically wearing the Jewish hat, which Christians required them to wear.
  • This 1625 painting of the book of Esther◊ shows the characters in royal clothing of the 17th century (though the Persian king Achashverosh at least has a turban).
  • In Peru, there is a painting of the Last Supper with a cooked guinea pig on the table. Not only are guinea pigs not kosher (and everyone in the picture is Jewish), nobody outside South America would have heard of them back then. But guinea pigs are commonly eaten in Peru, so the artist included one.

Comic Books

• Translations of Asterix do this quite a lot. Due to the series being a Hurricane of Puns, the translators skillfully altered cultural refferences and created new Punny Names to preserve the originals' trademark humor and wordplay.
  • Asterix in Switzerland features Asterix and Obelix having their cart repaired by the mascot of French oil company Antar.◊ The English translation replaces him with the Michelin Man,◊ which keeps the "mascot" gag as something Brits would recognise, but is bizarre in context, as instead of a short Gaulish warrior, Asterix is confronted with a man made out of tires. This results in a pun Obelix makes in the next panel where he mutters, "Call me fat! Did you see his spare tire?" Confusingly, in later editions, the Michelin Man is replaced with the Antar warrior again, but Obelix's comment is left intact, ruining the joke for English readers.
  • In Asterix in Belgium, one of the Belgians becomes obsessed with the idea of cutting root vegetables into chips and frying them. Upon finding a bit of pirate ship with mussels growing on it, he wonders if they'd go together, referencing the Belgian dish moules-frites. The English version has him leap from mussels to fish, as a reference to fish'n'chips.
  • In Asterix in Britain, when two background characters are arguing over the price of a "melon." In French, "melon" can mean "bowler hat," but it doesn't have that double-meaning in Britain. Therefore, for the English edition, the exchange was translated to, "Oh, so this melon's bad, is it?!" "Rather, old fruit."
  • Many of Cacofonix's songs count. In Asterix and the Normans, Cacofonix sings a variant of "Un kilomètre par pied" with Latin terms. The English version has him sing "This old man, he played unum..."
  • In Asterix in Spain, Unhygienix mentions having inherited property in Carnac and wanting to develop it with menhirs, implying that he arranged the Carnac stones. The English translation changes the location to Salisbury Plain, a reference to Stonehenge.
  • Asterix and the Great Crossing makes a point of having a bunch of Danish vikings discovering America, teaming up with Asterix and Obelix. The Norwegian version translated the leader of the Viking discoverers to be Leif Eiriksson — a Historical Domain Character who actually grew up in Iceland, and was the first European in North America anyway. His father, Erik the Red, was conveniently redheaded, and gave his name to the (originally Danish) chieftain who also sported red hair. Eric the Red was a Norwegian native, by the way. The Danish references were somewhat blurred by this, but the historical in-jokes gained an extra layer for Norwegian readers.
  • The Asterix books also convey the humour Parisian French speakers gain from the weird way French is spoken in places like Belgium and Switzerland, and especially from dialect French spoken outside Paris. In ''Asterix and Cleopatra", people from the South kingdom of Egypt are depicted as speaking in exaggerated Southern French accents — the languedocois dialect of the south-west is heavily parodied. This posed as problem for the British translation, which kept the theme of bucolic country folk from a long way away coming to the sophisticated metropolis; they were given parody The West Country accents, from a south-western region thought of by the rest of Britain as yokel farming country.
• In Brazil, Rogue is called "Vampira" (the female form of vampire), somewhat fitting with her power-sucking mutant ability.
• Brazilian editions of Marvel/DC superhero comics are full of examples. Particularly, whenever Spider-Man or another wisecracking superhero makes reference to some piece of American pop culture, chances are it will be replaced by some Brazilian version. Particularly if it's some sports reference. It was a bit odd, to say the least, to read Spider-Man making references to Brazilian soccer teams, Brazilian Formula One drivers, and Brazilian singers. Also, references to New Jersey being a toxic cesspit will be changed to Cubatão, a Brazilian city with a reputation for environmental pollution.
• When the X-Men comics were first published in Finland in the 1980s, most of the character names were translated literally if they had cool-sounding Finnish equivalents, such as with Cyclops ("Kyklooppi") or Colossus ("Kolossi"). However, with some other names they came up with rather unusual localizations. Nightcrawler became "Painajainen" ("Nightmare"), possibly because the translator didn't know what a "nightcrawler" was, and thought it had something to do with nightmares. The name of the villain "Arcade" would literally translate to "game hall", which obviously isn't a good name for character... So he became, rather inexplicably, "Armoton" ("Merciless"), which has little do with the original English name, except that both words begin with Ar-. As for the X-Factor villain Apocalypse, the translator was under the impression that the word "apocalypse" translates to "The Book of Revelations", and he didn't want the villain to be called a "book", so he was given the much more generic name "Tuho" ("Destruction").
• There was a French digest compiling several issues of various, mostly X-Men-related Marvel comics (which bore the name Titans somewhat ironically) printed from the late 70s to the early 90s, in which the names of American superheroes were a wide selection of direct translations, non-translations, and cultural translations. Phoenix was directly translated as "Phénix" whereas Colossus was still "Colossus", probably because the French "Colosse" was already being used for the Blob. And in most translations, "Nightcrawler" is "Diablo" probably because of his demonic appearance (quite unfortunate, since part of his character is being religious and having a tragic backstory involving his looks).
  • Wolverine (this was well before the character became a household name) became "Serval", as the exact translation of "wolverine" is "glouton", which also means "big eater", not really appropriate for a super-hero. The editor also justified the Serval translation by saying servals were the only other animals whose sense of smell was comparable with that of a wolverine. "Serval" was eventually dropped and Wolverine switched back to his original name in most current French-language versions.
  • Wolfsbane of the New Mutants was translated as "Félina". They actually considered a more literal translation like "Louva" ^note "louve" is French for "female wolf", but somehow found it awkward-sounding.
  • Although the Teen Titans were published at the same time, the mag that featured it was titled "Les jeunes T." (Young T.), presumably to avoid using a similar title.
  • In the early 80s, the French editor who published the Avengers and the Defenders lost the rights to Marvel comics. Undeterred, they would go on to publish the Legion of Superheroes and Infinity Inc series without changing the French names of the magazines (Les Vengeurs and Les Defenseurs). French readers were confused, to say the least.
• The Greek "ΚΟΜΙΞ" ("comix") magazine, a publication focusing on quality reprints of classic Disney comics (mainly Duck family stories), uses cultural translation to great effect. Although most accents can't be rendered in Greek, the translators make extensive use of off-beat vocabulary (also appropriately rural or dated where needed), folk tradition or classic, timeless references rather than contemporary/modern pop culture, and straight-up neologisms. Faithful to the spirit of the original stories, the result works extremely well and never causes the reader to stop and think about translation issues.
• In Italy, an old translation of Marvel comics renamed Nightcrawler as "Lombrico" (Worm). The funny thing is that "nightcrawler" is an American word for a type of worm, so it is actually a literal (if somewhat offensive) translation. Namor the Sub-Mariner lost his nickname for years, because no translation was fitting.
• The Punisher: One story has Frank describe a gunman as "shoots faster than greased lightning". The French translation used "shoots faster than his own shadow".
• #131 of The Simpsons parodies this process by presenting supposed examples of The Simpsons, as adapted by other cultures. "The Simpsons Comics Internationale!" presents a Bart Simpson manga (drawn by none other than Nina Matsumoto, whose claim to fame was her original manga Simpsons drawing), a story from Mexico, and a Belgian comic that mixes elements from both Tintin and The Smurfs.
• Early English translations of the Tintin comics tried to rehome the heroes away from their native Belgium. There are references to British currency, and Captain Haddock's mansion (Marlinspike Hall in English, originally Château de Moulinsart in French) is located in the fictional English county of "Marlinshire". The artwork betrays the non-English setting — cars drive on the right-hand side of the road, and police officers are seen wearing the uniforms of the Belgian Gendarmerie. The CGI movie adaptation appears to be actually set in Britain, and everyone has British accents.
  • Word of God has it that the movie was supposed to be set in a generic "European" location.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • In the Danish translation of the (in)famous arc about the baby raccoon, the raccoon was changed into a squirrel, probably because raccoons do not naturally occur in Denmark, while the squirrel is a fairly common and charismatic mammal that most people have encountered.
    • The Dutch version did the same thing but with a bunny instead. In both cases, it works because the raccoon is never shown directly, so it could easily be made into another cute furry animal without needing to edit any of the illustrations.
  • In the French translation, a reference to the different varieties of peanut butter (chunky and extra chunky) was changed to jam (strawberry and raspberry). References to dollars were also changed to francs or euros, despite the characters still mentioning that they live in the U.S.
• One of Gary Larson's The Far Side comics was a whale singing into a microphone underwater (referencing whale song). The caption originally read "A Louie, Louie... wowoooo... We gotta go now...", but was changed for the Danish book version into "I'm singing in the rain..." because that was more of an international hit. In the collection Prehistory of the Far Side, Larson noted that he found the Danish version funnier in retrospect.
• In Garfield, references to fudge are usually translated to "chocolate" in the Spanish version of the strip.
• Spoofed by Madam & Eve in this comic,◊ showing the "minor alterations" made to adapt it for different countries.

Films — Animation

• In the Dutch dub of All Dogs Go to Heaven, Itchy suggests to Charlie that they should move to Africa to flee from Carface, as opposed to the Himalayas in the original.
• The moose in the Portuguese dub of Brother Bear are voiced by "Toni" & "Zezé", another comedic duo. Their Running Gag of poor grammar comes up near the end. Doubles as a Woolseyism, as there was no way to match the correct sentence, "Eu gosto de ti" to the movements of "I like you".
• Cars:
  • In the first Cars film, the character of Guido speaks only Italian, except for a heavily accented "Peet stop!" For the Italian dub, Disney wanted to keep the "language barrier" gag and did so in a unique way. While the rest of the characters were dubbed into standard Italian, Guido wasn't. Instead, he was dubbed into the very distinctive local dialect of Modena (home to Ferrari, which Guido and especially his partner Luigi ardently support in-universe).
  • In Cars 2, during the scene where Lightning talks with Lewis Hamilton and Jeff Gorvette at the World Grand Prix kickoff party in Tokyo, specific foreign countries replace Jeff with another racer native to the country the film is dubbed; Australia has Frosty Winterbumper, Russia has Vitaly Petrov, China has Long Ge, Spain has Fernando Alonso, Sweden has Jan Nilsson, and Latin America has Memo Rojas, Jr.
• The Neil Gaiman novel Coraline, in its adaption to film, has been relocated from England to Oregon in the United States. Most of the characters have become Americans as a result, but the neighbors remain the same— Mr. B is still Slavic and the old actresses are still English. The latter are even implied to be living in the area of Oregon the film is set in due to its active theatre scene.
• In Fantastic Mr. Fox, the animal characters are all played by Americans — but the setting is still in the English countryside. Presumably this is a form of Translation Convention for Talking Animals. Interestingly, the human villains are English accented.
  • Lampshaded by Bill Murray in promotional interviews for the film. When asked why all the animals had American accents but the farmers had English accents, his reply was "BECAUSE they're the bad guys!"
• The Ted Hughes novel The Iron Man had its setting changed from 1968 England to 1957 America when adapted into The Iron Giant.
• In many versions of the A Goofy Movie song "After Today", some subjects were changed.
  • French: A girl's Algebra test was changed to History and Maths; two bullies make a reference to Molière and Racine instead of cheating and mystery meat; and two twin girls are excited about their last French lesson instead of Home Economics.
  • German: A girl's Algebra test is changed to pennies and drummers; and two jocks mention Latin and sweating during sports instead of cheating and having to eat mystery meat.
  • Italian: A girl's Algebra test is changed to homework (in general); and two jocks mention Geometry and Geography instead of cheating and eating mystery meat.
  • Spanish (Spain): During "On The Open Road", Max wishes that he would study instead of going on the trip with his father. In the original version, Max wishes he went to Beverly Hills, California 90210.
• The Arabic translation of Disney's Hercules compares Hercules to Antar, the legendary Arab hero.
• In the Brazilian dub of The Incredibles, the teacher trying to prove Dash put a tack in his chair was given a Portuguese accent.
• Inside Out:
  • Riley's distaste for broccoli became a distaste for green peppers in the Japanese version, as the stigma broccoli has among kids is more of a Western thing. Oddly enough, some pieces of merchandise made for the Japanese market still show it.
  • The emotions of Riley's dad are seen watching a game of hockey, keeping to the stereotype of the family coming from Minnesota. Several international versions such the UK, Australia and Latin American ones change this to soccer, likely because this specific stereotype would be unknown to them.
  • In foreign versions with right to left alphabets such as the Hebrew and Arabic dubs, Bing Bong reads the warning sign on Abstract Thought by pointing with his trunk from right to left rather than left to right.
• In The Lion King, an imprisoned Zazu is forced to sing for Scar, so he sings 'I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts'. The German dub changes it to 'Sur le Pont D'Avignon', supposedly because most of Germany doesn't know the song 'I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts'.
• Madagascar:
  • In the original, the two apes learn that Tom Wolfe is coming to New York and plan to throw poo on him.^note For those who don't get the reference: Wolfe's signature clothing was a white suit, which you can see in his page image. In the German translation, he was replaced by Hillary Clinton, for whatever reason.
  • In the Hungarian dub, it's simply a "lecture on evolution". And for some reason, Marty wants to go to Miami instead of Connecticut.
  • In the Russian dub, the monkeys want to... ummm, visit a "lecture on anarchy in the society".
• In Meet the Robinsons, the gag about Wilbur's dad looking like Tom Selleck was changed in some foreign dubs, replacing Selleck with whoever is voicing Cornelius in the local dub. Others, such as the Hebrew dub, keep it intact, because the gag is about how Wilbur's dad really looks like the exact opposite of Selleck.
• In non-English versions of Monsters University, the "BE MY PAL" cupcakes are changed into smiley face cupcakes, removing the resulting joke where they are smoshed together to spell the word "LAME".
• Shrek:
  • The Polish dub of the movies is full of Polish pop-culture references. For example, Donkey sings the theme song of a Polish TV drama when Shrek decides to go to the Potion Factory in Shrek 2.
  • The original Hebrew dub of Shrek 2 changes the line "give him the Bob Barker treatment" (i.e. neuter him) to "give him the David D'Or treatment" (David D'Or is an Israeli countertenor). After the singer threatened to sue, the line was changed.
  • In the Czech dub, the "let's neuter him" line continued "we're not Srstka and Kubisova", which referenced two very well-known celebrities (a stuntman/actor/moderator/sportsman and a singer) who are known as animal lovers and devoted to a long running pet adoption TV programme.
  • In the Spain dub, Shrek and Donkey were voiced by the sketch-comedy duo Cruz y Raya, and their dialogue incorporated some of their running gags.
  • In the Japanese dub, Shrek's original Scottish-ish accent is rendered as a Kansai accent (due to analogous cultural associations between the two accents).
  • From the Norwegian dub: Shrek, when asked by Fiona what kind of knight he is, alluding to his dub voice actor (children's show host Asgeir Borgermoen, who'd jokingly refer to himself as "boss over all bosses") and claiming to be "knight over all knights".
  • The Portuguese dub gives him a Porto accent.
  • In Shrek 2, the Brazilian dub changed the reference to Shirley Bassey (when Donkey says that a bush looks like her), mentioning the Brazilian singer Fafá de Belém instead. It also changed the reason why the bush resembles the singer: in Bassey's case, it's the arms pose; in Fafá's case, it's the bust size.
• This happens a lot in the Disney-distributed English dubs of Studio Ghibli movies. They heavily encouraged the various screenwriters to take liberties in translation but made sure it was written into the contract that the animation itself couldn’t be touched:
  • Their dub of My Neighbor Totoro, changes ohagi into cake in the dialogue without the visuals being altered. The Streamline dub, in comparison, just has Satsuki call all of her grandmother's food delicious.
  • Their dub of Kiki's Delivery Service has some dialogue changed to reflect modern teenage trends of the time, like calling coffee hot chocolate, calling rice porridge oatmeal and having Kiki talk about liking boys instead of going to the disco. The Streamline dub, which interestingly enough was used for the Dubtitle script on the Japanese-subbed Disney VHS as well as early DVD and Blu-ray releases, also uses the first change.
  • Their dub of Spirited Away has Chihiro state aloud some details that wouldn't be obvious to western viewers, like the bath house and Haku's dragon form, which is part of Japanese mythology.
  • Their dub of The Wind Rises refers to the Japanese snack Siberia as sponge cake. While castella is a kind of sponge cake, it isn't exactly like the kind most westerners would be familiar with.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie was co-produced by Nintendo and Illumination Entertainment, and released in the United States before it did in Japan due to the latter company's involvement. The "Super Japanese version" of the movie replaces the English script with one written by Nintendo for Japanese audiences. Changes include reducing the sarcasm and "Amerikan Jooku" (jokes), more use of Japanese wordplay, more subtle use of honorifics, and minor changes to characters' personalities.
• The Brazilian dub of Tangled substitutes Flynn Rider's real name, Eugene Fitzherbert, for José Bezerra. While not as uncommon (or lame-sounding) as the original, it's still a name completely unbefitting of a Disney prince (not that Flynn does fit the mold outside of his looks...).
• International versions of Toy Story 2 replace the American flag waving behind Buzz Lightyear during his motivational speech to the other toys that transitions to the news channel in Al's apartment signing off with a spinning globe with fireworks, and "The Star-Spangled Banner" with an original piece by Randy Newman called the "One World Anthem".
• In Toy Story 3, Buzz's "Spanish Mode" switches him from Mexican Spanish to Castilian Spanish in the Latin American version. In the version released in Spain, he picks up a dense Andalusian accent; they couldn't simply swap the language because Buzz's mannerisms are very stereotypically Spanish.
• In the original English version of Turning Red, one of Mei's talents is speaking French. In both French dubs, she instead excels in a Spanish class.
• In some foreign versions of Zootopia, the news anchorman is different. While most of the countries got a moose (named Peter Moosebridge, with real-life Canadian anchorman Peter Mansbridge voicing him in the English version), in the Chinese version he is replaced with a panda, in the Brazilian one with a jaguar, in the Australian one he's a koala, and in the Japanese version it's a raccoon dog (wearing a leaf on his head like the mythological Tanuki). The UK version (which, even though it otherwise had the same cast, was already redubbing all references to the city's name) had the moose redubbed by BBC sports reporter Vassos Alexander, and named Moosos Alexander.

Films — Live-Action

• Before dubbing or subtitling (depending on the country) became the methods of choice, early sound movies were sometimes produced in several versions simultaneously on the same sets. For instance Laurel and Hardy did a German and a French version of Pardon Us, learning their texts phonetically and interacting with different supporting actors. In some cases this led to cultural translations as well, e. g. in the 1932 German film F. P. 1 antwortet nicht the main protagonist was cast and performed in a way that played to the expectations of the intended audiences of what a masculine hero should be. In the German version Hans Albers (aided by sidekick Peter Lorre) was brash and ebullient, in the French version I. F. 1 ne repond plus Charles Boyer was more suave, and in the English Floating Platform 1 Does Not Answer Conrad Veidt was cool and reserved.
• In the 17 Again (2009) trailer, Michael says to his friend, "You look like Clay Aiken!". In the Russian version of the trailer, his line was replaced with "You look like Elton John!". Apparently, this is done because most Russian viewers don't watch American Idol and have absolutely no idea who the hell Clay Aiken is, while Elton John is quite famous. But the problem is that this guy does resemble Clay and in fact doesn't look like Elton.
• In the German version of 2001: A Space Odyssey the song that plays as Hal deactivates, "Daisy Belle", is replaced with "Hänschen klein". This is because both songs were used to test speech synthesizers in their respective countries.
• An adaptation of AKIRA is in the works. An early script review has indicated that it is now Manhattan that has been destroyed and rebuilt. However, the setting is kept intact (Japan buys what remained of Manhattan Island after the U.S. took a dive). It's still called "Neo Tokyo", Tetsuo is now Travis, and half the characters are now American. The review indicates that the plot itself remains faithful to the manga.
• In the Spanish dub of Annie (1982), several songs replace references to American culture with that of European ones.
  • In "It's a Hard Knock Life", the Chrysler Building was renamed to the Statue of Liberty.
  • In "I Think I'm Gonna Like it Here", Don Budge is the Champion of Wimbledon.
  • In "Let's Go To The Movies", Charlot and Jaimito replace Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse. Samuel Goldwyn and Jack Warner became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros, the studios that they co-founded.
  • In "We've Got Annie", Mrs. Pugh's verse mentions Annie's positive attitude (in regards to dancing to the Charleston and bewitching [everyone] with her mocking look) instead of Benny Goodman, Bing Crosby, Mutt & Jeff, and Eleanor & Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  • In "Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile", mentions of Main Street and Savile Row became London and Paris.
• In Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Austin dismisses the 70s and 80s as having only "an oil crisis and A Flock of Seagulls". The Brazilian dub changes the musical reference to "a group called Village People", which are much better known in that country. The third movie had comedy group Casseta & Planeta helping with the subtitles to ensure all the double entendres landed.
• In The Avengers, Tony Stark at one point refers to the fact that Steve Rogers alias Captain America has been frozen for 70 years by calling him a "Capcicle", a pun on the superhero's name and either icicle or Popsicle (an American brand of ice pop that has become a genericized trademark). It seems that the creators of the German dub have chosen the latter interpretation, even though this brand is unknown in Germany. So, Tony calls Steve "Captain/Käpt’n Iglo" in the dub instead, the local name of Captain Birdseye, the mascot of a brand of frozen food. This even serves as yet another one of those pop-culture references which are going straight over Steve's head, due to to Captain Birdseye/Käpt'n Iglo having been introduced as late as 1967/1985, as opposed to Popsicles, which have been existing by that name since The Roaring '20s.
• In the French dub of Avengers: Infinity War Tony Stark calls Ebony Maw Voldemort instead of Squidward. Spongebob Squarepants is known in France, but Squidward is just called "Carlo" in the French dub so the reference would be less obvious because of his generic name.
• Back to the Future:
  • In the French dub of the first film, Marty's brand name was changed from Calvin Klein to Pierre Cardin (which can be confusing, as Pierre Cardin is more commonly associated to haute couture than affordable underwear).
  • In the Spanish dub, it is Levi Strauss (Levi Strauss underwear?) because there was no foreign underwear brand that was particularly famous in Spain at that time. Ditto for the Italian dub.
  • In the French dub, Marty's comment that he knows CPR is replaced by him saying he works for SAMU (the name of the French Emergency Medical Service), since the CPR acronym is not well-known in French (people would most likely use expressions that translate as "first aid" or "cardiac massage", which are less likely to be opaque to a 1955 person). Since SAMU was founded in 1956 it remains an acronym that will puzzle someone from 1955, and as a bonus offers the additional joke of someone asking who is this Samuel Marty says he's working for.
  • Also in the French dub, the 1.21 gigawatts is changed to 2,21 gigawatts, because in French 1.21 would't have the very audible 'S' at the end.^note Numbers between 1 and 2 are plural in English but singular in French... and France uses a comma as decimal separator.
  • The German dub of Back to the Future Part II translates the Ronald Reagan reference "It is morning again in America" (even in the afternoon) as "Amerika erwache!" (America, awaken!), a variation on "Deutschland erwache!", a slogan of the Nazis during their rise to power. Naturally, this doubled as a Take That! at Reagan, who had caused controversy in West Germany with his deployment of Pershing II missiles in the country and his 1985 visit to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II, which saw him speak at a German military cemetery in Bitburg where 49 members of the Waffen-SS were buried.
• The German comedy Bella Martha (American title: Mostly Martha) tells the story of a gourmet chef in Hamburg who after the death of her sister in a car accident has to look after said sister's daughter and who also falls in love with another cook. Both the cook and the child's father are Italian and the ending of the film is set in Italy, the epilogue showing that Martha marries her colleague and lives with him and her niece in Italy, where she sets up a new restaurant. In the American remake No Reservations, the story is set in New York, the inconvenient father of the niece is removed from the story, and the chef and her love interest are both white Anglos, removing the immigration subplots (the Italian cook in Bella Martha having difficulties communicating in German, Martha moving to Italy in the end). Which is all the more remarkable considering that the United States usually prides itself on being a nation of immigrants.
• The Birdcage, a 1996 remake of the French film La Cage aux folles (the American a direct translation of the original French). Unlike most American remakes of foreign films, it is not set in New York, but rather in Miami. The contrast between the LGBT-friendly South Beach and highly conservative (and religious) politics more closely reproduces the contrast between the Saint-Tropez nightclub scene and ultraconservative politics of the original.
• In the book that The Bridge on the River Kwai is based on, Major Shears is British. In the movie, he was made into an American.
• Norwegian film The Bus suffered this fate when being remade in Denmark. The main idea of a revolting people who gets their way against their own elected representatives were smoothed down, and the fact that the Beadle actually worked against his own superiors on behalf of the people, was too Norwegian to fit in a Danish environment. To this, add some Hotter and Sexier elements, well fitting for the Danish spirit, and gloss out a more strict morality code, fitting for a traditional rural Norwegian society (like, for instance, the way you regard booze and drinking).
• Candyman was based on a Clive Barker short story, "The Forbidden", about a malicious ghost haunting the slums of Liverpool. The film moved the story to the notorious real-life Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago and turned the story from a metaphor for British classism to one for American racism, with the Candyman now a black man who was lynched for sleeping with a white woman. The bonfire featured in the finale is retained, though the connection to Guy Fawkes Day celebrations isn't.
• In foreign editions of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, four points of Steve's list of things he missed while being frozen^note More precisely, the ones that in the North American English version are covered as I Love Lucy, Steve Jobs, disco music and either the moon landing or the Berlin Wall, depending on the version are replaced with popular stuff from the country the dub comes from, chosen via polls on the various international Facebook pages. In the British version, for example, the points are The Beatles, Sean Connery, Sherlock^note which raises the question of who plays Sherlock and John in the MCU, since Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman both appear in the MCU and the 1966 Football World Cup finals. In the foreign versions of this list, Star Wars is not penned out like in the North American version. Other countries' versions can be seen here.
• In Cold Pursuit, a character discusses giving a hotel a review on Yelp. The UK trailers replaces Yelp with TripAdvisor.
• Constantine (2005) changes the nationality and location of the UK-set (American-owned) comic Hellblazer to Los Angeles. Since the release of the movie, the comic book character of Constantine has stated that there's another guy with his name and a similar job in the US.
• In The Country Bears, when Dex tells Barry how he was adopted, he mentions that their parents showed him "a bunch of Barney videos". Since Barney is not as popular in Spain as in Latin America, the European Spanish dub has Dex mention Sesame Street instead (more specifically its International Coproduction, Barrio Sésamo).
• Dark Water: The Japanese movie was based on a book written by the same author of The Ring. The constant raining (which is a major element of the movie and book) made more sense in the Japanese version, since Japan is a very wet country and it's not strange that more than one heavy rainfall occurs there daily. But in the American version, it takes place on Roosevelt Island in New York, a city that isn't particularly well-known for rainfall.
• The Italian dub of Deadpool has the Merc with a Mouth mockingly refer to Francis as "Mr. Bean" instead of "Basil Fawlty", since Fawlty Towers is almost unknown there.
• A rare example in which only cultural references were changed: in the European versions of Demolition Man, all references to Taco Bell were re-dubbed as Pizza Hut, due to Taco Bell's relatively small foreign penetration. Both companies are owned by the same conglomerate,^note PepsiCo at the time of the film's release; it spun off its restaurant operations in 1997, forming what's now Yum! Brands. and the translation was very simple to pull off because the whole joke in the scene is that the fancy restaurant shown bears zero resemblance to Taco Bell or Pizza Hut (both of which have fairly déclassé reputations).
  • In the French dub specifically, the pro-freedom Motor Mouth speech of Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary) replaces "I want to smoke a cigar the size of Cincinnati" by "I want to smoke a cigar the size of the Eiffel Tower".
• The Departed, an American remake of Infernal Affairs, moved the setting to Boston and replaced the Triads with The Irish Mob. Furthermore, many details were changed in order to mirror the story of the notorious Boston mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger.
• The Russian dub of Evolution replaced the song Wayne sings to attract the dragony alien with Alla Pugacheva's song Iceberg. The result was hilarious. (It's a love song addressed to a man, to begin with...) "And you're so cold, like an iceberg in the ocean..."
• François Truffaut's film version of Fahrenheit 451 is set, surprisingly, in England, whereas the novel is set in the United States. It's never stated, but everyone has British Accents (except the Austrian star actor), the post boxes and houses are very period British, the clothes◊ are as well, and the children in the school (one of the last survivors after The Good Old British Comp was created the previous year) chant "Twice two is four, twice three is six..." Americans generally say "two times two", not "twice", when doing math.
• Fever Pitch was originally an autobiography about a fan's obsession with the Arsenal Football Club in England. It was adapted into an American movie about a fictional person's obsession with baseball's Boston Red Sox. Conveniently, the word "pitch" applies to both football/soccer and baseball, so the title remained the same. The ending had to be changed at the last minute due to the Sox actually winning the World Series. The ending actually mirrors that of the British-made first film adaptation, in which Arsenal wins the First Division for the first time in 18 years. Unlike the Sox win, the Arsenal win was, at that time, historical fact.
• In Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman nicknames Leonard "Private Pyle", a reference to the bumbling protagonist of the sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.. Since this reference would fly over the heads of non-Americans, international dubs had Hartman give Leonard different nicknames.
  • In the German dub, Hartman calls Leonard "Private Paula", because it's both a female name and, presumably, sounds close enough to Pyle.
  • The Italian dub, meanwhile, turned Leonard's nickname into "Palla di lardo" ("Lardass"), and also changed "Snowball" into "Biancaneve" or "Snow White".
  • The French dub calls him Engagé Baleine. Baleine roughly translate as Whale in French.
  • The Spanish dub (more specifically Spain) calls him Recluta Patoso. The word Patoso roughly translate as either Clumsy or Smart Aleck in Castilian Spanish (which is a common word used only in Spain).
• In the French dub of Galaxy Quest, the reference to Gilligan's Island was replaced by one to the Soap Opera Santa Barbara, since the former is unknown in France (the series did get a French dub, but very obscure and long forgotten).
• When Godzilla: King of the Monsters! was brought to the United States, scenes with an American reporter played by Raymond Burr were added into the film, with dialogue changes and edits used to make it seem like he was interacting with the Japanese cast. Interestingly, this version was later dubbed back into Japanese and shown under the name Monster King Gojira, and it was a hit, with future kaiju films including reporter characters inspired by Burr. The makers of Godzilla were suspicious of the poor dubbing of the time and thought American audiences wouldn't watch a subtitled version. Plus, they probably felt that more Americans would get the message about atomic weapons if it was in English.
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was adapted into a film in the early 2000s, changing the location from 19th-century England to 20th-century Southern California.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 does this to the "I'm Mary Poppins, y'all!" line, However, in Taiwan, Mary Poppins isn't as memorable, so the Mary Poppins reference instead references My Neighbor Totoro, another character who floats around with an umbrella. (And for viewers who are paying attention, it still fits within the world of the film; Totoro came out in 1988 and Peter Quill was abducted from Earth the same year, so it's unlikely but not impossible that he would have seen it.)
• High Fidelity, the film version of Nick Hornby's novel, moves the setting from London to Chicago (and changes the central character's name) while otherwise remaining fairly faithful. The Broadway musical shifts the location to Brooklyn.
• Hook: When Tinker Bell is fighting and defeating a bunch of pirates by herself, Peter asks her "Are you related to Mighty Mouse?" In the Canadian French dub, he instead asks her "Did you drink some magic potion?" This is a reference to Asterix, whose title character is known for gaining Super-Strength whenever he drinks the magic potion made by the druid Getafix.
• The Indian in the Cupboard's movie adaptation did this with a British work, changing the setting from England to New York and making the main characters all American. The American cowboy and Native-American action figures from the book remain American in the film.
• Insomnia is a 2002 remake of a 1997 Norwegian film with substantially altered plot and characters from the harder, more cynical Film Noir original. The constant daylight of the Scandanavian summer was a crucial plot point and symbol in the original, so the American remake was located in Alaska in order to preserve that aspect of the story, while still managing a US location.
• The American comedy Jungle 2 Jungle starring Tim Allen is a remake of the less slapstick-y French comedy Little Indian, Big City (which was also billed An Indian in Paris for international release), but the American remake eventually found its way back into French theatres under the title Un Indien à New York.
• Countless kung fu movies get dubbed in English with the main character's name changed to something like "Freddy Chan" or "Ricky Lee". In China, and especially Hong Kong, where many of the films were originally made, it's fairly typical for people to have a western given name for use when talking to western people. For example, Jun-fan "Bruce" Lee.
• The American subtitles of Kung Fu Hustle replaced an offhand reference to two beautiful lovers from Chinese mythology with Paris and Helen of Troy. The subtitles are Woolseyed in other areas as well, while the dub is more straightforward, including keeping the reference to Xiaolongnu. The French dub preferred the less subtle Romeo and Juliet.
• When The Longest Yard was remade in Britain as Mean Machine, the sport it revolved around was changed from American football to association football. Fittingly, the protagonist was played by Vinnie Jones, who himself was a footy/soccer player before venturing into acting. The title change also reflects this, since gaining yards is an intrinsic concept to American football, so it was changed to the inmates' team's name.
• The second film adaptation of Lord of the Flies changes every British reference into an American one.
• The film Love, Rosie is an adaptation of a Cecilia Ahern novel named Where Rainbows End. This time the setting was shifted from Dublin and Boston to a generic English town and Boston for no particularly obvious reason.
• Matilda: The movie's cast is American instead of English and it is set somewhere in America instead of somewhere in the Home Counties. Only Pam Ferris is British. Crunchem Hall retains an oddly British feel by being a fairly old, dour-looking building rather than the newer building more typical of American schools in media, as well as maintaining much of the same structure as a traditional British school.
• Men in Black: International features a scene where M stares at an alien-monitoring screen that features celebrities who are secretly extraterrestrials, to which High T claims "It's never who you think it is". In the original, it's Ariana Grande, Elon Musk, J. J. Abrams, and Donald Glover. But internationally it changes according to the country, including Piers Morgan in the UK, Jérôme Boateng in Germany and Sérgio Mallandro in Brazil.
• In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie has Ivan Ooze complain that as a Sealed Evil in a Can he missed "The Black Plague! The Spanish Inquisition! The Brady Bunch Reunion!" The Brady Bunch is very obscure in Brazil, so it was changed in two versions, one with "The Woodstock Festival!" and the other with "The Miss Universe contest!".
• Monster-in-Law has a scene when Jane Fonda chews out the unnamed pop star for not knowing about "Roe vs Wade". Now abortion was / is a controversial topic in Germany too, but an American character referencing German laws wouldn't have made sense, so in the German translation, she mentions Richard Nixon instead.
• The Brazilian dub of The Nice Guys changes the nickname of an assassin from "John-Boy" to "John Travolta", fitting of the 1978 setting (the dialogue explicitly mentioning The Waltons was changed to Grease and Saturday Night Fever).
• At the end of Ocean's Eleven, as Danny is leaving the jail, he tells Rusty, "Ted Nugent called. He wants his shirt back." In other versions, the reference is changed to Elton John.
• One Missed Call, the American remake of the Japanese horror film Chakushin Ari, changes the setting to America. The scene in which a famous TV evangelist tries to exorcise the ghost from an unfortunate victim was based on a similar scene with a Buddhist priest.
• In the original version of One, Two, Three, MacNamara makes sure nobody will play “Marching Through Georgia” for his Georgian boss. In the German version he makes sure no songs about beer and wine are played for the Coca-Cola boss.
• The international versions of Parasite (2019) has the poor family use Whatsapp instead of the Korea-only KakaoTalk as their instant messaging client of choice. A dish named jjapaguri, a mix of two instant noodle brands, is named ram-don in the English subtitles, just because ramen would be more familiar to the foreign audience.
• Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief has a scene where Hades turns into a Big Red Devil and Grover asks "Please, stay in the Mick Jagger thing!" The Brazilian dub changes the reference to local singer Zé Ramalho, who does resemble him more (after all, Mick Jagger doesn't use a beard).
• Point of No Return was a relatively faithful remake of Luc Besson's Nikita. The original featured locations in both France and Italy, while the American version remained entirely within the continental US, albeit moving from Washington D.C. to southern California (a shift that's as great or greater, both geographically and culturally).
• The Hilary Swank film P.S. I Love You is set in New York City with an American heroine. The novel it is based on, written by Cecilia Ahern, is set in Dublin with an Irish heroine. The husband remained Irish, though, but was played by Gerard Butler, whose Scottish accent never ceases to perplex.
• In the Danish film Pusher II, Tonny's crimelord father is called "Smeden", meaning "the Smith", because he chops stolen cars. In the English subtitles, however, he's called "the Duke" for some reason.
• The American adaptation of The Ring avoided the pitfall that befell Dark Water by moving the setting not to New York but to Seattle, a city that's nationally famous for its rainy, constantly overcast weather, in order to keep the dynamic of a gloomy, rainy environment while still having it make sense.^note New York actually gets more precipitation per year than Seattle does, and by a wide margin (49.52 inches on average versus Seattle's 39.34). However, most of New York's rain comes in storms, with many sunny days in between, while Seattle's rain mostly comes in a drizzle, leading to constantly overcast weather outside the summer months.
• Inverted with Run Fatboy Run which is actually a Britishized version of Michael Ian Black's original script.
• Rush Hour 2: One scene has Carter talking to a Chinese woman who attempts to sell him a live chicken. At one point, he says "I like 'em dead and deep fried. You ever heard of Popeyes?" Given that Popeyes is a restaurant chain that is nonexistent in Quebec, the Canadian French dub has Carter mention St-Hubert instead, which is a popular rotisserie chicken restaurant chain in that province.
• For the European French dub of Scary Movie, in the opening where the girl originally said Kazaam is a scary movie due to Shaq's bad acting, she instead says Space Jam and Michael Jordan.
• The 2007 film The Seeker, based on Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series of books, stayed in Britain but made the main character and his family Americans.
• What makes the American remake of the Japanese film Shall We Dance? rather bizarre is the fact that part of the plot has to do with ballroom dancing being somewhat taboo in Japanese culture, something that doesn't translate into American culture. They dealt with this by making it about the male dance taboo in American (i.e., only gay men dance.) This gets reinforced as all the characters are paired off at the end except J.Lo's, though as she had a relationship with her previous pro partner perhaps that's implied, suggesting that the only reason to ballroom dance is to either find a mate or repair your extant relationship, while the Japanese version was simply about the social taboo around a sport requiring male/female contact.
• In the Brazilian dub of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Katy saying "I'm the Asian Jeff Gordon!" became "I'm the Asian Ayrton Senna!" (which even makes the explanation once Shang-Chi doesn't recognizes the name from erroneous — "he's the winningest NASCAR racer", Gordon ranks third^note though he is first in NASCAR's post-1972 "modern era" — to simply complimentary — "There's never been a better Formula One racer!")
• This may be a borderline case since the cartoon series based on the original book was crammed with ethnically and racially ambiguous characters, but it's quite remarkable how populated The Wachowskis' 2008 big-screen version of Speed Racer is with Occidental actors (mostly American and British) as the characters.
• An odd case with Straw Dogs (2011). The original was directed by Sam Peckinpah and starred Dustin Hoffman, both Americans, but took place in the UK. The remake takes place in the Deep South, swapping the negative portrayals of rural Englishmen for negative portrayals of American rednecks.
• The live-action film version of Street Fighter made the All-American soldier Guile into the protagonist instead of Japanese warrior Ryu, the franchise's usual lead character. Somewhat justified since Guile was one of the few characters in the Street Fighter II series who was motivated by his grudge against the Big Bad M. Bison, whereas Ryu's rivalry was primarily with Sagat at the time. Ironically enough, Jean-Claude Van Damme, the actor who played Guile, couldn't fake a convincing American accent if his life depended on it.
  • The fact that the Big Bad is called "M. Bison" is this trope plain and true.^note In a nutshell: The boxer character was "Mike Bison" in Japanese, but there was apparently some fear that Tyson would sue if that was used in America. They did a three-way swap, giving the boxer the name the masked Spanish fighter had in the original ("Balrog"), reusing the Big Bad's name ("Vega") for the Spanish fighter (as a bonus, "Vega" is a Spanish surname, so it does sound more fitting to American ears for the masked Spaniard than "Balrog", a name that is more likely to conjure thoughts of a certain type of creature), and renaming the boss "M. Bison." Funnily enough, the Japanese versions of the film's tie-in game keep the Western names.
• Stuart Little 2 had a case similar to the Shang-Chi one above, as Snowbell asking Stuart driving his toy car "Hey! Mario Andretti, slow down." was in the Brazilian dub "Hey, Barrichello!"
• The French comedy The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe was remade in the US as The Man with One Red Shoe, with the humorous violence made more sadistic, the sexual content turned quite prudish, and the characters more finely defined as heroes and villains.
  • French actor Pierre Richard could well be considered the patron saint of this trope: He starred in The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe but also in Le Jouet (The Toy) which was remade as The Toy starting Richard Pryor, and Le Jumeau (The Twin) remade as Two Much starring Antonio Banderas (though both screenplays were based on an American novel called Two Much). With Gérard Depardieu he made Les Compères (Comdads) remade as Fathers' Day with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, Les Fugitifs (The Fugitives) remade as Three Fugitives with Nick Nolte ans Martin Short and La Chèvre (The Goat) remade as Pure Luck with Danny Glover and Martin Short.
• The American Taxi remake relocates the story from Marseilles to New York. The taxi driver (who also changes both ethnicity and gender) was a bicycle courier rather than a scooter-riding pizza delivery boy before. The Peugeot 406 taxi turning into a mean, lean rally machine is replaced by a Ford Crown Victoria turning into a kind of streetmachine with even more useless Rice-style body modifications. While Emilien Coutant-Kerbalec is simply untalented at driving a real car, Jimmy Washburn has to be completely clueless about automobiles, maybe because Americans were thought to be unable to grasp the concept of simply not being able to drive a car. The original villains were two stereotypical German men like the French see the Germans in two Mercedes-Benz 500 E. Perhaps also since the American stereotype of Germans, lederhosen etc., wouldn't look good on tough bank robbers, they were replaced by four supermodels in a BMW.
• Venom: Let There Be Carnage has the exchange "I'm 39!" "And I'm Barry Manilow!" The Brazilian dub puts a local singer, "And I'm Ney Matogrosso!"
• The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells is set in Victorian England with the narrator traveling to London. In the 2005 film, the invasion begins in New Jersey and the narrator travels to Boston. The earlier 1953 film adaptation moved the story to southern California, while the famous 1938 radio version by Orson Welles took place in New Jersey.
• Yes-Man is Very, Very Loosely Based on a True Story; the book of the same name by and about Danny Wallace, a Dundonian living in London. The film is set in LA and stars Jim Carrey. The film bears almost no resemblance to the original book.

Literature

• 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die: Translated editions replace a certain number of entries with local entries. The Swedish edition contains movies such as Miss Julie, I Am Curious (Yellow), and Show Me Love that aren't in the original English-language edition, for instance.
• Most versions of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day have the Running Gag that Alexander wants to move to Australia every time something bad happens to him. However, in Australian editions of the book, this is changed so that Alexander wants to move to Timbuktu.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
  • Antoni Marianowicz's Polish translation changes all the parodies of (mostly forgotten) Victorian English poems to parodies of equivalent Polish poems. One Swedish translation does the same.
  • The Polish translation by Grzegorz Wasowski, among other things, throws out the scene where the Mouse cites the history of William the Conqueror, as it's incomprehensible and irrelevant to most Polish readers (especially young ones). Instead the translator wrote an entirely new scene where the characters engage in a Hurricane of Puns with a warped version of Polish history.
  • In Russia, one cartoon adaptation has Alice reciting a distorted "This Is the House That Jack Built," which is well known in Russia due to Samuil Marshak's translation.
  • The Russian translation by V. Sirin (a Pen Name of Vladimir Nabokov) might be one of the most extreme cases of this trope as applied to Wonderland. The protagonist herself is renamed to Anya, the history of William the Conqueror as told by Mouse becomes the history of Prince Vladimir Monomach, and poems Anya recites are mangled versions of children poetry common in Russia at the time.
• Artemis Fowl:
  • The US edition of Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox, by the proudly Irish Eoin Colfer, has the equally proudly Irish Artemis start referring to his mother as "Mom" after making an emotional breakthrough. She gains the title "Mum" in the UK edition, but even that may be a version of this trope, as she's referred to indirectly as the very Irish "Mam" in the first book.
  • In the Finnish translation, The Fair Folk, who usually call themselves "the People", are known as "Väki". While the word väki (with a lowercase v) in modern Finnish generally means "folk" or "people", it also has fantastic connotations. In Finnish mythology, väki referred to a collective of spirits of a particular domain, something like a Genius Loci Mind Hive.
• The Bad Guys, an Australian graphic novel-chapter book series, redraws the illustrations to fit the culture of the released location, such as the position steering wheels are in cars or the style of wall outlets.
• The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant: In Polish translations, all references to Roger Wilco are changed to MacGyver. Apparently the translator (or editor) concluded that Wilco was too obscure to general audience, and MacGyver will work better because of his huge popularity in Poland during The '90s.
• Brave New World: The only translation into German made during the lifetime and with the approval of the original author sets the main story in Berlin rather than London. Part of this comes with the fact that back then Germans would say "Neu York" and translate the names of foreign monarchs, while today they don't.
• Captain Underpants: In the Spanish translation of Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plan of Professor Poopypants, a Cher reference (as the artist whose music controls the robo-gerbils in George and Harold's comic) is replaced with Julio Iglesias. The Italian translation replaces her with Italian singer Nek instead.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory changed quite a few terms and items used in the original U.K. text for its U.S. publication: fifty-pence piece to dollar bill, Square Sweets That Look Round to Candies, and the Great Glass Lift to the Great Glass Elevator, etc. This had an interesting effect on the sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, which was released in the U.S. first and specifically locates Charlie's hometown and the factory in that country when it was left ambiguous in the first book. The U.K. edition has extra dialogue added to the opening chapter to cover for the book using elevator in place of lift. (Mr. Wonka explains that now that the lift is flying, elevator is a better term for it.) While all adaptations of Factory use the term elevator, other cultural detailing is usually downplayed in favor of a Where the Hell Is Springfield? approach (the key exception being the 2013 stage musical, which heavily implies that the town and factory are in England).
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Meltdown: When Greg's family watches the Olympics, Manny is holding an American flag. In some translations of the book, Manny holds the country's respective flag (colored in black and white), such as a striped flag in the Spanish version and the United Kingdom flag in UK releases.
• Discworld:
  • After some deliberation on her blog, one of the Hungarian translators of Terry Pratchett's novels decided to translate the name of the character Susan to Hungarian Zsuzsa. This hasn't met with universal approval among fans, some of whom pointed out that Sto Helit (where Susan is from) was so obviously unlike Hungary that giving her a Hungarian name was jarring. The translator really made a heroic effort to get most of the puns translated, and leaving Susan's name alone would have displeased the other half of the fandom.
  • An essay in The Discworld Companion describes the thought processes of the translator dealing with the Dutch editions. Rendering Granny Weatherwax as Opoe Wedersmeer was literal, and as a bonus, conveyed something of the character into Dutch. But Dutch does not have the cultural meme of the split-level Morris Minor to describe an elderly broomstick that winces into action now and again. Therefore an exclusively British reference was replaced with a Dutch idiom roughly equating to "granny's bike". Holland may not have Morris Minors, but it does have creaking one-speed clumsy bicycles with no gears and bad brakes.
  • The same essay also says that, more generally, while the German and French translators of the books feel comfortable replacing all the cultural indicators, so "The Sto Plains is basically the UK" becomes "The Sto Plains is basically France/Germany", the Dutch translator has to be more careful; the idea that a British author knows about Dutch cultural signifiers can be jarring, never mind a fantasy character. A French reader might assume We All Live In France, but a Dutch one is well aware we don't all live in the Netherlands.
  • The Truth:
    • The Czech translator was given a different problem. Vampire Otto Chriek, in-universe, comes from a remote Slavonic corner of the Discworld. To reinforce this, in a moment of great stress he is given a long heartfelt expletive to shriek in his native language. In the English version, Bodrovaskie Zheijet! is a meaningless piece of cod-Slavic. The translator's problem lay in making this meaningful in a Slavonic language. Did he replace it with a real swear word? Did he fudge around it? In the end, for the Czech market, he wrote Otto in subtle little ways suggesting he was Russian and left the cod-Slavic exactly as it was in English, reasoning his audience would not be offended and would understand only an uncouth Russian would swear as luridly as that, what could we cultured Czechs expect from Russians? The Czech translator of The Truth was the Czech translator of the whole series who regularly attended fan meetings, so by that point he probably knew pretty well what to expect from his readers.
    • The translator approached to do the Polish version allegedly threw his hands up in horror, declaring that he did not consider it possible to think like that in Polish.
  • Soul Music controversially replaced many of the cultural references with Hungarian ones.
  • Pyramids: There is a footnote explaining that an ambassador is dressing with various Djelibebian pieces of clothing that would amount to someone entering Buckingham Palace with a mishmash of pieces of British clothing from the last five centuries. The French translation changes Buckingham to the Elysée Palace and adapts the pieces of clothing accordingly (e.g. a bowler hat becomes a béret, etc).
• The Divine Comedy: In Dorothy L. Sayers' version, one of the few non-Italian passages — Arnaut Daniel's Provençal speech in Purgatory — is translated into the Scots language, whose relationship to English is very similar to the relationship between Provençal and Italian.
• Dr. Seuss:
  • The UK editions of books sometimes have currency conversions; in The Lorax, the price to hear the Once-ler's story is "fifteen pence and a nail" rather than cents, and in The Cat In The Hat Comes Back "Dad's $10 shoes" become "Dad's £7 shoes", to fit the scansion. (And never mind that in 1958, seven pounds was about twenty bucks.)
  • Green Eggs and Ham: The Woolseyist Hebrew translation is simply entitled Not Hungry, Don't Love It, and omits any references to the meal containing ham. A wise move when much of your target readership has religious objections to eating pork.
• Finnish translations of Swedish children's books used to often change the location from Sweden to Finland to make the stories more relatable to children. This was a simple process as the two countries are so similar that changing the setting could be achieved by only localizing the character and location names. Notable examples are Karlsson on the Roof, which was changed from Stockholm to the Kruununhaka neighborhood in Helsinki, and Peter No-Tail, which was changed from Uppsala, again, to Helsinki.
• Saxo Grammaticus in Gesta Danorum goes the exact opposite way, describing Norse mythology and society with a Classical vocabulary. Thus, Saxo's mythic Scandinavia is filled with amazons (shieldmaidens), satyrs (dwarfs), nymphs (valkyries?), and fauns (?). People exclaim "by Hercules!", Asgard is Byzantium, jarls are satraps, and the underworld is ruled by Proserpina (Hel). In one thing Saxo is adamant, though: Odin and Thor are not Mercury and Jupiter, because Odin is Thor's father but Mercury is Jupiter's son.
• The USA version of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens had, on request by an editor in the New York publishing house, an extra 700-word section included near the end reassuring the readers about the fate of the American character Warlock.
  • The American translation has one howling error: unfamiliarity with British regional towns meant the American sub-editor changed one reference to the east-coast seaport city of Hull to "Hell", meaning the passage lost all sense and context. Crowley was going to Hull to make the place even more miserable and gloomy. Going to Hell to perform a temptation is like... well, taking fish to Hull. Nobody would notice.
• Some Eastern European and Russian translations of Hansel and Gretel have the two characters instead meet Baba Yaga.
• Harry Potter:
  • The first book had Americanization in addition to its title change, and despite selling well (to say the least) the publishers bore the criticism they received about it in mind when releasing the later books. Once the series became reliably popular in America, Harry always wore "trainers" instead of "sneakers", Ginny Weasley wore a "jumper" instead of a "sweater", Hogwarts served "chips" at its start-of-term feast instead of "fries", and Dean Thomas liked "football" instead of "soccer". That said, the books still continued to have textual changes to reflect the differences between British and American English to prevent legitimately confusing Americans unfamiliar with terminology beyond differences well-known in the mainstream.
    • Averted in the version of The Order of the Phoenix released in the US, which led to hilarious consequences. The book has Filch "punting" students across the swamp left behind by Fred and George. "Punting" in British English means manuevering a flat boat, often with a pole. In the US, the term "punting" is associated with grid-iron football, in which a player drop-kicks the ball for a field goal. This led to a significant portion of American readers thinking Filch was drop-kicking students across the swamp...and not questioning it, because that's not out of character for him.
    • And there were some things that had no direct cultural translation without massively altering the story, so the early 2020s saw a small trend on social media of now-adult Americans sharing things about the series they thought were magical, but were actually just British.
    • Ron still calls his mother 'Mum' however. J. K. Rowling put her foot down for that one, saying in an interview "Mrs Weasley is NOT a 'mom'".
  • The Danish translation sometimes replaces typical British food with alternatives that are more known to Danish readers. For example, the steak and kidney pie in Chapter 9 of the first book is replaced with minced meat patty, and the sherbet lemon that Dumbledore mentions in the very first chapter is reverse-translated into "citronsorbet" (lemon sherbet) which is ice cream (a sweet similar to sherbet lemon is eaten in Denmark, but ice cream is much more popular). Similarly, "lemon sherbet" was replaced with Krembo, a popular Israeli candy, in the Hebrew translation.
  • Arabic translations of the series omit any references to alcohol use, except by Death Eaters, and remove any mention of pork, since both are forbidden in Islam. They also removed every mention of characters kissing, even on the cheek, to appease religiously conservative readers.
  • The Hebrew translation, however, did not omit pork, since the characters aren't Jewish.
  • For a scene where Sirius sings a Christmas carol, the Hebrew version replaced it with a Hanukkah song, since Israelis aren't as familiar with cultural Christianity.
  • The Yiddish version, however, left in references to Christianity, reasoning that its audience would be familiar enough with them.
  • In Yiddish, the Golden Snitch is called "goldene flaterl" (golden butterfly), since butterflies are a common symbol in Yiddish folktales.
  • In the Polish version of Deathly Hallows, the Snatchers are called Szmalcownicy, a term for Poles who sold out Jews to the Nazis.
• When the Dutch novel HEX was translated into English the setting was changed from the Netherlands to the USA, with the author's full approval. The author even wrote a new ending for the American edition, which he ended up liking so much that he then incorporated into a revised edition of the original Dutch version of the novel.
• In 1992, Douglas Adams wrote to an American editor working on the comic book adaptation of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy pointing out how ridiculous the endeavour to Americanize it was, showing every bit of his signature wit:
  If you feel that referring to ‘Marks & Spencer’ might seriously freak out Americans because they haven’t heard of it... we could either put warning stickers on the label (‘The text of this book contains references to places and institutions outside the continental United States and may cause offence to people who haven’t heard of them’) or you could, I suppose, put ‘Harrods’, which most people will have heard of. Or we could even take the appalling risk of just recklessly mentioning things that people won’t have heard of and see if they survive the experience.
  • Inverted when, in the same letter, he said that it would make more sense to illustrate the bit about "small green pieces of paper" with dollars rather than pounds, since this was a point about humanity generally, the dollar was close to a global currency, and most British banknotes weren't actually green.
• The Czech translator of The Hobbit replaced seed cakes, a decidedly British food, with ''makové koláče'', a decidedly Czech food which shares with the original the superficial similarity of being a pastry with seeds.
• As is mentioned in the entry on Woolseyism, the Polish translation of Honor Harrington cycle replaced Haven's State Sec with the name of the local State Sec from the time when Poland was a Real Life People's Republic of Tyranny.
• The Spanish language versions of Lee Iacocca's books Iacocca: An Autobiography and Talking Straight also do this, but to ridiculous levels: All the references to American-style football are replaced with American Rugby (since the translators thought that Spanish-speaking audiences would not know what American-style football is.) The translation of the books are also, bizarrely, the Spanish-language version of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, despite the books not being fiction and not taking place in the Middle Ages or Ancient Times.
• Medieval Icelandic translators of works dealing with Classical Mythology often replaced the names of the Greek gods with Norse ones. For example, Jupiter becomes Thor, Mercury Odin, Juno Frigg, and Venus Freyja. Snarls were inevitable: For instance, both Diana and Minerva become Gefjon.
• The Last Dragon Chronicles, described by the author as "aggressively English", received a North American version, with the setting shifted to the US and various other Americanizations. This causes some interesting issues in later books, such as when the characters go looking for a dragon buried under a chalk hill with a white horse carved into it (common in England...not so much in America, which required them to be spawned out of nowhere). In his memoir book Rain and Fire, d'Lacey comments on how his Japanese translators flawlessly handled all of the cultural references, with one lone exception: he received a panicked phone call apologetically explaining that they had no idea how to translate "daft as a brush".
• In the Stephen King Story "The Library Police" there's a homeless man who loves Slim Jims. The Swedish translator changed it from Slim Jims, that are obscure in Sweden, to Guldnougat, a Swedish nougat candy bar.
• In Brazil, lawyers are occasionally called Doctors and this is shown in their translations of books where Mickey Haller is a protagonist.
• The English edition of P. J. O'Rourke's Modern Manners turned all the US-specific references into English ones. And rather clumsily at that: "the Democratic Party" became "the Social Democratic Party" (the Labour Party would have been a much better equivalent) while a series of jokes about US regional accents got mapped onto various regions of the UK seemingly at random.
• In Rainbow Magic, some of the UK titles and names were changed when imported to the US. For instance, Summer the Holiday Fairy became Joy the Summer Vacation Fairy in the US, due to "holiday" not being synonymous with "vacation" like it is in the UK.
• In Silver Blaze, a guard has been put to sleep with opium in curried mutton. In the Russian translation, it is traditionally mutton under garlic sauce — curry isn't exactly a Russian cuisine thing.
• In 1991, Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder published a highly successful juvenile novel called Sofies verden (Sophie's World), which has been translated into 54 languages. It contains references to the geography of the Norwegian capital, Norwegian authors, and a Norwegian poem, which is quoted in the text. Most foreign-language editions kept these references and translated the poem as directly as possible, but the U.S. edition substituted American geography and references to English-speaking authors.
• Arthur Whaley's classic English translation of The Tale of Genji was written at a time when East Asian customs were less well known then they are today and so he referred to beds, wardrobes and other furnishings unknown in Heian Japan.
• In Warrior Cats:
  • The old forest map was based on an actual forest in England, meaning the first series was set in England, which is also somewhat reflected by some of the wildlife. However, the second series featured a mountain lion, which cannot be found in the UK (alleged sightings notwithstanding), and had a change of location, the new setting being entirely invented for the books.
  • For some reason, the 2015 reprinted editions of the books changed all instances of the more-common-in-the-UK term "catmint" to the phrase most common in the US, "catnip".
• In a talk, the Italian-to-English translator William Weaver apparently stated that he routinely replaced Nutella (an Italian hazelnut chocolate spread, popular in several English speaking markets that aren't the U.S.) with peanut butter, as well as replacing a reference to an Italian novelist in Foucault's Pendulum with Barbara Cartland.

Live-Action TV

• The Slovak dub of ALF — where Alf was voiced by actor Stano Dančiak - used this in a surrealy funny, Breaking the Fourth Wall way. Since Alf often referenced various obscure American movie actors while watching films on TV, Dančiak decided to overdub the most obscure references by Alf simply making remarks like "Starring Stano Danciak".
• Several Brit Coms have successfully undergone Americanization, including Man About the House (turned into Three's Company), Steptoe and Son (Sanford and Son), and most famously Till Death Us Do Part (All in the Family, and in Germany as Ein Herz und eine Seele). More recently, The Office has been as successful on the left side of the pond as the right. An American version of The IT Crowd was dropped after the first viewing.
• Queer as Folk was script-recycled into an American version with the same title.
• The acclaimed ITV Detective Drama Broadchurch has been given an American remake titled Gracepoint, with David Tennant playing the role of lead detective in both shows, putting him in the nearly unprecedented position of playing the lead role in two different ongoing takes on the same material.
• The German dub of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had some of that. In the musical episode Yma Sumac became Britney Spears. In the episode in which Xander was split, the "Kill us both!" Star Trek reference was dropped, and they answered "Then there'll be group sex!" instead.
• An extreme case happened in Germany with Cheers, which became "Prost Helmut!". Yes, the translation was set in a German bar, and all characters became Germans. Norm was the Helmut from the title, Cliff became Uwe, and so on. Thankfully, this version lasted only 13 episodes, and the entire series received a translation that was true to the original later on.
• The Brazilian dub of El Chavo del ocho turns almost all the references to the History of Mexico into references to the History of Brazil. Most of the time, they fit so smoothly within the episode that it does not even looks like that the original dialogue was changed.
  • However, since many episodes recycle previous scripts^note actually an intentional practice of Chespirito's, to give every actor a chance to act out a script, in some episodes the references to Mexican history are kept. A particularly well-known one is when Professor Jirafales asks Quico who was the conqueror of Mexico.
  • In an episode where the whole vecindad goes to a cinema, a bored Chavo keeps complaining: "It would have been better if we had gone watch El Chanfle".^note A football-themed comedy by Chespirito himself and starring the same cast as the show. As this film was never released in Brazil, it was changed to "Pelé's film", which viewers understood as refererring either to the documentary Isto É Pelé, or the more recent Os Trombadinhas.
  • A three-part episode features the vecindad's residents on a vacation in Acapulco. When it was dubbed for Brazilian viewers, Acapulco became Guarujá for second and third parts but remained Acapulco for the first one.
  • The Brazilian dub was also notorious for changing the names of Mexican (and, sometimes, even American) celebrities mentioned in the show to Brazilian ones. The only aversion was with Héctor Bonilla cameo As Himself, since the channel that broadcasted the show (SBT) was notorious for also broadcasting Mexican Telenovelas and the audience would likely be familiar with the actor.
  • In some episodes, when Spanish text is shown on-screen, the translation brings up some justificative for it since the dub alters the show to be set in Brazil. In one episode, Chavo reads a sign reading "Se solicita mesero" (Looking for waiters) and points out that "Mesero means waiter". In another one, Sr. Barriga puts up a sign with the word "Prohibido" (forbidden) written on it. Since in Portuguese, the word is spelled "Proibido" instead, the translators added a line by Dón Ramón stating that "The H is out of place".
• Every Witch Way is this to the LatAm Grachi (also from Nickelodeon). Characters are changed, along with some plot points from the original to better suit it for an American audience. Some of the same sets are even used, since they were both filmed in Miami.
• Extras: Several relatively minor changes are made to the British show for its American release, from changing terminology in instances where slang means different things on different sides of the pond ("pop knob into fanny" during a tirade against gays would have made zero sense to American audiences) to replacing references to British celebrities Billie Piper and Jade Goody with Halle Berry and Kramer, respectively.
• When The Flying Doctors, an Australian drama, was imported to the US, executives demanded the removal of some of the more peculiar Australianisms. Notably, a scene where a young boy described his injuries as "hurting like buggery" was redubbed, because while that expression isn't taken literally in Australia, executives were pretty sure it would be in America.
• When Fraggle Rock was imported, it was designed to be an international production from the start. The Muppet scenes were all self-contained and could be dubbed over, while different "Doc" and Traveling Matt segments could be shot in each region, making the viewer feel like this was all happening near them. In addition to the North American original, there was Germany, the UK — where Doc was a lighthouse keeper named The Captain — and France — where he was a baker and his dog was named Croquette.
• The Czech dub of Friends typically used Anglo-american cultural references but those that were believed to be more familiar to the Czech audience. Kind of justified for the time when the show first aired. For example, in the famous bet game Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance was replaced with Michael Jackson's moonwalking. Rachel's favourite movies Dangerous Liaisons and Weekend at Bernie's were changed to Sophie's Choice and The Terminator respectively.
• The German dub of the The Golden Girls features this heavily; a lot of the cultural references were changed to either more known celebrities, movies and shows, or rough equivalents from Germany.
• The German version of Hogan's Heroes added a whole new character (Colonel Klink's housekeeper...and maybe mistress), added different German accents — all of the important Germans have a different one: Klink's is from Saxony, Schultz's is Bavarian, General Burkhalter's is Austrian... the only ones speaking standard German are the Americans. Newkirk, instead of having another English accent, stutters. Because certain Nazi phrases are illegal in Germany, they work around that "Heil" thing a lot.
• Polish adaptation of The Honeymooners was interesting. The original was set in the 50s America, Polish was set in the 90s Poland — but a lot of gags still made sense. When Ralph and Ed buy a new TV, it's a status symbol in 50s America — but a brand new color TV would still be something a tram (not bus) driver and sanitation worker would barely afford in Poland. Likewise, when Alice/Alina looks for a job she still has to pretend she's Ralph/Karol's sister — many Polish employers are unwilling to hire female workers because of maternity leave.
  • There are some differences — instead of bowling, they play soccer, instead of being in a quasi-masonic Raccoon Lodge, they belong to a club of sergeants.
• Hope Island was an Americanization of the BBC dramady Ballykissangel. The setting for the American version was a Pacific Northwest resort village, that the male lead was switched from a Catholic priest to a Protestant pastor. Had the show lasted longer than a season (it didn't), that would have changed the main dynamic somewhat (the original series' main plot for the first three seasons was a Catholic priest slowly falling in love with an agnostic pub-owner), because Protestant ministers are allowed to marry (though, of course, if the pub-owner had stayed agnostic, it would still be eyebrow raising for an ordained minister to wed a non-Christian, since the Bible itself discourages even lay believers from marrying outside the faith).
• In an episode of House, M.D., House temporarily revives a patient who has been in a coma for ten years using a combination of drugs. The patient asks if he can drive to a restaurant that he used to go and House sarcastically hands him the keys to his own car, declaring that they put so many drugs in his system that he has now better reflexes than NASCAR pilot Dale Earnhardt, Jr. In Spain, the pilot was changed to Formula One's Fernando Alonso, and in Germany to Michael Schumacher. The latter ceased to be funny six years later, when Schumacher went into a coma after a skiing accident.
• House of Anubis is, in its entirety, a Cultural Translation of the Dutch TV show Het Huis Anubis. Noted by the American names of the characters (Nienke, for instance, becomes Nina).
• In the Spanish dub for I Love Lucy, Ricky's long-winded Spanish rants obviously provided a problem. In at least one scene shown on TV Land, a rant was translated into English.
  • In the Latin American dub he just talked in a heavy Cuban accent but at least once it was changed in the episode "Cuban Pals" to "Italian Pals".
• Infomercials for Operation Smile which are broadcast on English-language television stations feature efforts to offer aid to poor people in Guatemala; those which air on Spanish language stations feature similar efforts made in the Philippines. Appeals for donations, made by Roma Downey in inserts, are dubbed over the Spanish-language version.
• The classic Japanese cooking competition Iron Chef, successfully Americanized to Iron Chef America (featuring Alton Brown's running commentary along with Japanese Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto, and former competitor Bobby Flay) which is showing on Food Network.
  • The Food Network seems to get that a lot of people watched the show for the cooking and the dramatic competition, with a dash of camp, rather than the other way around.
  • Iron Chef America is unusual as it's more of a spin-off: the original "chairman" is mentioned as the new "chairman" is supposedly his nephew. Fuji Television, the network that broadcasted the original, helps produce it.
• On an episode of a Japanese game show, part of an American contestant's introduction described her as being from the "prefecture" Missouri.
• On the Swedish release of Jeff Dunham: Arguing With Myself on DVD, the subtitles had references to Wal-Mart and KFC replaced by references to ICA Maxi and Kronfågel, respectively:
  English!Walter: Welcome to Wal-Mart. Get your shit and get out!
  Swedish!Walter: Välkommen till ICA Maxi. Köp er skit och dunsta strax-i! (Welcome to ICA Maxi. Buy your shit and beat it soon-i!)
  English!Walter: New from the colonel! Chicken and tits!
  Swedish!Walter: Nytt från Kronfågel! Kyckling och pattar!
• Korean and Chinese dramas in the Philippines are usually aired with the characters' names changed to Western names like "Jenny" and "Johnny", presumably so that it's easier for the dubbers to pronounce and for the audience to identify the characters. If the title contains the name of a character (e.g. "My Name is Kim Sam Soon"), however, the name of that character is retained. It is jarring, though, to hear one character going by a Korean name while the rest of the characters have Western names.
  • Averted with the Philippine airing of the Korean version of Hana Yori Dango ("Boys Over Flowers"), where ALL the characters were stuck with their original Korean names.
• La Chica de Ayer (Yesterday's Girl, a reference to a classic 80s pop song), a Spanish remake of Life On Mars. The Italian version is titled 29 Settembre (September 29th).
• In the telenovela La reina del sur Teresa moved from Mexico to Spain. In the English drama version, Queen of the South, she went from Mexico to America.
• Law & Order: UK uses plots taken directly from the original US show, but often changes the endings, and a few plot points, to reflect British sensibilities. Oddly, it often removes ambiguities that exist in the original show, and adds messages, usually anvilicious ones. Sometimes, because very few people own a gun in the UK, when there is a gun crime in the US version, something else must be substituted, which is usually much less dramatic.
• The BBC partly re-dubbed the Icelandic children's program LazyTown, with British voice actors speaking for puppet characters originally voiced by Americans. However, the human characters' American and Icelandic accents were untouched. Additionally, they seem to have left them all alone for LazyTown Entertainment/BBC co-production LazyTown Extra.
• A MADtv (1995) sketch spoofed this, with Phil LaMarr as a wrestling agent who helps luchadores get into American wrestling organizations. He spends most of the sketch trying to convince his client that, regardless of how much it speaks of his strength and honor in Spanish, "El Asso Wiper" is not going to be a successful name in the US. The sketch ends with him asking his secretary to send in "Senor Bag-O-Crap".
• The German dub of Married... with Children had constant references to a then-popular German actor, to the point where the whole German fandom guessed and still is guessing who the heck was supposed to be referenced in the original version.
• The Portuguese remake of the Spanish series The Ministry of Time is virtually identical in characters, sets and plots to the original series, but it changes the Ministry's location to Lisbon, makes it Portuguese, and all the missions related to preserving Spanish history are now about preserving Portuguese history. Most remade episodes take place around the same time as the original (e.g. the episode about ensuring that Lope de Vega boards the right ship in the Spanish Armada is now about ensuring that Camões boards the right ship in the India Armada), but some can depart centuries. The Pilot, instead of being set in the 1808-1814 Peninsular War, is set in the Portuguese Crisis of 1383-1385; and because the villain now comes from a time before firearms, he stabs two cops instead of shooting them with an antique pistol. Meanwhile, the two-parter about Julián being stranded in the 1899 Siege of Baler is about his Portuguese alter-ego Tiago being stranded in 1975 Timor.
• A few Monty Python's Flying Circus sketches were redone by the German comedy duo of Harald Juhnke and Eddi Arent. The one sketch about the difficult book shop customer gets a justification tacked on — Because the salesman's mother owns the shop and has threatened him that she'll disinherit him and give the shop to his brother if he doesn't manage to sell at least one book — that's the explanation why he puts up with the customer neither being able to pay for the book nor to read it. And the famous "Dead Parrot" sketch has the dead parrot replaced by a plush parrot. And at the end, when the customer points out that the "parrot" he bought is "just a toy", the salesman states philosophically "Aren't we all but God's toys, somehow?", turning around and revealing that he's a wind-up android.
• Likewise, the Swedish Chef from The Muppets became Danish in their dub.
• The Italian dub of The Nanny rewrites Fran as an Italian immigrant, Francesca Cacace. Her mother Sylvia becomes her aunt Assunta (with her father Morty becoming uncle Antonio). Oddly enough Yetta's Polish origins are retained, although she's not portrayed as Fran's grandmother, but as an in-law relative.
  • The huge character overhaul is somewhat mitigated as the original Jewish Mother theme can be found also in Italian culture, so to Italian viewers Sylvia-Assunta's relentless interference in Fran's life was perfectly normal, especially as the family was portrayed as coming from a rural and old-fashioned area.
  • However, some very Jewish bits, like Fran's obsession with Barbra Streisand and the flashbacks from the kibbutz, make absolutely no sense from an Italian standpoint.
  • Conversely, the show wasn't changed for the British, and whilst the Jewish love for Streisand is easily understood, the lack of existence of the Jewish Mother trope except for in imported US media means that examples of it are accepted as My Beloved Smother at the best of times, downright confusing at the worst.
• The Brazilian dub of The Office (US) had a case less for the referenced work but for the language spoken. The episode "Murder" has Pam's attempt at a Southern accent being mocked as a Forrest Gump imitation. The dub had her doing the one for the former colonizer that earns a "What are you, the Portuguese owner of the bakery?".
• The Orville: One of the Russian dubs for the episode "Krill" changes the Krill deity's name from Avis (a car rental company no one in Russia would recognize) to Netflix.
• The Brazilian dub of Perfect Strangers was titled Primo Cruzado (literally Crossed Cousin, but also a reference to Brazilian then –- mid-80's -– currency Cruzado). Balki's nationality was changed from Greek to Brazilian – more specifically, he was turned into a caipira from the countryside of the state of Minas Gerais, with the corresponding accent, and his name was changed to Zeca (a Brazilian nickname for José or José Carlos).
• Power Rangers sometimes does this when they're sticking especially close to the Super Sentai scripts.
  • Samurai Sentai Shinkenger's Sixth Ranger was an aspiring sushi chef, with the motif extending to his Ranger gear (a fish-shaped sword and scabbard, lobster and squid mecha, etc.). Power Rangers Samurai adapted the character's seafood theme by making his counterpart a fisherman instead. Antonio does still have the portable restaurant stand, though; mostly, the names of dishes that you'd have to be Japanese to know get removed/changed. However, Genta's Transformation Trinket looks just like one such sushi dish; because that wouldn't translate, Antonio's is different. So after the episode where he's turned into sushi and nearly eaten by a cat, where Shinkenger has Genta afraid to use his Sushi Changer because of the flashbacks he gets, this wouldn't make sense; the same plot is used but the source of the fear is that Antonio's sword looks like fish.
  • Likewise, Shuriken Sentai Ninninger features a Sixth Ranger who is a cowboy with a rock guitar weapon, with both aspects tying into him being Japanese-American (but still played by a full-blooded Japanese actor). Power Rangers Ninja Steel justifies both by having the character be a country music singer.
• In the German dub of Scrubs, this is sometimes done. One example is the time the janitor poses as Dr. Jan Itor. It's dubbed as Dr. Haus Meister (Hausmeister beeing the German word for janitor and referencing the show Dr. House (pronounced the same way).
  • The German dub also turned the Australian girl Maya from the Post-Script Season into a Swiss girl to salvage the Separated by a Common Language jokes.
• Snobs: In Portuguese language dubs, the Ferals are called "Ciganos" (Gypsies).
• The Hungarian dub of Star Trek: The Next Generation changes a defrosted Human Popsicle's inquiry about how the Atlanta Braves baseball team is doing to if Dallas is still running.
• When they imported Tales of the Unexpected to the United States, they changed the opening narration, replacing the author with John Houseman.
• In the American dub of Tweenies, the song "Five Currant Buns" song has its' lyrics changed to be about raisin buns, likely because currant buns aren't as common in the United States as they are in the United Kingdom.
• Played for laughs on Two and a Half Men. Charlie is hired to write the Theme Tune for the American version of an anime Jake likes, and initially he makes a cheesy song that sounds like an advertising Jingle. Jake agrees to study for a test in exchange for Charlie studying up on the show and writing a better song. When the show finally airs, its theme song is...the same Jingle from before, because as Charlie explains to a mortified Jake, the executives liked it better. Possibly a subversion, as when Charlie put his mind to it, the song he wrote was accurate and powerful to a fan like Jake, thereby throwing all the blame on the executives.
• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: In one episode, Kimmy is advised to deliver bad news in a British accent. The Brazilian dub says she should use a Minas Gerais accent, leading to Kimmy speaking in a hillbilly accent.
• A few of Italy's most famous serials, like Un Medico In Famiglia and I Cesaroni are adaptations of Spanish formats (the aforementioned two are based respectively on Medico De Familia and Los Serranos). Italian procedural RIS (an acronym which means Reparto Investigazione Scientifica', Scientific Investigation Department, a Department in the Carabinieri, a branch of Italian police) is based on CSI (though manages the personal aspect better) and was itself redone in France, Spain and Germany.
• Stefan, Damon, and Katherine were all from Renaissance Europe in the book series of The Vampire Diaries. The brothers are from the Civil War era in the show.
• Averted in the British Wallander series which is based on the Swedish crime novels written by Henning Mankell. The characters speak English but the series is filmed in Sweden, and it is actually following the books rather well.
• Happens in-universe in Westworld, as a nod to the borrowing between American Western films and Japanese Jidaigeki films. In "Akane no Mai", it is revealed that Sizemore engaged in Self-Plagiarism when he recycled the outlaw attack on the Mariposa Saloon in Westworld for an outlaw attack in the Japanese themed park, Shogunworld. Both attacks happen while localized versions of "Paint in Black" play in the background.
  • Hector's scarred, black-clad outlaw equivalent is Musashi, a scarred, black-clad ronin who used to work for the Shogun before defecting. Hector's narrative includes killing Sweetwater's Sheriff, stealing his horse and rifle, shooting the Sheriff's deputy with it when he recognizes the horse, handing the rifle to Armistice, and storming the Saloon with a sawed-off shotgun. Musashi kills one "Yoriki Yamato", steals his horse and sodegarami, kills one of the Shogun's men when he calls him on it, hands the sodegarami to Hanaryo, and storms a brothel with his katana.
  • Armistice is a (female) expert marksman with a snake face tattoo who covers the saloon's entrance by shooting anyone who comes close to it; Hanaryo is a (female) expert archer with a dragon face tattoo who covers the brothel's entrance by arrowing the charging Shogun's guards.
  • Saloon prostitutes Maeve and Clementine are replaced by two geishas, Akane and Sakura.
  • The Saloon's bartender, who is shot by Hector without a word, is replaced with a Chinese ambassador who tries to invoke You Have No Idea Who You're Dealing With before being slashed by Musashi.

Magazines

• MAD
  • Their parody of Return of the Jedi had Leia offering the Ewoks, "the candy of outer space creatures"- Reese's Pieces. The UK/Irish version replaces it with Jelly Babies.
  • In a bad execution of this trope, a collection of MAD comics from the early 40's-50's released in Italy in 2008-2009 replaced many of the references... but not in a way that makes sense, meaning that the readers got comics clearly made in the US ages ago that contain multiple references to Italian celebrities and politicians from 60 years later.

Music

• The Beatles' pre-Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band albums were all trimmed and re-arranged by US record label Capitol, mostly for marketing and monetary purposes. Using one-off singles and b-sides — as well as allowing shorter running times per album — they were able to turn the band's first six albums into eight albums for the US market, mostly under different titles like Something New and Beatles '65. The US version of Rubber Soul was even made to capitalize on the rising success of Bob Dylan, removing the rock numbers and importing the acoustic songs from the UK Help! to seal the deal.
  • Canada's own Capitol Canada Records even released their own versions of the first three albums, titled Beatlemania! (based on With the Beatles), Twist & Shout (Please Please Me), and Long Tall Sally (that EP with tracks from A Hard Days' Night.) The US version of A Hard Day's Night followed, and Canada's releases matched the US' from then on.
  • Japan received five albums that cobbled together the first five UK albums with single cuts and b-sides, and released them as Meet the Beatles!, The Beatles' Second Album, A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles No. 5 and Help!.
• The title of Camellia's song "Bassline Yatteru? Lol" is a pun on "bassline" and the Japanese social-media/instant-messaging service LINE. While LINE is very popular in its native Japan, it doesn't have the same pop culture permeance in the rest of the world^note Although it is available globally in many other languages in addition to Japanese. It had a sizable niche amongst Western fans of Japanese media at one point, but that went away when Discord came into existence and then repurposed itself as an all-purpose chat app, so the title is officially translated into English as "Can I friend you on Bassbook? Lol".
• Ryuichi Sakamoto had a modest hit in the UK with the Thomas Dolby collaboration "Field Work" in 1984. This led to his 1984 album Ongaku Zukan (Music Encyclopedia) being released internationally in 1986 with a new tracklisting under the title Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia. This version removed five of the original album's tracks and added the singles "Field Work (LON)" and "Steppin' Into Asia", as well as the song "Ma Mere L'Oye" (renamed to "Zen-Gun"), taken from a bonus single packaged in original copies of Ongaku Zukan. It also renames the song "Haye No Haneshida" ("Wings of the Trees") to "In a Forest of Feathers". The reworked album has a markedly different feel — it is more in line with the western view of Japanese music and lacks the original version's classical, jazz, and experimental pieces.
• A cultural translation across time rather than national borders: the 1995 Amy Grant version of "Big Yellow Taxi", originally released in 1970, changed the admission price for the tree museum from "a dollar and a half" to "twenty-five bucks" just to see 'em.
• In the Spice Girls cover of "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses, they get the turkey from Tesco instead of A&P and go to the all-night garage rather than grocery. Because cranberry sauce isn't a major part of British Christmas dinner, they forgot to get the newspaper instead. It also reworks the first verse to be about being the Spice Girls in 1998, rather than meeting a guy in 1981.
• The classic French song "Les trois cloches", strongly associated with Édith Piaf, eventually became a big hit in America as "The Three Bells". While the English translation keeps the concept of tracing a man's life from his birth to his marriage to his death, a few little adjustments were made to better appeal to an American (and British) audience. The original's main character is named Jean-François Nicot, which to French ears would sound plain but distinctive (like, say, a similar English name like John Nichols), but the English version changes it to the more common and humble Jimmy Brown. The French version prominently talks about a priest's blessing, reflecting France's Catholicism, while the English version talks about a more Protestant "little congregation". And in general, the French version is more of a rumination on the fleeting nature of life, while the English version is more of a celebration of life.

Pinball

• Stern Pinball's NASCAR was rethemed with an IndyCar racing motif and released outside of North America as Grand Prix.

Religion & Mythology

• The Bible: As the the Bible has been translated multiple times across many languages and for many different cultures, some attempts at this have been made. In general, Biblical translations fall onto a spectrum between literal translations which try to preserve the linguistic content of the text on one end, and dynamic translations which try to clarify the meaning of the text or make it more readable on the other end. More extreme examples of dynamic translation qualify for this trope.
  • The common perception of the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden as a Tempting Apple is partially this, partially linguistic drift ("apple" used to have a much broader meaning), and partially pun (the Latin words for "apple" and "evil" are almost identical). European audiences were familiar with European fruits, so they thought of it as an apple.
  • The Living Bible (published 1971) was an attempt to translate — or rather, paraphrase — the Bible into modern vernacular English. It tends to avoid introducing any anachronisms, though.
  • The Message takes a different approach, preferring familiar phrases whenever possible. Sometimes this works, such as when "Blessed are the poor in spirit" is translated as "You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope". Sometimes it's distractingly anachronistic or just not a good fit: for example, the house built on sand collapses "like a house of cards", and Psalm 23's "valley of the shadow of death" becomes "Death Valley".
  • The Cotton Patch Gospel, an experimental translation of the New Testament (later adapted into a stage musical), moves the action of The Four Gospels to the mid-twentieth-century American South, replacing the geography of the Holy Land with roughly equivalent American places, mostly in Georgia.^note For example, Jerusalem is Atlanta, Bethlehem is the small town of Gainesville, the Jordan is the Chattahoochee, and Egypt is Mexico. John the Baptist lives on "corn bread and collard greens" rather than locusts and wild honey, the shepherds in the nativity story are tending to chicks rather than sheep, the Pharisees become the Southern Baptist Convention, Samaritans become blacks, and Jesus is hanged rather than crucified. Despite all these substitutions, this isn't a novelization or retelling of the gospels, but a versified, footnoted direct translation from the Greek. The author even translated the epistles of Paul into the same idiom.
• When Hans Egede was preaching to the Eskimos of Greenland in the 17th Century, he realized that none of them had any idea what bread was. So he dutifully translated the relevant line from the Lord's Prayer to "give us this day our daily seal".
• A few Anglo-Saxon monks took a whack at translating a few books of the Bible into Old English. Fans of The Silmarillion will notice that Genesis begins, not with the creation of the universe, but with God creating the angels and Satan's subsequent rebellion. No music though. It may also be amusing to modern readers to picture Pharaoh and his court as a Germanic king in a mead hall.

Sports

• In 1957, two American baseball teams, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved to new cities. Coincidentally, the cities they chose, San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively, were themselves emerging rivals, just as the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn (their old homes) had been. Thus, the teams' intracity rivalry was easily transposed to an intrastate one in their new California home. The result was a smashing success that led to many other team relocations to the West Coast and the South in the ensuing years.

Tabletop Games

• When Steve Jackson Games issued an American version of the French roleplaying game In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas, they did a complete rewrite. Interestingly, rather than specifically "Americanizing" the game's originally Franco-centric setting, they tried to make it more global.
• The precursor to modern Chess was invented in India, where one of the pieces was known as an elephant. When the game was brought to Europe in the middle ages, that piece became known as a bishop, as elephants weren't common or well-known in Europe (the piece is still called an elephant in some languages). This makes this trope Older than steam.
• A strange semi-example: Traveller: The New Era is peppered with references to 20th-century pop culture, which caused many people to wonder why people in the 50th-something century were so fixated on pre-spaceflight Earth. Word of God has it that this is supposed to be a Cultural Translation along with rendering 50th-century English as modern English.
• While Virgil being dubbed 'Rock Star of the Burning Abyss' in the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG seems odd for an archetype rooted in the Divine Comedy, it's an attempt to translate the sort of fame and impact bards like Virgil had to an audience who know bards more as an RPG class.
• The Polish version of the party card game Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, titled "Buła Pizza Kot Ser Koza", replaces tacos with sandwiches ("buła" meaning "bun" in Polish), since tacos aren't a popular dish in Poland.

Theme Parks

• Disney Theme Parks tend to feature many of the same rides, though they are sometimes altered to fit different locations and cultures.
  • Depending on the park, each version of Disney's The Haunted Mansion is located in a different land:
    • In Disneyland, the Haunted Mansion is located in New Orleans Square, and thus the exterior mansion has the appearance of a plantation house.
    • In Walt Disney World, the Haunted Mansion has a Gothic appearance to its mansion, owing to the location in Liberty Square.
    • To the Japanese, ghosts are a major element of myths and legend, so the Haunted Mansion in Tokyo Disneyland is in Fantasyland. Gargoyles outside were added to help connect it to the surrounding area.
    • The French, meanwhile, have a thing for the American Old West, and so Phantom Manor is in Frontierland. As a result, the backstory and set pieces are changed to reflect the setting, which includes replacing the graveyard sequence from the other rides with a trip into a literal ghost town.
    • Chinese culture has immense respect for ghosts and ancestry, which means that Hong Kong's Mystic Manor doesn't include any spirits. Instead, it's located near Adventureland and owned by Lord Mystic, whose artefacts come to life thanks to an enchanted music box.
  • While the basic ride experience on Splash Mountain was the same, there were some elements that differ between the three versions of the ride.
    • Disneyland's version of Splash Mountain was situated in Critter Country. The soundtrack was a jazzy "big band" meets orchestral style, owing to the ride's location near New Orleans Square.
    • The Walt Disney World version of Splash Mountain was located in Frontierland. As a result, the soundtrack had a more country feel to it, with banjos and harmonicas as the primary instruments, which was also appropriate because of Florida's close proximity to Georgia, where Song of the South is set. "Burrow's Lament" was the only exception, using an orchestral track with timpani drums originally recorded for the Disneyland version.
    • Tokyo Disneyland's Splash Mountain is located in Critter Country, just like the California version, but its soundtrack uses the country music of the Florida version owing to the ride's location near Westernland (the equivalent of Frontierland, itself renamed because the word "frontier" doesn't translate well to Japanese).
    • And the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom rides were closed in 2023 to be completely reimagined for The Princess and the Frog after the original Song of the South theme becoming more and more unacceptable as Time Marches On.
  • When Disneyland Paris opened, Tomorrowland was reimagined as Discoveryland, with the land taking inspirations from famed European thinkers and explorers such as Leonardo da Vinci or H. G. Wells, with Jules Verne featured most prominently. This land was heavily inspired by the abandoned Disneyland concept 'Discovery Bay', which would have sat at the north end of the park's Rivers of America. Architecturally designed using Jules Verne's vision of the future as inspiration, the land is laid out very differently from its predecessors. That said, most of the classic Tomorrowland attractions exist, such as Autopia and Orbitron, some in an altered way, though Space Mountain looks much different, using a steampunk-detailed appearance, with a huge dominating Columbiad Cannon and a plate-and-rivet exterior rather than the all-white dome that the other versions of the ride use.

Theatre

• The German version of "Pulled" from The Addams Family has Wednesday saying Udo Jürgens' greatest hits have got her pulled in a new direction, rather than Liberace's.
• Foreign adaptations of Avenue Q often get this. The Gary Coleman character is usually replaced with some other (local or international) celebrity. In the Hungarian adaptation, for example, he's Michael Jackson.
• Hair Tokyo 1969, a remake of Hair written and translated by Katsumi Kahashi of The Tigers which almost completely rewrites the song lyrics/plots to suit Japanese attitudes, reflecting the Youth Movement at the time (in Japan hippie covens were largely formed in a reaction to the Liberal Democratic Party's rather oppressive and sometimes violent attitudes towards minorities and expressions of sexuality).
• The British production of Hamilton adjusted a few lines to be more accesible to an audience that may not be as familiar with American politics and geography. "John Adams doesn't have a real job anyway" became "Vice President isn't a real job anyway" while "Weehawken. Dawn." became "New Jersey. Dawn." Reportedly other productions staged outside the USA have also adopted these changes.
• A 1970 Zulu-language adaptation of Macbeth by South African playwright Welcome Msomi, called uMabatha, adapts the play into Zulu tribal culture of the early 19th century (around the reign of the famous King Shaka). Theater critic Peter Ustinov remarked that until reading uMabatha, he did not understand Macbeth. Nelson Mandela remarked on the similarities between Macbeth and King Shaka.
• The Miser features a scene where numerous worthless kitschy objects are listed, including "tapestry hangings representing the loves of Gombaud and Macée"; these were apparently characters from "an old comic pastoral" sometimes depicted on tapestries at that time. The Polish translation of the play (by Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski) replaces this with "...the courtings of Jupiter", which is much less hopelessly obscure to modern audiences.
• In the Japanese version of The Nutcracker, the Sugar Plum Fairy becomes the Konpeito Fairy (konpeito is a Japanese star-shaped sugar candy).
• Six: The Musical originated in the UK, so when performances ran in the US and Australia, slang terms were altered as needed (i.e. "mate" changed to "friend" or "bro" in the US, and "fit" changed to "hot"). The line "Remember us from your GCSEs?" changes to reference either the regional history test for wherever it's playing or the most likely place for local viewers to have learned about the queens (in the US, it's PBS; in South Korea, it's The History Channel).

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • The English translations of the games change the setting from Tokyo to... a Los Angeles which looks a lot like Tokyo. English-speaking fans have lampshaded this by referring to the setting as "Japanifornia". Even the localization team's head has stated she likes this nickname.
  • In the final case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, an instance of curry is changed to gravy in order to maintain both the flow and the context of a plot point involving word play. Other localisations manage similarly: in both French and Spanish, for example, it's based around some form of sauce.
  • Maya's Trademark Favorite Food is either ramen or burgers. This threw people off when they first meet the ramen cart man in Apollo Justice, though in the Professor Layton crossover she is shown eating burgers with Phoenix. It also got riffed in a yonkoma from the doujin collection Official Casebook: Phoenix Wright, where Maya says that she's craving burgers, but she's forced to also eat ramen "for the sake of Maya fans around the world."
  • The Punny Names get the treatment even with characters that have Japanese names start appearing.
  • Unfortunately for the series, this translation got more and more difficult over time. The first game didn't reference Japanese culture very much, so there was no difficulty in culturally translating all of it. Then in the second game we see the Fey family home, which is a Japanese temple in the mountains. Since this only involves the setting, though, the game mostly just kind of ignored the fact that this was clearly not America. But in the fifth game, there's a case that revolves around Japanese youkai mythology, and in the sixth, another case revolved around the Japanese art of rakugo. The official say on the matter by the localization team is that the series actually takes place in an alternative universe America, where anti-Japanese-immigration and settlement laws were never passed, which is referred when Nine-Tails Vale is stated to be have been founded by Japanese immigrants. Awkward Zombie parodied this here.

Web Animation

• A flash movie on the site for the Tamagotchi V5.5 has Chamametchi say her favorite food is chocolate-filled strawberries. The Japanese text remained unaltered, revealing that it was originally strawberry daifuku, which is not filled with chocolate, but anko, also known as red bean paste.

Webcomics

• Erika and the Princes in Distress: In the original French version of the comic, the magic mirror used by King Raspberry Parfait shows the head of Philippe Etchebest, who hosts of the French version of Kitchen Nightmares. In the English version of the comic, it has been redrawn to look like Gordon Ramsay instead.
• A strange version almost happened with Least I Could Do. When the comic's creators looked into turning it into a cartoon, Teletoon mandated that the comic had to be changed to remind the viewers^note Read: Beat them over the head with the fact that it takes place in Canada; this would have included slapping a hockey jersey on one character, making the only girl an Inuit, and turning the protagonist's Walk and Talk into ice fishing. Creator Ryan Sohmer said no way and began working on his own cartoon while Teletoon produced a knock-off.
• A fan-made one from Square Root of Minus Garfield: this strip mirrors this◊ real Garfield strip (in the literal sense) so that it makes more sense for people who live in countries who drive on the left side of the road (such as the author, who is Australian).

Web Original

• Accuser: When the line featuring Barry Dinsmore congratulating his attorney for winning the case was redubbed for Brazilian audiences, they had Dinsmore calling Dan Mason a "doctor" instead of a "counselor".
• The ZeroMic Italian Fandub for Dragon Ball Z Abridged swaps out the use of "Suddenly" by Billy Ocean in Episode 60 for "Bello e impossibile" by Gianna Nannini.
• Red vs. Blue has Lopez, a robot that can only speak Spanish. When a Spanish fandub was made, it goes with the natural inversion of Lopez speaking English. A discussion in the next episode also changes Simmons being referred as having "a Latin persuasion" to "a touch of English", and Donut states he's from Miami instead of Iowa.
• Due to it being more common in Japan to refer to your sibling by a title than by their name, in the Japanese dub of RWBY Ruby usually calls Yang "onee-chan". In the original English version she near exclusively calls Yang by her name.

Western Animation

• In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Flower", Gumball (In jealously form) said he would escape to Mexico, but in the Latin American dub, he said he would escape to Africa.
  • And in the Brazilian Portuguese dub, instead of saying Chanax invented cheese puffs in "The Boss", Gumball instead says they invented pão de queijo, something that would be more common to Brazilian viewers.
• In American Dad!, the German version of Klaus receives a Saxon accent, and some of his references to the Nazis are changed to reference the Stasi and East Germany.
• The German dub of the Animaniacs song "Hello Nurse" changes her from playing Chopin to playing Brahms.
• In addition to censoring certain scenes, the American version of Bluey also changes some Australian terms. "Thongs" are refered to as "sandals", and "capsicum" is changed to "pepper". These changes also apply to the American releases of the tie-in books.
• The American dub of Bob the Builder changed references to "hedgehogs" to "porcupines", despite looking clearly like the former.
• The English dub of the French series Code Lyoko avoids falling into this trap, mostly by removing all spoken references to the show's setting. The animation itself is unchanged, thus keeping the show pretty firmly in France. This particular example is an interesting case, as the show was dubbed in France by a French company rather than in America.
• An example of a cultural translation within a country: In the Dennis the Menace (UK) comic strip, Dennis's friend Pie-Face's Trademark Favorite Food is the Scotch pie, reflecting The Beano's Dundonian origins. In the animated series Dennis and Gnasher, Pie-Face's pies are shown in a pie dish, looking more like English pies.
• In several international versions of Dora the Explorer, Dora teaches English instead of Spanish, since in Latin America (as well as in several other countries), English is the most commonly spoken foreign language.
• Drawn Together:
  • The following references have been changed for the show's German dub:
    • In the episode "Spelling Applebee's", references to Tori Spelling are replaced with Rosie O'Donnell and Tim Allen. One reference to Ellen DeGeneres is also replaced with Jodie Foster.
    • In the same dub of the episode "Little Orphan Hero", Bell Biv DeVoe is replaced with Marilyn Monroe.
    • In "Super Nanny", Captain Hero's line "Auf Wiedersehen, Frenchie!" is dubbed over with "Vaya con dios, darling!"
    • Forrest Gump is mentioned in place of Jose "Daddy Long Legs" Martinez in "The Lemon-AIDS Walk".
    • In "Wooldoor Sockbat's Giggle-Wiggle Funny Tickle Non-Traditional Progressive Multicultural Roundtable!", Wooldoor asks Clara, "David oder Copperfield (David or Copperfield)?", in which Clara replies, "Copperfield." In the original, he asks her, "Street or Vegas?", which she gives "Vegas" as an answer. In the same episode, the Ku Klux Klan is mentioned in place of Denny's.
    • In "Mexican't Buy Me Love", Bell Biv DeVoe is once again replaced, but this time with the Pussycat Dolls.
    • In the original version of "Lost in Parking Space, Part One", when thinking of names beginning with "Captain," Foxxy lists Cap'n Crunch as one of them. While in this dub, she lists Captain Planet instead. In the same episode, Captain Hero refers to his right hand as his Stephen Hawking hand, where he refers to it as his Bob Dole hand in the original. This is due to Dole's obscurity in Germany.
    • In "Lost in Parking Space, Part Two", the reference to Invader Zim is dubbed out, and is instead replaced with SpongeBob SquarePants.
    • Mary Lou Retton is replaced with Britney Spears in "Breakfast Food Killer".
    • Quiznos is referenced in the original "Toot Goes Bollywood". But in this dub of the episode, McDonald's is.
    • In the episode "Freaks & Greeks", the "Seacrest" in Ling-Ling Hitler bin Laden Seacrest replaced with Küblböck, a German pop-singer and actor who achieved short-lived celebrity in 2003, in the media-circus that surrounded the first season of Deutschland sucht den Superstar (DSDS), the German version of Pop Idol.
    • In the first two seasons, the words "Jew" or "Jewish" were often censored. The Jewish Producer, for example, is in Germany known as "Geldgeiler Produzent" ("geldgeil" is German and means he has a "Money Fetish")
  • In the Italian dub:
    • The episode "Freaks & Greeks" has the "Seacrest" in Ling-Ling Hitler bin Laden Seacrest replaced with Obama.
    • In the episode "Mexican't Buy Me Love", one reference to Jennifer Lopez replaces the mentioning of Edward James Olmos.
  • In the Hungarian version of "Little Orphan Hero", Captain Hero sings Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge", whereas in the original he sings Five for Fighting's "Superman (It's Not Easy)".
  • The Russian dub had references to Russian commercials and reality shows inserted into it, replacing some of the more obscure references to American culture.
• Dynomutt, Dog Wonder: In "The Great Brain... Train Robbery", Blue Falcon mentions the time he used to play football and Dynomutt suggests enlisting help from the Pittsburgh Steelers. In the Brazilian dub, Blue Falcon mentions soccer instead of football and Dynomutt suggests Brazilian soccer player Rivellino.
• The same thing happened to Family Guy, although its quality compared to the European French dub (which was also generally disliked in Quebec) is more debatable. American Dad!, however, has a similar Quebecois localization that is widely praised.
  • An in-universe example in Family Guy occurs when Brian and Stewie end up in the Middle East, where a street vendor offers them a movie called Dude My Car Is Not Where I Parked It but Praise Allah We Are Not Hurt.
  • The trope is further parodied in an episode where it is revealed that Family Guy is actually a Foreign Remake of a popular British series, and we are treated to an episode of the "original". The family has terrible teeth and lives in a smaller row house, Brian is a thoroughbred horse, and the plot is about Peter trying to get DNA from the Queen during an official visit, to prove that he has royal blood.
  • One Mexican Spanish-dubbed Family Guy episode had Jenna Jameson referred to in dialogue as Pam Anderson, as well.
• The earliest case of Quebec localization would be the The Flintstones, where not only were the voices dubbed locally, but many character and place names were changed to make them sound more "Quebecois", even if this made them different from the European French dubs. Fred Flintstone was renamed Fred Caillou (a small rock) in Quebec, while in France he was named Pierrafeu (or "Pierre a Feu", the French for Flintstone). And Mr. Slate, the owner of the stone quarry, was cleverly renamed "Mr. Miroc", a reference to a ciment company operating in Quebec at the time. The show kept the European French name of "Les Pierrafeu", however.
• Futurama:
  • In the German dub of the episode "Parasite Lost", the parasites in Fry's intestines greet the miniaturized heroes with "Welcome to Darmstadt", which is an actual German city whose name has changed over centuries to now sound exactly like "intestine city".
  • In the French dub of the episode "Law and Oracle", both instances of Fry mentioning Speed Buggy were replaced with him instead mentioning Scooby-Doo. Also in that same episode, the Take That! against Jay Leno was replaced with a Take That! against Eddie Murphy.
  • Futurama also parodied the pandering variant in the episode "Reincarnation", part of which was done in a pastiche of a badly-dubbed 80's anime. Several distinctly Asian landmarks (by which we mean exactly the same one, used repeatedly) were shown with English text directly superimposed over their names, reading things like "Omaha, Nebraska".
• The English version of the US Acres quickie following the Garfield and Friends episode "Attack of the Mutant Guppies" has the guppies wanting to guest star on Muppet Babies. In the Spanish version, the guppies wish to appear on Sabado Gigante, a long-running Spanish variety show that dates back to 1962.
• In Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks, the American setting of the present day is changed to Great Britain, and the voices of American characters are dubbed over accordingly.
• The Polish dub of Johnny Bravo replaces Farrah Fawcett (in the episode "Johnny Meets Farrah Fawcett") with Pamela Anderson, since the former was much more obscure in Poland (back when the translation was made in the late nineties) than the latter, and "Johnny Meets Someone You've Never Heard About" is hardly an interesting title.
  • Something similar happened to the episode "Johnny Meets Adam West", which was re-titled to "Johnny Saves Mom", also likely due to West's obscurity in Poland (though in that case only the title was changed, West remained West in the episode itself).
  • The Norwegian dub of the episode "Beach Blanket Bravo" have the shark with the Nixon Mask pretending to be Peter Pan instead of the late president.
• The Brazilian dub of Justice League Unlimited has one tiny bit in the episode "The Great Brain Robbery": when Grodd, not convinced by Flash's attempts to affirm he is Lex Luthor, sarcastically remarks he is Charlton Heston, the dub replaces Heston's name with "King Kong", which would be easier for kids who hadn't seen Heston's films to get.
• The Québécois dub of King of the Hill (Henri pis sa gang) places the story in small-town Quebec (Ste-Irène) rather than Texas, making for some odd representations of Quebec (such as warm-weathered and football-crazy). The episode involving former Texas governor Ann Richards simply pretended she was Quebec-based Senator Lise Bacon.
  • The funniest part is when it's clear they can't get away so for one episode they are back in Texas, such as when Hank discovered he was born in New York or when it was about the American flag, the Hill teleport back to Texas for the length of the episode.
• The Danish dub of the Cartoon Network TV series The Life and Times of Juniper Lee changed several references to America to Danish ones, including references to Jutland, Zealand, and other Danish areas.
  • The same happened to Braceface.
  • Downplayed with Sabrina: The Animated Series. In the Danish dub Sabrina lives in Grøndal, which is not only an actual city in Denmark, but a literal translation of Greendale.
• The European Portuguese dub of Looney Tunes used this extensively, one notable example being changing Bugs Bunny's wrong turn at Albuquerque to Vila Franca de Xira, and Foghorn Leghorn's Texan accent to an Alentejan one.
• In the The Loud House episode "Linc or Swim", Lana sings the chorus from the folk song "Shortnin' Bread" as she chops vegetables in the swimming pool. The Italian dub changes it to a carrot-themed parody of the Zecchino d'Oro song "Le Tagliatelle di Nonna Pina".
• In the My Life as a Teenage Robot episode "Speak No Evil" while on a mission in Japan, Jenny loses her English language disc and is stuck speaking Japanese. In the Japanese dub, she's stuck speaking English.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "The Cutie Pox", one of Apple Bloom's many cutie marks makes her speak French, which Applejack describes as a fancy language. Since the language she speaks in the original is of the modern type, the French dub changes it to old French.
• One episode in the European Portuguese dub of Ned's Newt mentions one of the country's local channels, one who at the time used to run an American game show in some way.
• When Finnish animated series Pasila was given an English dub, some of the names were changed in ways that preserved their Punny Name nature.
  • The main character had his name changed from Kyösti Pöysti to Jefferson Anderson, preserving the rhyming nature of his name.
• While DVDs of Peppa Pig sold in the U.S. use the original British recordings, books based on the cartoons switch some of the words to American equivalents: dollars for pounds, dessert for pudding, color for colour, etc. Not everything is changed, though — Mummy Pig is still Mummy Pig.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In the Norwegian dub of the episode Meet The Beat Alls, all the reference to The Beatles is replaced with reference to the Norwegian rock band "deLillos". And the name of the villain group "The Beat Alls" is changed to "Devillos".
• Ready Jet Go!: In "A Visit from Uncle Zucchini", Carrot makes an "enchisushisagna" using enchilada, sushi, and lasagna. In the Korean dub, the sushi is changed to gimbap, a Korean food that is similar to sushi.
• In the Japanese dub of Rick and Morty, Morty and Summers' habit of calling Rick by his first name is dropped considering how Rick is their grandfather and referring to older family figures in such a fashion is considered even more disrespectful than in the West even if we are talking about Rick here, and works pretty well for Morty's character. Even Morty refers to Summer as "onee-chan" instead of her name.
• The Dutch dubs of Rugrats and All Grown Up! changed the setting from the USA to The Netherlands, replacing American cities with Dutch ones etc. Due to the differences between the US and The Netherlands, this lead to several The Mountains of Illinois type scenarios.
  • The same was done initially for the Dutch dub of Phineas and Ferb (again with references to Dutch cities, and the Tri-State Area becoming the Region), but this was dropped around Season 3 (when they started referring to the Tri-State Area as the Tri-State Area like in the original version, and stated several times that the Flynn-Fletcher family lives in America).
• The Simpsons:
  • Early Brazilian dubs included several local references so that things would sound more familiar (some of them are infamously remarkable). It seems they stopped by the sixth season, but still happen upon occasion — during The New '10s, Homer's dubber would often hum the anthem of his football team.
  • The Italian dub of The Simpsons and Family Guy normally replace obscure American references with the ones known in all the world. In a Simpson Season 11 episode they replaced the Dixie Chicks with Spice Girls, and they were onscreen. Everybody would state they didn't look similar.
  • The Québec dub is generally considered to be about as good as the original (if you can get over Homer having a deep, gruff voice provided initially by Hubert Gagnon and later by his successor Thiéry Dubé), replacing some celebrity appearances with local ones when it fits, and generally making it sound both natural and very close to the original. This also works in favor of the episode "The Crepes of Wrath", where Bart not being able to understand French is changed to Bart not being able to understand the overly-formal Parisian French instead of his usual Québecois French.
  • The German exchange student Uter becomes a Swiss exchange student in the German dub. Given that the stereotypes the character is based on are more Swiss/Austrian than German, this is actually a perfect fit.
• South Park: After years of getting the European French dub, a Québec French dub was made, probably with The Simpsons' success in mind. Except in that case, it turned out inferior to the European French, and seemed like it had ridiculous amounts of gratuitous swearing even compared to the original (and even considering Québec French is well-known for Cluster F-Bomb). Even worse is that they weren't modern Québécois swearing but some of the 90s such as torieux, a slang term for someone who plays lots of pranks).
  • Sega Dreamcast is changed into PlayStation in the Polish translation simply because no one there knew what a Dreamcast was.
  • "Come Sail Away" was swapped out for "La Cucaracha" in a dub aired on Mexican local TV, while the other Spanish-language dubs used other alternative songs in its place.
  • Starvin' Marvin was referred to as "Paco el Flaco" (Paco the Skinny) in the original Latin American dub. Big Gay Al became "Gran Pato Al" (pato being slang for an effeminate gay man).
    • Some celebrity references are also replaced, likely because of their obscurity in Latin America. Sally Struthers from "Starvin' Marvin" became Shelley Winters, while Tina Yothers from "Pink Eye" became Shirley Temple...
    • Yothers is also replaced in the French Dub (Farrah Fawcett), and in Hungarian (Zsa-Zsa Gabor).
  • In the Taiwanese dub, Kyle's family is Buddhist. Other jokes are changed as appropriate: for example, when learning that the Tooth Fairy is fake, Kyle also asks if it's true that Mainland Chinese live "in hot fire and deep water" , as Taiwanese children learn in school. "They're fine." "Ahhhh!!"
  • In Brazil, the dub of the early seasons of South Park had several Brazilian pop culture references, such as celebrities and soccer teams, despite the fact that the town of South Park is always covered in snow.^note  Snow is pretty rare in Brazil, being seen only in small scale in southern areas during winter. Later dubs stopped with this trend, keeping the references the same as the original.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Sold!", Squidward pretends to be a family of Germans living in SpongeBob's house. The German dub changes it so that he pretends to be Bavarian instead.
• The Stressed Eric episode "Pony" has Eric reading Claire's note about wanting to participate in the school gymkhana (equestrian events). In the American dub, Claire's voice-over helpfully adds an explanatory "England's greatest horse show" even though those words are not in the note.
• Teen Titans Go!: In the Hungarian dub of "Two Parter", instead of jokes about "Weird Al" Yankovic, they joke about how Darkseid has the same voice as SpongeBob and Darkseid calls SpongeBob evil for keeping kids so captivated with his show they don't go outside.
• The American dub of Thomas & Friends replaces British railroad terminology with its American counterparts: "trucks" become "freight cars", "guards" become "conductors", etc. Some other relatively minor changes are also made to better fit American culture, such as the Fat Controller almost invariably being referred to by his actual name, "Sir Topham Hatt", due to the more negative connotation the word 'fat' has in the states.
• Transformers: Animated: In the Japanese release, up to three minutes are cut to make way for a longer intro, and live action bookend segments focused on the Otoboto family.
• The "Far-Out Friday" episode of 2 Stupid Dogs has Cubby to hum a random "la di la" tune while re-stacking a pile of cans. In the Brazilian dub, he clearly sings the initial verses of Chico Buarque's "A Banda" instead.
• Most foreign dubs of VeggieTales change the identities of the people sending each letter. It would be easier to list alternate examples, though.
  • Averted in the Indonesian, 2nd Latin Spanish, and 3rd Brazilian Portuguese dubs. One of the latter two makes more sense, as it was only ever released in the United States (though the TV version did get DVD releases in Mexico).
  • Subverted in the 1st Latin Spanish dub. While Where's God When I'm S-Scared? and Dave and the Giant Pickle leave them as is, Are You My Neighbor? and Rack, Shack & Benny change them.
• In the W.I.T.C.H. episode "Divide and Conquer", Taranee mentions that Sondra mocked her for not reading Tolstoy's War and Peace in the original language, only for Taranee later catching her on not knowing a basic Russian word for "hospital". In the Russian dub, where it would be hard to impress anyone with knowledge of Tolstoy's language, Sonbra tries to impress Taranee with Goethe instead.

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• Happens a lot with regional accents: British English, for example, is often rendered as European Spanish in Latin American dubs.
  • The Kansai dialect of Japanese was often dubbed in English as a Brooklyn accent, due to similar stereotypes about the people who speak them.
    • Though the convention seems to have changed to a Texan accent, which still often works due to different nuances in the stereotype.
    • In French, the Kansai-equivalent is usually either the Marseilles accent (or a generic broad "Southern" accent), or the Northern "Ch'ti" accent.
    • In Spanish, they usually go for the Andalusia accent (south of Spain), also due to similar stereotypes, but in some cases it is rendered as Mexican Spanish. Anyways, the convention is actually rarely used in dubs, and the only examples are often in works set in fantasy worlds, where it would be less jarring.
  • People with German accents usually get Bavarian (or occasionally Swiss) accents in German dubs while British people have English German accents.
    • Unless they are the stiff Prussian kind, in which case they usually speak in more or less standard German. However, Gert Fröbe dubbed himself in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines with his native Saxon dialect and the German dub of Hogan's Heroes has Colonel Klink speaking in a Saxon and Sergeant Schultz in a Bavarian accent.
    • Urban types typically get Berliner accents.
    • This, incidentally, is why Ahnuld never dubs himself in the German dubs of his movies; his Austrian accent makes him sound like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel to most Germans.
  • This also happens with Arabic, which tends to provide a wealth of accents within the same country, and where the differences in spoken dialect are so big that people often can't understand each other. Since most Arabs understand Cairene dialect of Egyptian Arabic, this would be translated as the "standard" dialect of the work; if the movie is American (for instance), a "normal" Midwest accent is translated as "regular" Cairene, a redneck would be given an Upper Egyptian accent, an Englishman Lebanese/Syrian or (if villainous) Standard Arabic, a Valley Girl "high class" Cairene or perhaps Lebanese (it's a long story), a New Yawker might be rendered as Port Said, or super-working-class Cairene^note Cairo is big — about 20 million in the urban area — so it has lots of dialects. etc.
• People with Southern accents are in Swedish dubs typically dubbed in the Scanian dialect.
  • Characters meant to sound like pirates or be sailors are given a Gothenburg dialect. Examples include Captain Haddock or Mr. Silver.
• Brazilian dubs also put their spin on Dixie accents, by dubbing them with a Caipira (rural parts of states like São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Goiás) accent.

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