Woolseyism/Other Media

Comic Books
"Shopkeeper: Oh, so this melon's bad, is it? Customer: Rather, old fruit."
 * European example: the characters' names in Asterix are puns. When translated from French to Spanish, these puns still worked fine, probably because French and Spanish are both Romance languages. However, these same puns often came out rather silly in English: the fisherman, in French, was called Ordralfabétix, from "ordre alphabétique" ("alphabetical order"); now imagine a fisherman called "Alphabeticalorderix". So, the translators created new names out of whole cloth, based on the characters' traits and flaws. For example, the fisherman was often blamed for selling stale fish, thus he was called Unhygienix. The chief was called Vitalstatistix because he had the "vital statistics" at hand, the bard was called Cacofonix because of his awful singing, and so on. One rather clever example: the name of Obelix's pet dog, Idéfix (from the idiomatic phrase idée fixe, meaning "fixed idea") was translated as Dogmatix.
 * Several of the English dubbed animated films called the fishmonger Fishtix and the Druid who creates the strength-potions called both Panoramix (his original French name) and Getafix (the name used in the English translations of the books).
 * In Asterix and the Big Fight, the original name of the pro-roman Gaulish chief is Aplusbégalix ("A + B = X" read aloud in French). The English translation changes it to Cassius Ceramix. Not only is this a pun on Muhammad Ali's former name Cassius Clay (appropriate since the titular fight is essentially a boxing match) but having a name ending in -us and another ending in -ix perfectly fits his nature as a collaborator.
 * Fridge Brilliance: Ceramics is clay after it has been molded and cooked from its raw form into something more orderly and idealized, much like the Romans are trying to do to the Gaulle villagers through assimilation.
 * Moreover, the narration is full of puns and sly allusions, many of which also didn't translate -- but the translators manage to keep the number of jokes per page pretty much unchanged.
 * Sometimes the translators even one-up the originals: in Finland, the Asterix book Asterix and the Normans was translated as 'Asterix and the Landing of the Normans'', an obvious, but still very functional pun on the landing of Normandy.
 * In Turkish, it's taken a step further. For example, the Egyptian architect has an accent for a minority that's known in Turkey for being architects, even though the rest of the Egyptians speak nothing like that.
 * Sometimes the translators will even change the drawings. For exemple, in "Asterix in Switzerland", Asterix, Obelix and Idefix/Dogmatix break a wheel on their chariot and must have it repaired; in the original French version, the gaul man at the gaul stand-in for a gas station was also the mascot of a chain of gas stations called "Antar". In several translations, including the original English translations, the character was changed to Bibendum (the Michelin man). The dialog was also altered to include a reference to his weight. Interestingly, other editions of the English translation revert the drawing change but kept the dialog, which made the weight joke misplaced. Other examples of changing the drawing includes, notably, changing the strips in an Egyptian newspaper in Asterix and Cleopatra from French ones ("Chéris-Bibis") to "Pnuts" and "Ptarzan".
 * The Dutch version has some name changes, but mostly retains the French element, since French is a mandatory subject at secondary schools for at least 2 years (except at the very lowest level) most people will understand the jokes. There is one exception, when flying over Tyrus on the magic carpet and getting shot a box is added to one of the panels explaining the relation to "Tyr" (Tyrus) and "tire" (to shoot) which are both pronounced the same in French.
 * When Obelix sings French patriotic songs with the words altered, they changed them to English WWII patriotic songs with the lyrics altered ("There'll always be a Gaaaaauuuullll..."), but somehow still kept the meter.
 * The Swedish translations are usually excellent, often with puns and clever references to Latin and Greek that do not work in any other language. Some requires a lot of pondering even by the well-educated reader.
 * There was a segment in Asterix the Gaul in which four consecutive puns on hair were needed for the panels to make any sense. They pulled off every which one stupendously in Swedish. The same four panels were translated to Polish with similar ingenuity.
 * There was one line in the English translation of Asterix in Britain that Goscinny allegedly liked so much he said he wished it was in the original. The original was a play on the French word for a bowler hat being the same as the word for melon, a pun which simply doesn't exist in English. The translators replaced it with:


 * It's worth pointing out that the original series is not about having Bilingual Bonuses when it's appropriate. Hence, the British rebel village chief is called Zebigboss.
 * The writer Goscinny loved using those in any series he wrote, notably with evil vizier Iznogud whose name is the literal phrase "He's no good" which nobody ever seems to notice because the characters all speak French. Maybe that's why the Calif never notices that his vizier is constantly out to usurp him.
 * Of course, who could forget the Italian translation of the catch phrase "Those Romans are crazy!" ("Ils sont fous ces romains!"), which came out as "Sono pazzi questi Romani" (a literal translation). Its initials refer to the Roman government, Senatus Populusque Romanus ("The Senate and People of Rome").
 * One of the comic magazines in Poland - "Komiks Gigant" (which is exclusive to Poland) - contains Disney Comics which, on occasion, are truly masterfully translated, with lots of puns and Shout Outs added in.
 * Ditto on the Finnish version of Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, which is often superior to the originals.
 * In the 1950s the Swedish publisher used one specific translator team for all Donald Duck stories and the members coined a lot of funny neologisms that gradually have become an accepted part of the vernacular.
 * The popular Belgian Tintin comic books by Herge feature a pair of bumbling twin detectives named Dupont and Dupond in the original French language version, pronounced the same way. In adapting Herge's work for foreign audiences, translators usually rename the detectives, giving them names that sound the same in the language they're speaking but that are spelled differently. The English version, as just one example, calls the less-than-competent detectives Thompson ("with a 'P', as in 'Psychology'" ) and Thomson ("without a 'P', as in 'Venezuela'"), keeping Herge's original intent.
 * Other language examples include the Dutch Janssen and Jansen, the German Schultze and Schulze (in German, "lz" makes an audible plosive, just like "ltz"), the Icelandic Skapti and Skafti, the Spanish Hernandez and Fernandez...
 * Most of the other names were changed as well, and there are whole websites listing the names of the main cast in various languages. Even the title character's name is changed frequently, most notably to the rather bland-sounding "Tim" in German and the completely different "Kuifje" in Dutch, which means something like 'quiffy'. Also, in French his name is pronounced more like 'Tantan' than 'Tintin'. The dog's name is also prone to change, going from Milou in the French to, for example, Snowy in English, Bobbie in Dutch, and Struppi in German. Finally, Professeur Tournesol became Professor Calculus because "Professor Sunflower", the literal translation of his name, would have sounded a bit silly in English (not so in other languages, though, and he's called Zonnebloem in Dutch, for example).
 * The Tintin books, like their rival Asterix, are also famous for a lot of punning, especially when the fairly deaf Professor enters the scene, and the translators, at least into English, tend to be quite good at altering the text to make the things like rhyming work. They also have Tintin, in particular, using a lot of contemporary British turns-of-phrase, many of which have changed in meaning.
 * One 80's issue of Spider-Man dealt with Spidey busting an arms trafficking ring, complete with an Anvilicious message about gun violence. The Brazilian translator chose to title that story A Cidade Apresenta Suas Armas (The City Presents Its Weapons), which also happened to be the first verse of a popular, then-recently released Brazilian rock song by band Paralamas do Sucesso. It fit amazingly well, possibly because the song had a similar anti-violence theme.

Newspaper Comics

 * In the eighties, there were two different Norwegian translations of Garfield: one in which he kept his original name, and one in which he was named Pusur. The former tried to stay close to the original text, while the latter sometimes altered the text completely, changing the content of entire storylines (a sequence where Jon and Garfield are watching a horror movie is changed to having them watch a crappy vaudeville show, complete with references to Norwegian celebrities). Sometimes the translators were even adding political commentary. Eventually, the former school of translation won out, but the name Pusur remained and became canon.
 * In The Pre-History of The Far Side, Gary Larsen discusses a change that was made in one of his cartoons before it was distributed to foreign markets. In the cartoon, a ship drops a microphone into the water to record whale songs, and a whale swims up to the microphone and sings "Louie Louie". In some foreign markets, the whale instead sings "Singing in the Rain". Larsen admits that Singing in the Rain was funny, and writes that the song change was probably due to Louie Louie being less well-known outside of the US.

Film
"Fabienne: Czyj to Harley? (Whose Harley is that?) Butch: Zeda. (It's Zed's.) Fabienne: Kto to jest Zed? (Who's Zed?) Butch: Zed zszedł, kochanie. (Zed passed away, baby. - which sounds in Polish almost exactly like the original "Zed's dead" as the two words rhyme.)"
 * Examples from Czech dubbed versions of foreign movies:
 * In Jumanji, the hero said when attacking the carnivorous plant: "It's harvest time, Adele!" Adéla ješte nevečeřela (Adele hasn't had supper yet) is a Czech movie, and the titular Adele is a man-eating plant created by a mad scientist.
 * In the Czech version of the first Shrek movie, the translators have smuggled in a number of references to popular Czech fairy tales.
 * Polish versions of Shrek are loaded with Woolseyisms, pretty much like all movies translated by Bartosz Wierzbieta.
 * Also, this gem from the Polish version of Pulp Fiction:

"Aux frontières/ Du mystère/ Au château de l'impossible/ Vit le diable dans son horrible tanière."
 * Not even mentioning turning the "I'm gonna get medieval on your ass!" line into highly memetic "Zrobię ci z dupy jesień średniowiecza!" (I'm gonna make The Autumn of the Middle Ages out of your ass!).
 * Various dubs of Robin Hood: Men in Tights change the gag when Robin Hood tells the Sheriff, "unlike other Robin Hoods, I speak with an English accent" because foreign viewers who saw the dubbed 1991 Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves wouldn't get the joke. So, it is changed to another line deriding Costner. For example, the German dub changes the line into something like "because unlike that other Robin Hood, I do not cost the producers 5 million", putting stress on kosten (cost) as a pun on Costner.
 * The French dub had "Unlike my predecessors, I do not dance with wolves.
 * The Italian version of Young Frankenstein is full of these. One example; 'Werewolf?' 'There. There wolf, there castle!' Was translated with a mispronunciation of 'ulula' (howls) to sound like the sardinian dialect's 'u l'u là', 'it's there'. So, it became 'Là. Lupu u l'u là, e castellu, u l'u lì.' 'The wolf is there and the castle is here.', the single most famous line from the movie in Italy.
 * The Latin American dub of the 2008 Get Smart movie got back the original voice actor for Smart and he ad-libbed many of the jokes, sometimes placing Mexican pop-culture references over the original ones and overall made the film much more true to the original series than the English version was.
 * An hilarious example in the French dub of Aladdin. At one point, in the famous "Prince Ali" sequence, you see a group of pretty courtesans at a balcony, joined by the genie disguised as a courtesan too. What's the point ? Well, in French "Il y a du monde au balcon" ("it's crowded on the balcony") is an extremely popular, ironic euphemism used to say "wow, these breasts are big" - a holdover from the tradition of "precious language". And in Aladdin, here's this little balcony with plenty of... well-built young ladies. This joke was just so good that the dubbers threw it in without any regard for the original line. Hilarity Ensues.
 * Most of the best lines in Disney dubs from the 90s are add-libs from the translators anyway (because there's no other way to "translate" humor).
 * That's just one out of hundreds of examples. The French version of "I just can't wait to be king" sees Zazu's pun on Out of Africa becomes a pro-democratic tirade, and of course to the French version of "Mine, Mine, Mine", which may well be one of the best Disney adaptation ever. Long story short: Disney understood sometime in the 1990's that bad adaptations ruin movies, so they created DCVI, a whole company dedicated to dubs. The French department somehow managed to recruit some of the most creative translators there are, and made them work with great dubbers. The result was crack.
 * "Prends garde, lion! Ne te trompe pas de voie!"
 * "Rebelle et lion font rébellion!"
 * The translation of Beauty and the Beast is also pretty awesome. "The Mob Song" is already amazing in English but the French dub changes most of the lyrics to paint the Beast as a devilish soul-stealing monster and it's pretty damn effective.

"Toi mon ami/ Aux yeux de soie (you my friend/ with silk eyes)"
 * While the French translation of Beauty and the Beast, and all of the Disney songs really, is usually incredible, there's a point in "Y a Quelque Chose" ("Something There") that sounds everything but natural in French, especially when speaking about the Beast, once you stop and think about it:

"Littlejohn: Braddock! I'm warning you, don't step on any toes. Col. James Braddock: I don't step on toes, Littlejohn, I step on necks."
 * Dutch Disney translations tend to have these too. Most notable is probably the song "the bare necessities" from the jungle book. Since that pun doesn't work in Dutch it first got translated as a song about "Baloe de bruine beer" (Baloo the brown bear). Some years later people started noticing Baloo was actually not brown at all, so they retranslated it as "als je van beren leren kan" (if you can learn from bears). The text is still completely different from the original, but it works just as well. They've been doing it right ever since.
 * Sometimes, Woolseyisms can move a rather poor movie into So Bad It's Good territory. Case in point: the French dub of Braddock: Missing In Action 3, featuring Chuck Norris as the titular character. One memorable line :

"Littlejohn: Braddock! Attention où vous mettez les pieds. (Braddock! Pay attention where you put your feet!) Col. James Braddock: Je mets les pieds où je veux, Littlejohn. Et c'est souvent dans la gueule. (I put my feet where I want, Littlejohn. And it's often in faces.)"
 * Became memorable to the point of Memetic Mutation in France:

"Why don't you look up "asshole" in the phone book? I bet you'll find your number listed!"
 * The French dubs of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are prone to this. The dub of Last Action Hero has Arnold call himself "Arnold Albertschweitzer" (a reference to famous medical doctor Albert Schweitzer) and great improvements on the original dialog, like when one of the mooks gets taken out by an ice cream cone to the head ("Pour qui sonne la glace! Celui-la j'ai refroidi!" - "For whom does the ice cream toll? That guy I just froze!") and during the Schwarzenhamlet scene ("Moi, doux? Tu veux rire!" - "Me, fair? You're kidding!")
 * The English dub of The Story of Ricky.
 * A lot of German film dubs from before the mid-nineties took liberties in translation. Blatant example in the first Terminator film. Arnold rudely interrupts a caller at a public phone booth to look up Sarah Connor's address in the book. Said caller mentions Arnold to have "a serious attitude problem". Very witty indeed. Compare the German version:

"Mack: Wait a minute here... they're just using the same actor over and over! What kind of a cut-rate production is this?"
 * The French version of Dirty Dancing has quite a few, which have become so cult that most viewers miss them when they watch the original version. For example, the very flat line "I'm sorry you had to see that, Baby... Sometimes in this world you see things you don't wanna see." became "Parfois, on assiste à des scènes terribles. Malheureusement le monde est une jungle, l’homme est un loup pour l’homme et surtout pour la femme..." ("Sometimes, we see horrible things. Unfortunately, the world is a jungle; man is a wolf to man, and especially to woman.") Some of the lines just have an irresistible Narm Charm that goes perfectly with the story.
 * The French version of Back to The Future even created a new expression. "Great Scott!" was changed to "Nom de Zeus!", a pun on "Nom de Dieu!" (literally "God's name", but it's more of a "Goddamnit"). I still don't know how or why this was changed, but I know I still watch the movies in French because of this expression.
 * The French dub is actually full of Woolseyisms. For example, the Calvin Klein joke is changed to refer to French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, and the DeLorean needs 2.21 gigowatts of power (because 2.21 is more easily heard in French.) The "Hey, McFly!" scene changes the insult from "Irish bug" to "espece de creme anglaise" (a pun on the food creme anglaise and "English piece of shit") and an attempt by Biff to say McFly in a British accent.
 * From Wikipedia: In the German dub of the 2005 movie version of Bewitched, the line "The Do-not-disturb sign will hang on the door tonight." became "The only hanging thing tonight will be the Do-not-disturb sign."
 * In Cars, John Ratzenberger, who's been in every single Pixar film to date, plays Mack. During the end credits, Mack goes to a drive-in featuring car versions of Toy Story, Monsters, Inc.., and A Bugs Life. Mack praises the John Ratzenberger characters at first, until he realizes...


 * In the Swedish version, where these characters were not voiced by the same actor, Mack instead rants about how P. T. Flea (the last Ratzenberger character shown) is leeching off of the hard-working circus bug(gies), even squeezing in a flea-related pun.
 * Attempted in the Hungarian dub. Mater, whose voice actor has been part of a popular comedic sketch at the time, uses the famous Catch Phrase of his character from that sketch. This was met with mixed reception, only because that phrase included the F-word in an abbreviated form.
 * The french dub of A Christmas Movie is widely considered by bilingual viewers to be far superior to the original thanks in large parts to the lively and emotional delivery of the narrator who has more lines than anyone else in the movie. Kudos to the snappy, catchy french version of the arc words "Tu vas te crever un oeil!" ("You'll put your eye out!")
 * In Hero there are four scenes where the soldiers yell in unison: before the emperor appears, before the attack on the city Flying Snow and Broken Sword are staying in,, and . In the original Chinese the soldiers are simply yelling "Ha! Ha!", but the English subtitles transcribe it as "Hail! Hail!", creating a pun not found in the original work.
 * Appears in all but the very earliest movies with Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. The german dubs give them witty and funny dialogues, often completely changing the original meaning or outright changing the theme of the movie from a grim spaghetti western to a lighthearted buddy romp. The high quality of the dubs (not in accurateness, but in sheer outlandish mannerism) are responsible for the fact that these movies are still extremely popular in Germany.

Live Action TV

 * The German dub of Hogan's Heroes gives Sgt. Schultz and Col. Klink Bavarian and Saxon accents respectively; the original was not specific.
 * Klink's speeches go even further as he occasionally uses terms and mannerisms that no sane German would (but no one said Klink is sane). He even calls his superiors names that would get him in trouble. General Burkhalter (who got a clear Vienna accent like the other two named above) is repeatedly called things (to his face) like "Sacherfriedhof" which literaly means "cake cemetery" (Sacher is a special cake from Vienna). This sometimes leads to a Hurricane of Puns from Klink. Also noteable is, this is the second German Dub under "Ein K&Atilde;&curren;fig voller Helden" (engl. "a cage full of heroes"). The first one was pretty lame and only the first season was dubbed and abbdonned later.
 * A specific example: Hochstetter has found a button marked "US" on the ground outside the camp, indicating American spies in the area. He shows it to Klink triumphantly--Klink first reads it as "oos!" and when his attention is drawn to the fact that it's actually two letters reads it as "unterseeboot" (submarine). (Which doesn't make any sense either since the only correct shortening would be UB.)
 * Power Rangers varies from time to time on how close it resembles Super Sentai, sometimes for the better. A good example would be how Denji Sentai Megaranger was turned into Power Rangers in Space. Megaranger showed ships flying through space and in preparing for the next season, the production team ended Power Rangers Turbo with a change of scenery to space. What they discovered was that Megaranger was a virtual reality/ gadget based series, never an outer space setting. So they mixed and matched the Megaranger footage with original American scripts and footage. What was originally just another Super Sentai series became one of the most popular seasons of Power Rangers and Growing the Beard for the entire franchise.
 * Power Rangers RPM seems to be doing a similar thing -- taking the Lighter and Softer Engine Sentai Go-onger, about heroes fighting with sentient talking car/aircraft/train toys that can be transformed into giant talking cars/trains/aircraft and robots, and turning it into a series set After the End in a Crapsack World where, in the wake of an attack by a computer virus and the robot army it constructs, humanity only survives in a doomed domed city called Corinth, protected by a small but elite team of Rangers, and even those Rangers are in dire straits when the series begins, forced to recruit two new Rangers, one of which they're not sure if they can trust and the other of who is, at best, a bit shy of the skills necessary for the job.
 * A mix of this trope and Bowdlerisation can be found in Power Rangers SPD with its treatment of the annual criminals. In Dekaranger, it's Sentai brother, they were judged, found guilty, and then promptly Executed. Disney apparently considered showing the police explode perps in a massive fireball and posing over it wouldn't be a good idea, and filmed new footage of them being nonfatally arrested, ala Time Force.
 * In the French dub of The A-Team, B.A. Baracus becomes Barracuda.
 * The Italian dub renamed him P.E. Baracus, with P.E. being perfect for the lip-sync and standing for "Pessimo Elemento", more or less "Nasty Guy".
 * The Persuaders with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore is remembered much more fondly in Germany (where it was called Die Zwei (The Two)) because of the extremely creative dub that consisted almost entirely of crazy made-up 70s slang. Some of the phrases from the dub have become memes in Germany, for example the Gratuitous English One-Liner "Sleep well in your Bettgestell" ("Bettgestell" means "bed stead" but rhymes with "well"). Then there's "Hände hoch - ich bin Achselfetischist!" ("Hands up - I'm an armpit fetishist!").
 * The same translator gives us MASH. Even folks that normally see movies and serials in the original english like the german better.
 * Allo Allo got a Woolseyism in its very title in Sweden. Since it was a spoof of Secret Army (Hemliga Armén in Swedish), its Swedish title became 'Emliga Armén, which sounds like it's pronounced with a French accent while at the same time referencing the dialect word emliga, "lame".

Tabletop Games

 * Used in Magic: The Gathering on occasion. The Italian version of Volcanic Fallout is "Pioggia di Lapilli" ("Rain of Lapilli"), the Italian Tideforce Elemental is "Elementale della Marea Selvaggia" (approximately "Savage-Tide Elemental"), and the Italian Splinter Twin is "Gemellare" ("Twinning").
 * This can result in a pun which cannot easily be retranslated back to English. The card Lightmine Field was translated into Italian as Campo Illu-Minato - "illuminato" meaning "illuminated" and "minato" meaning "mined" in the sense of having explosives placed in it.
 * The Slivers - Hive Mind creatures, each of which grants abilities to all the others - are known in Italian as "Tramutanti", from the same root as English "transmute".
 * What may be the most amazing translated name, the Yu-Gi-Oh! card called "Mind Hack" in Japanese was astonishingly renamed Mind Haxorz in the English translation.
 * Other cards that had "death" in the name were translated as "Des," for cards such as "Des Koala" and "Des Frog." Initially just a Bowlderization. Then comes "D.3.S. Frog."

Theater

 * Brian Hooker's excellent translation of Cyrano De Bergerac. He substituted lines and allusions to Shakespeare and Marlowe which were appropriate to the classical French theatre quoted in the original text. This inspired Anthony Burgess to use the same approach in his own translation 50 years later.
 * The Metropolitan Opera adaptation of Die Fledermaus by Howard Dietz and Garson Kanin is usually not a literal translation but fairly close. Sometimes, however, they couldn't be bothered to do anything more literate than a Better Than a Bare Bulb spoof, as in the Irrelevant Act Opener which now ran, "It's the kind of libretto where we all are at a ball."
 * The English version of Les Misérables. "At the end of the day", for example, takes all the best from "Quand un jour est passé", gets rid of the less effective lines and most importantly is easier to sing. The original lyrics are impossibly hard to articulate clearly; the translation is more musical because of the added alliterations, etc.

Other

 * The name of Tel Aviv, Israel is a Woolseyism: the intent was to name the city after Theodore Herzl's book Altneuland (An Old-new Land), but this didn't translate well into Hebrew. Thus, to get the idea across, a combination of Tel, refering to an ancient archeological site and Aviv, spring (the season), which symbolizes renewal.
 * In fact, the name "Tel Aviv" came well before the city - it was the original name given to the book by its Hebrew translator.
 * Neopets does it with their own site sometimes, since some of the jokes, even when adapted, are still horrible as the original ones. But then, since Viacom expelled Adam and Donna from the team, it was just bound to happen.
 * As TV Tropes goes from language to language, tropes occasionally get names that are neither direct translations nor bland descriptions, such as the French versions of All Of The Other Reindeer or Bad Ass.
 * When Coca-Cola first came to the Chinese market in 1928, there was no official representation of the name in Mandarin, so several shopkeepers interpreted it in different ways. While the right sounds (ko-ka-ko-la) were used, the wrong characters were used, giving us interpretations as "Bite the Wax Tadpole" or "Bite the Wax-Fattened Mare". Eventually, an official translation of Coca-Cola was used, sounding fairly close to its name (ke kou ke le) with the added bonus of loosely meaning "Let your mouth rejoice".
 * Isaac Watts' psalm "translations" for use in the Anglican church. Until the mid-1800s, the Anglican church didn't allow singing of hymns, but metrical translations of the Book of Psalms and other scriptural references were considered sacred enough for use. To hear Watts tell the tale, King David made direct references both to his own far-distant descendant Jesus Christ (by name, no less), and to the British empire - an international power ruling large amounts of land mass which were completely unknown to the Hebrews in David's time, seated in a nation that had yet to be created. Some of Watts' translations are still in use - "Joy to the World" chief among them!
 * The G.I. Joe franchise was renamed Action Force for the European market, because the phrase "G.I. Joe" wouldn't have meant anything to the non-American audience.
 * The Jonathan Coulton song "Re: Your Brains" has a French version ("Re: Vos Cerveaux") which replaces the line "All we want to do is eat your brains! We're not unreasonable; I mean, no one's gonna eat your eyes!"" with "On veut juste vous bouffer le cerveau! Non, ce n'est pas si bête; ca va pas t'couter les yeux de la tête!" This translates roughly as "We just want to eat your brains! It's not so bad; it won't cost you the eyes from your head!" However, in French, "couter les yeux de la tête" is an idiomatic expression for something expensive, similar to saying something "costs an arm and a leg."
 * In some Fairy tales that feature a Wicked Witch that isn't always named, especially "Hansel and Gretel", sometimes the witch is Baba Yaga - as in, the Baba Yaga from Slavic mythologies; seeing as she is pretty much the slavic Wicked Witch.
 * When all of the Latin prayers and other parts of the Catholic mass were translated into various native languages after Vatican II, it was decided that more user friendly translations would be used instead of direct translations.
 * However, in 2011, extremely conservative Pope Benedict XVI, having thought the changes made in Vatican II were too radical declared that certain things (such as the Nicene Creed) be re-translated to be more faithful to the original, leading to a great deal of confusion as to what the word "consubstantial" meant and, in some cases, how to say it.