Remember when I reviewed Disney's Luca? It's an excellent example of how to screw up linguistic worldbuilding.
Well, I recently watched Castlevania: Nocturne on Netflix, and while it follows up on the first Castlevania series in not really trying to do anything particularly notable with language, there is one brief scene in episode 5 that completely breaks the setting for me.
Nocturne is set primarily in France, in the midst of the French revolution, with plenty of native French characters. We can thus assume that everybody is supposed to be speaking French, as there are no language barriers presented, and it would be ridiculous for all of the French people to be speaking anything else. This includes the main character Richter Belmont (a descendent of the Belmont vampire hunters we were introduced to in the earlier Castlevania series), who grew up in America and thus can be presumed to be a native speaker of English, but who, like everyone else, displays no difficulty in communicating with all the French people he now lives with.
Now, with all that background explained: at 10:45 in Episode 5, Richter Belmont says to a group of girls arranging costumes for the personifications of the revolutionary principles of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity", that, quote:
You have to be a man to be Fraternity. It means "brotherhood".
To which the reply is
"Sisternity", then.
Now, in English, that should be "sorority", if we want to parallel the derivation of "fraternity". But, I checked with some actual French people just to be sure, and my suspicions were confirmed: this is a conversation that just does not make sense in French, especially not in the historical sociological context in which it occurs. And it seems fairly obvious that the dialog was not originally written with French in mind; there are French audio and subtitle tracks available for the series now, but when I first watched it, the only options were English and Japanese. You can't even say "Fraternity means 'brotherhood'" in French, partially because a straightforward word-for-word translation comes out as the tautological "La fraternité signifie la fraternité." ("Brotherhood means brotherhood."), but also because... that's not actually what "fraternité" means. In fact, if you ask Google Translate how to say "sisterhood" in French, guess what it tells you? Fraternité! Not, incidentally, "sororité", which, while it is a valid French word, is a pretty darn rare one. "Fraternité" would be understood by everyone involved as a gender-inclusive term--besides which, "fraternité" is a grammatically feminine word in French anyway and the strictly female-coded Marianne is the artistic personification of the French Republic and all three virtues of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity!
I asked several French speakers and actual French people how they would express this conversation in French if they absolutely had to, and none of them would do it, because it just seemed stupid. Since we do now have access to a French dub and subtitles, however, let's see how they officially translated that scene:
- Seul un homme peut incarner la fraternité. Ça vient du mot "frère".
- La Petite-sœur-nité, alors.
"Only a man can incarnate fraternity. It comes from the word 'brother'."
"The little Sister-nity, then."
(French people, is that actually any better than the original English? Update: Non.)
As far as I can tell with my limited French competence, that's about the best you can do to render the intent of the original English is a way that doesn't come across as nonsenical in French, but it still turns out to be factually wrong. Women have portrayed Fraternity, and "Fraternité" does not come from the word "frère"--it comes from the Latin "frāter", which is also the origin of the word "frère", and does mean "brother"... but it also means "sibling", and the two words "fraternité" and "frère" developed independently from their common root (never forget, Etymology Isn't Destiny!)
There is really only one way to save this scene--assume that Richter is, in fact, not merely a non-native French speaker, but also an idiot, who is actually just wrong, and the women he is talking to are just humoring him because they don't feel like getting into an argument with an idiot. In that case, the use of the neologism "La Petite-sœur-nité" kinda makes sense, as it subtly highlights through non-parallelism with the Latinate "frater-" that "fraternity" does not in fact derive from "frère" just as the rarer-but-valid "sororité" does not derive from "sœur" (sister).
But if we are generous and assume that that was in fact the intended interpretation... the writers did not do the work to properly set that up or make it obvious to the audience. Don't be like them. More precisely: don't try to do clever things that exploit etymologies and translation-equivalents of English words to imply things about some other language and culture. Even if you are using a pure-English translation convention, you've got to look into the culture that you are portraying-in-translation enough to know how their language and values will influence how they would talk about things. Sometimes you can get away with, say, using English puns and just assuming that the implied translator did a really good job of replacing an equivalent pun in the diegetic language, but when the entire content of the conversation is just dumb in the cultural context in which you have set your story... that doesn't fly.
Update: Someone asked how this is handled in Spanish, and it turns out... it's even worse:
- Debes ser hombre para ser Fraternidad. Significa hermandad.
- ¿Y eso qué tiene que ver?
See, "hermandad" is explicitly gender-neutral in Spanish, where the words for "brother" and "sister" share the same stem "herman-". Which makes Richter's statement so completely bizarre that the "sisternity" comment would itself be nonsensical--and so it is replaced with "What does that have to do with anything?" Which is honestly kind of an improvement, as it makes it seem like the characters are acknowledging that Richter is being an idiot, rather than us audience members having to infer it.
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