A little bit in the Irish dub of Adventure Time that I liked

TG4 (Teilifís na Gaeilge Ceathair) is an Irish-language public broadcast television channel that has original programming as well as producing Irish dubs of mostly children’s films and cartoons. Unfortunately most of the dubs they’ve done have never had a physical media release and were only available for streaming on their website for a short period of time after broadcast, if at all. Many of them are not archived anywhere (except hopefully somewhere in TG4’s own offices) and the ones that people have archived can be very difficult to find online. The internet, sadly, does not preserve everything.

One thing I do have an archive of myself is Am Aachtraíochta, TG4’s dub of Adventure Time, thought I believe they only ever covered the first four series and even within that some episodes are missing. Learning and practising Irish is not something I have successfully made time for with a long time, and honestly much of the show in Irish is beyond my ability to understand or keep up with, but there is one little moment in the dub I really appreciated that I want to talk about. It demonstrates and uses a feature of the Irish language in a way that I really like.

Towards the end of Memory of a Memory there’s a brief exchange where, after Marceline learns that her boyfriend Ash had been altering her memories, Finn asks “Are you going to be okay, Marceline?” She responds with a quick “Yeah,” before quickly moving on to say thanks and then being interrupted by Ash returning.

This seems like it should be a straightforward thing to translate, but Irish actually does not have native words for yes or no¹. Instead, the standard way of repeating affirmatively or negatively is to repeat the verb that was used in the question that was asked without the subject or object².

Ar léigh tú an leabhar?

Léigh.

An gcaitheann sí buataisí?

Ní chaitheann.

Still, it doesn’t make for a difficult translation. There’s a straightforward way for Marceline to respond in the affirmative (it would make it quite difficult to communicate in the language if one couldn’t), but the translators chose to reword things slightly in a way that I like.

An bhfuil tú ceart go lear, Marceline?

Beidh.

In the Irish version, Cuimhne ar Chuimhne, Finn asks Marceline the question in the present tense: “Are you okay?”, but her response, «beidh»³, is the future tense. Sighed out in a single syllable Marceline has said “I’m not okay right now, but I will be.” It’s a small change that adds a bit of depth to the conversation and shows the differences in experience and perspective between the two characters. Finn is concerned with how she is right now but Marceline, for being a bit immature, is a thousand years old and has been through heartbreak and betrayal before. She knows herself and knows that she can recover, even if things are difficult right now.

I am perhaps overstating things; this is not revelatory storytelling. But it just struck me as a neat piece of writing where the translators saw they could add another layer to the dialogue while still sticking to the original rhythm and tone. That the word «beidh» fits so neatly in and can be said as casually an noncommittally as the original “yeah”, but can convey a bit more if the sentence before it is adjusted slightly.