"ET phone home" was difficult to translate to Spanish, yet it worked

The 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was an enormous hit in the 1980's, and is one of the classic movies that defined the decade. In retrospect, it's pretty astonishing how immensely popular some movies, like Star Wars and E.T. got in the pre-internet era. It was just everywhere.

The most iconic line in the movie, something that is probably the only line that most people even remember, is the famous: "ET phone home" (while pointing towards the sky, of course.)

The movie was also immensely popular in Spain back then. Curiously, that line happens to be unusually difficult to translate properly to Spanish, and I'm sure the translator struggled quite a bit with it.

You see, "phone" is both a noun and a verb, and in this case the duality of meaning is completely intentional and taken advantage of by the script writer. As a noun it means the physical device, and as a verb it means "call (by phone)". In the context of the movie the duality works perfectly because it is pretty much used to mean both at the same time. It's almost like word play.

And as with most word play, it can be incredibly difficult to translate to other languages.

The Spanish translators had a decision to make: Translate is as the noun "phone" ("teléfono"), or translate it as the verb "phone", which essentially means "call" ("llamar"). Because in the context of the movie the word was being used as a sort of word play meaning both, it was not a clear choice to make.

There is also the slight extra difficulty in that verbs in Spanish are highly inflected. "Llamar" is just the basic form, when referring to the act itself. If you want to say "I call home" you don't use "llamar", but instead "llamo"... if you are using the present tense. Future tense, past tense, imperative, all use different inflections. If you just use the basic form "llamar" you sound like someone who doesn't know how to speak Spanish and are looking up the word in a dictionary (which, incidentally, might have actually worked here because ET didn't speak English almost at all in the movie in the first place.)

Regardless, I personally believe that "llamar" would have been the better translation for "phone", ignoring its dual meaning. It would have been essentially "ET call home", which I think would have worked (even if using the basic form of the verb.)

Yet, for some reason, however, the translators decided to go with the noun instead, ie. "telephone", ie. "teléfono" in Spanish. I'm not exactly sure why, but I suppose back in 1982 translators weren't so meticulous with their translations and might have been doing a bit of a sloppy job. Maybe they just lazily thought "phone means a telephone, so just translate it as such."

So you have to imagine ET saying "ET telephone home", with "telephone" not being a verb in any way, just a pure noun referring to the physical device. It kind of still works, but still...

But that's not all. Turns out that "ET phone home" is doubly difficult because of that last word, ie. "home".

Spanish has two expressions that mean "home" that are in common use: "Mi casa" (which literally translates to "my house") and "hogar".

The thing is that neither one is really a good translation for "home" in this case.

Both refer explicitly to the domicile where you live, nothing else. Both lack completely the alternative broader meanings of "home", which could mean eg. "home city", "home country" or, in this case, even "home world." And, in fact, technically speaking ET in the movie wasn't even intending to call his home world, but his spaceship, with the other aliens, who in this case represented his world, his home.

There isn't really a word in Spanish that has that meaning.

So if the translation for "phone" was a hard choice to make, "home" was significantly harder. At least for "phone" there are words for both meanings, but for "home" (in this context) there really aren't. In a way, there actually are no words for any of the possible meanings of "home", preserving the exact same tone.

So how did they end up translating it? Once again, they went the lazy route and just used "mi casa". Which doesn't really fit at all.

So, indeed, in Spanish it was: "ET, mi casa, teléfono." Which literally translates to: "ET, my house, telephone" (with "telephone" being purely a noun that refers to the device.)

It is quite an irksome lazy translation because quite literally and explicitly ET was not calling his "house". He wanted to call his people in his space ship. Nothing even remotely related to his "house".

Yet, that's exactly how it was translated: "ET, my house, telephone." While referring to his people.

The translation is jarring. Yet, miraculously, it worked. "ET, mi casa, teléfono" became an incomprehensible hit, even a meme (long before even the concept of "meme" was coined.)

And the thing is, I don't think most people were using it in a mocking way, ie. laughing at it, at how bad the translation was. The vast, vast majority of Spaniards had absolutely no idea what the original English version was (all movies are dubbed in Spain), nor did they have any idea of how bad the translation was.

I suppose people were a bit more naive and innocent back in 1982 than they are today.

 

By the way, if I were tasked to translate it to Spanish, I would probably translate it as "ET call family", in other words, "ET llamar familia". It might not be exactly as fluent and have the exact same tone as "ET phone home", but it would be a hundred times less awkward than "ET, my house, telephone".

Other possibilities would be "ET call friends" and "ET call my people", but neither of those sound very good in Spanish. Although the former, ie. "ET llamar amigos", might have worked acceptably, it just somehow doesn't carry that same tone. It might be a bit ambiguous about who these "friends" are. I think "family" (even though the other aliens might not have been his literal family) would have worked better in this regard. And "ET call my people" just doesn't work well in Spanish, in this context, in my opinion.