User:RM395/Course/Manypedia/Sherlock

I chose to compare the English and Korean Wikipedia pages for Sherlock, the British TV series, because of a video someone showed me. The video was a translation of a Korean trailer that advertised the show in Korea (obviously). It was hilarious because the preview seemed to assume that the show was really just a romantic drama about Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in a gay relationship. It's funny because although the show does often center around the relationship between the two characters, and also makes a lot of jokes in referencing to their close but technically non-romantic relationship, it's still a show about Sherlock Holmes solving mysteries and whatnot. I was curious to see if the Korean Wikipedia page for the show would make this mistranslation, but they were pretty much on point.

The English version was definitely a much longer page, but it's not to say the Korean page wasn't filled out. Both pages gave detailed synopsis of the show, and describe the characters and casting in detail. It surprised me just how thorough the Korean version was despite being shorter, still covering the shooting schedule and progress, though their episode/season summaries are significantly shorter. The English version simply has additional sections for ratings, awards, and other related materials including merchandise, and generally longer paragraphs. However, overall I found both pages to be similarly competent in what they achieve in informing interested readers about the show. It's nice to know that although a lot of entertainment media doesn't translate well between different cultures with different languages, at least in this case Wikipedia remains fully informative.

--Seannator (talk) 05:55, 25 March 2013 (UTC)