I remember being shocked when I watched Shrek for the first time in English - all the jokes were different than how I remembered it(I watched it in Polish for the first time)! But well, thinking about it, that makes perfect sense - English jokes translated literally into Polish wouldn't have been anywhere near as funny - so the translators took a bit of a creative liberty and changed them to work with Polish audiences, even inserting some Polish pop-culture references where appropriate. And yeah, I remember it being incredibly funny and in comparison the English version is just....different(not to mention all the voices are just....wrong lol).
It brings up an interesting question though - do we care about the outcome(the film being funny) or about being "correct". After all, Polish translation of Shakespeare doesn't change the meaning just to be more relatable to Poles. But then again, books like Harry Potter had plenty of changes to work in Polish(like the Sphinx's riddle being completely different in Polish just so it would make any sense - I would argue that one was kind of necessary though).
I remember as a kid seeing an representation of Shakespeare's Twelfth's night in French as a kid and the meaning was changed so that the jokes would work in French. Likewise, it was made to rhyme in French. I do believe that even in older works, it makes more sense to translate in a creative way. After all, those works were written to convey comedy or poetry and if a translation fails to convey that, then the translation failed.
Likewise, when Baudelaire translated Edgar Poe, the translation literal as it would have been a failure to convey the poetry of the text.
I've actually heard that french translations of shakespeare are "better" than the english originals, as they modernise it a bit, whereas the english version is left in an archaic form of english where a lot of the rhymes and puns no longer work
That's a good point. One could argue that Shakespeare's early modern English feels like a different dialect of English and as such would be better translated during representations...
Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot is a great read, and discusses these issues in depth. (Hofstadter is strongly on the side of creative rather than literal translations.)
It brings up an interesting question though - do we care about the outcome(the film being funny) or about being "correct". After all, Polish translation of Shakespeare doesn't change the meaning just to be more relatable to Poles. But then again, books like Harry Potter had plenty of changes to work in Polish(like the Sphinx's riddle being completely different in Polish just so it would make any sense - I would argue that one was kind of necessary though).