Amelie Poulain - Translation Differences

Translation Differences

In the English subtitled version, the concierge, Madeleine Wallace, is renamed Madeleine Wells in order to maintain a joke in the screenplay: in the original French, she mentions that she is destined to cry because her name is Madeleine, and goes on to refer to the French expression "pleurer comme une Madeleine" (a reference to the tears cried by Mary Magdalen). Her surname, Wallace, is compared with the Wallace fountains of Paris, continuing the crying theme. The English version retains the mention of Mary Magdalen but alters the joke with the surname, as the phrase "to well up" means to cry. In the English subtitled version, the concierge, Madeleine Wallace, remarks that her husband ran off to Panama. However, in the original French version, her husband runs off to the Pampas.

In the Region 1 English subtitled DVD when Amélie orders Nino to look at 'page 51' of his scrapbook, the subtitle erroneously reads 'Page St.', likely due to the OCR process for conversion. This mistake does not appear on U.S. television sets programmed to display closed captioning.

In the Region 1 English subtitles, Amélie says "But I hate it in old movies, when drivers don't watch the road"; but the French dialogue in fact means "But I hate it in old American films when the drivers don't watch the road." This distinction, however, remains in the Region 2 English subtitling.

At the end of the film, the narrator explains "...in Villette Park, Félix Lerbier learns there are more links in his brain than atoms in the universe," while in the French there is the word "possible" links in the brain. The idea of 'possible' links is important not only for the scientific truth of the statement, but also for the underlying philosophy of the movie; that is, Amélie's fabulous destiny and that of the people she influences in the film is not predetermined but consists of a set of possibilities that are finally subject to her will.