The Turkish translation of the James Blish novelization of The Menagerie replaces Pike and his crew with Kirk's crew. Uhura and Rand take the places of Number One and Colt, while Jose Tyler becomes "Jose Sulu".
That actually kinda makes sense. I mean, Kirk, McCoy, and Rand were basically just Pike, Boyce, and Colt with their names changed, differentiated only by the actors' performance, and Tyler was such a non-entity that he wasn't even named in dialogue and could easily have been substituted with Sulu. So if it's just words on a page, if the target audience isn't necessarily familiar with the actual show, it makes sense to conform that odd one out to fit the regular cast. Number One to Uhura is the only replacement that isn't one-to-one.
I heard that the Japanese dub of TOS changed Sulu to Kato and changed Scotty to Charlie, but I don't know if this was carried over to the books.
Because Sulu is not a Japanese name, of course. Sulu wasn't intended to be any specific Asian ethnicity -- Roddenberry apparently considered it a "pan-Asian" name because he erroneously believed the Sulu Sea abutted multiple Asian countries instead of just two -- but the Japanese dubbers probably wanted to establish Sulu as clearly Japanese so their audience could have an identification figure.
As a kid, the German intro to TNG always confused me, because it says "The Enterprise advances into galaxies nobody has seen before." - The Enterprise-D leaves the Milky Way only once.
Americans do the same -- you constantly hear "intergalactic" used in reference to stories that take place within our own galaxy, or even within our Solar system. I once saw a TV listing describing
Total Recall, which takes place on Earth and Mars, as a tale of "intergalactic intrigue," which is tantamount to moving into the adjacent room in your home and calling it international travel.
The German intro to TOS establishes "We are writing the Year 2200", setting the show 60 years earlier.
TOS was not unambiguously established as taking place in the 2260s until at least 1988 when TNG established its own calendar year as 2364, allowing backward extrapolation. Prior to that, it was one of two competing theories in fandom and tie-in fiction, the other being the
Spaceflight Chronology model that put TOS in the first decade of the 2200s, to reconcile the movies' references to the 23rd century with "Space Seed"'s reference to being about 200 years after the 1990s. (I was an adherent to the SFC model myself, so as soon as TNG: "The Neutral Zone" mentioned the date, I groaned at the realization that I'd have to rework my entire pencil-and-paper chronology.)
Something I prefer from the German translation over the Anglo original: the "d" in Picard is silent in the German dub, so its pronounced p'KAAR instead of Pikkard.
Isn't that accurate to how it should be pronounced in French?
