I have watched this movie on Vietnam Central Television (VTV1, "The Little Flowers" program) since I was very young, of course only on black-white TV. This is a very challenging movie about translation. Here is the film story (фильм-сказка) : http://www.barius.ru/biblioteka/book/852

Nice book! Thanks for that link.

Yes, I found it hard to translate as well. But if you're trying to do it, I think you should use the latest English subtitles that are here, rather than the older ones elsewhere online (a lot of which have mistakes).

By the way, regarding the names of the characters:
(Professor) Selezniov = slug
(Captain) Zelyony = green
Gromozeka = the root is "grom" (thunder), probably because of how boisterous he is
Veselchak = happy person (he's often smiling and eager to please in the film)
(Professor) Verhovtsev = higher
Ptitsa Govorun = talkative bird (I was fortunate that English already has the word "chatterbox", which I could easily modify into "chatterbird")
Glot = possibly from "glotka" (throat)

Most of these I kept as is, but I did translate "Green" because that's a common English surname too.

In my opinion, that is fine to leave most of it as is, just footnotes. However, fortunately characters "Veselchak U" and "chatterbird" have equivalent words in classical Vietnamese language : Tễu (笑 / "laugh" ; who has a cute body and funny personality), Liến Thoắng (連通 / "continuous communication").

https://tve-4u.org/threads/alisa-phieu-luu-ki-kir-bulychyov.36569/

This film apparently also had a german dub made, according to this: (https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/taina-tretej-planetu/) But this dub, which was made by DEFA, is currently lost

>>4
>But this dub, which was made by DEFA, is currently lost
Interesting. It wasn't even that long ago. I bet it'll be found one day when there is the will to find it. Just like those early Ukrainian animations from the 1930s (1, 2) that had long been thought lost in WW2 were suddenly discovered by DEFA in their archives in the last few years...

>>5
Good news: I finally found the original german dub for Mystery of the Third Planet! It was posted rather recently at the beginning of april on Youtube. Found it only by chance, when I was curious and tried finding german dubs of soviet cartoons, since germany was once occupied by the soviets for a long time and DEFA, the studio, which was founded in the soviet occupation zone in germany, was responsible for distributing many soviet films there. Also being able to speak not only russian, but also german, like I do, also played a part :).

Here's the link to the dub: link

The dub is pretty well done, competently made and not bad at all, voice actors are also doing a good job, though I would still rather watch this film in it's original language, simply by habit alone :).

Nevertheless it's a very cool curiosity for sure and though a few the attempts at translating the russian into german are clunky, it still has some charme to it and at least it is in my opinion better made than the german dub for ''The Little Humpbacked Horse''(1975). Also it's still bizarre to me seing something you grew up watching in your native language, only to discover it has a dub made for it in a foreign language you know, but only recently found out about it..

I will try and find other german dubs of other animated films on here and post the links to them in the comments under the respective films, simply out of curiosity and for the others, who might want to find out, how the films were translated into german and which changes they made to the dialogue, which I must imagine must be a real pain in the butt, because of the difficulty during the translation (since russian to german very untranslateable), though I'm sure that's not a new problem in dubbing.

>>6
Good news indeed! If it is actually well done it might make sense to add the video link. I haven't added the English dubs because they are not well done.

It would be great if somebody could transcribe the German translation and match it to the Russian version of the film, though I realize it would be a big job.