How does one go about translating a show that's so based in English accents? Do translators opt for the basic equivalents of the accents from whatever language they're translating to, or do they instead have the characters perfecting a upper-class English accent in whatever language they're translating to? The latter seems like an exercise in pure redundancy, and the former seems to lose something of the point of the story...

What's your experience, you excellent people who have access to and understand foreign-language productions? This question has been bugging me for the longest time, and I haven't the multilingual talents to compare for myself...

In the very famous Norwegian trandation, André Bjerke went for using the equivalents of the class distinction marks in Norway, with accent from east and west in Oslo. I don't undertstand how it should lose anything of the pont of the story, which is how class distinctions are reflected in language?

That sounds great. This must be such a difficult piece to convey effectively in another language.

Maybe it's not the story, but the air of the thing. Culturally, there's just something so British about My Fair Lady, and the language above all seems to dominate the piece. Maybe that's just my bias, as a bit of an anglophile and Bernard Shaw-whore, though.

How did they do 'The Rain In Spain' in Bjerke's translation? A tongue-twister familiar to Norwegian audiences, or a translation of what was already there?

The rain in Spain is translated as "Det gol og mol i solen en spanjol" ("In the sun a Spaniard purred and crowed"), where the "l"s are pronounced different depending on one's social status. A high class Norwegian would pronounce the "l"s thin and one of the lower class would pronounce them thick. I don't think they have parallell sounds in English, but the languag/class effect is the same. It is a tongue twister, but I think it was constructed specially for the show.

I think that Norwegian productions usually present MFL as if the characters are English, talking Norwegian.

I wish I had more knowledges of other languages that aren't English or French, so I could appreciate the nuances of these other productions fully. The way you explain it makes a lot of sense.