20 Things You Didn't Know About The Shining
6. What Jack Wrote Changes From Country To Country
The most famous line out of this entire movie is what Wendy finds written 500 times in a row on Jack's typewriter: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
However, if you live in a different, non-English speaking country, you probably recognize the line as something quite a bit different.
In Germany, for example, the text instead reads "Don't put off tomorrow what you can do today". In Spanish it reads "Although one will rise early, it won't dawn sooner". And in Italian, it says "He who wakes up early meets a golden day".
What's that? That gives no more insight as to what Jack is trying to say here than the English version? Did you really expect anything less from Kubrick?
While not making any more or less sense than what we English speakers got, all of these other versions still imbue the scene with the right amount of dread that the scene required. One has to wonder, though: if Kubrick DID write all 500 of the English text, did he do the same for the other languages?