• AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
    10·
    5 hours ago

    It really bugs me whenever I see a US film that has been dubbed into Canadian or Australian English and the characters say things like “you’ll be back on your metres in no time”

    • frog@feddit.uk
      482·
      17 hours ago

      Thank you for this. I am such redneck I need subtitles for british shows. I can’t fucking understand them a lot of times.

      This probably helps with users where English isn’t their first language.

      • spicy pancake@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        11 hours ago

        Derry Girls is one of my favorite shows of all time but feck me I can’t understand shite without the subtitles

        (am northeastern US yank)

      • Demdaru@lemmy.world
        41·
        12 hours ago

        English ain’t my first language. Was taught british in school.

        …prefer american english. More similiar to my native lang xD

      • wieson@feddit.org
        6·
        15 hours ago

        Now this is just a feeling, not a fact.

        When I watch British talk shows, I have way less of a problem understanding i. e. Scottish accents than the American guests.
        I think, foreign language learners of English might be better at understanding different accents, because they’re not locked into one. Or maybe I’m a special little boy idk

      • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
        3·
        15 hours ago

        My wife and I will find shows but not really read anything about them, and we put them on and sometimes we’re like, shit, they’re from England or Scotland, and we have to use subtitles. We just know that, in the past, we’ve tried to chug along and just lost details.

        The complete opposite was true of the show dark, obviously in German (if my poor memory serves), but we couldn’t keep track of the story and for probably the only time ever had to switch to dubs, which I am loathe to do, but we were completely lost in the sauce.

  • brsrklf@jlai.lu
    69·
    9 hours ago

    Long ago, I watched a youtube video of a girl singing a song from an anime that I’m assuming she’d translated herself in French. A bit bold because she didn’t speak French. It was a nice try, but overall quite funny.

    The part that really got me was a line about “a beautiful blooming spring” that she translated as “un beau ressort qui fleurit”.

    “Ressort” is the mecanical part that goes “boing”. The season is “printemps”.

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      There’s a YouTube channel whose entire schtick is that they take songs, translate them to one language, translate them to another, translate them back to the original, etc. then sing the resultant output.

      I have my doubts about the honesty behind it, but the results are often entertaining.

    • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
      44·
      19 hours ago

      This reminds me of a translation I saw for a spring themed song. Not the mechanical spring, the flowering one.

      Japanese has three writing systems 漢字 which are essentially Chinese characters, the traditional kind rather than the simplified ones, ひらがな and カタカナ. They each complement one another and offer context, but sometimes you can also use different sets as a stylistic choice, which can deviate from general practise.

      So there is this one line in the song

      人ゴミを掻き分けては

      Typically you’d write that first word with hiragana, 人ごみ, meaning crowd. ゴミ is a different word meaning rubbish, garbage, trash, litter, etc.

      Whoever translated the song must’ve been decently new to the language, and did a valiant attempt, but they separated words out too much, and read 人ゴミ as two words, and 掻き分け again as two words.

      • 人 person/people
      • ゴミ garbage
      • 掻き arm stroke (like in swimming)
      • 分 part/portion

      And thus translated it to something like “the people rummaged through the trash.”

      • 人ごみ crowd
      • 掻き分ける push aside/push through

      So the actual meaning was roughly “I made my way through the crowd”

    • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      17 hours ago

      There was a story going around some time ago of someone who got a tattoo in Hebrew writing and asked for the word “butterfly” (🦋) but it instead read “butter fly” (🧈 🪰).

      • brsrklf@jlai.lu
        2·
        15 hours ago

        I can’t check the link directly, that store’s site might be geolocked for some reason… But yeah, good one.

        • VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca
          2·
          15 hours ago

          I found them in a MAXI store close to me. I had to buy one to try, it was not too bad but I don’t trust a company that can’t even translate properly for my food.

      • brsrklf@jlai.lu
        1·
        15 hours ago

        Not sure, but I don’t think so… I think it might have been the opening from Ouran Host Club. IIRC that’s what my sister was watching back then, and she showed me that video.

        There’s a line about beautiful spring in there, maybe it’s not a perfect fit but obviously the person doing that started from an English translation, and there might have been some creative liberty here and there.

  • dwt@feddit.orgDeutsch
    18·
    19 hours ago

    Took me some time to figure this out as a non native speaker:

    • lift, easy
    • flat, that took a while
    • Chipped, didn’t even know that idiom…
    • Lumidaub@feddit.orgEnglish
      14·
      18 hours ago

      Long potato sticks are called chips in the UK and freedomnch fries in the US :)

      US chips are UK crisps, btw.

    • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de
      4·
      17 hours ago

      Yes, the first two are obvious, but I didn’t get the last one.

      Mainly because “to french fry” isn’t an actual verb, afaik.

      Alternative could have been “has an RFID transponder implanted”.

      • EvilHankVenture@lemmy.world
        5·
        14 hours ago

        “French fried potatoes” is an archaic term but not unheard of. I know of it mostly from the song “Cheeseburger in Paradise”. It can be used to give a country or homemade feel to French fries.

        • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de
          2·
          14 hours ago

          I had to look up the existence of the song and its lyrics to make sure your post wasn’t the Al hallucination that it at first sounded like to me. 😆

          Interesting trivia!