Greetings, Fellow Linguists,
I've always admired my friends who can speak multiple
languages. There is always something fascinating about listening
to someone shift between languages with radically different
structure, like English and Chinese, say, and still realize that
you recognize all the distinctive properties that make your
friend's voice unique. It makes me wish I also spoke another
language fluently... I don't, of course. I'm still working on
my English.
Humor is by far the toughest thing to translate or
understand in another language, with the context of most jokes
disappearing when shoved from one language to another. Along
these lines, I was reminded recently of one of one of NBC's six-
week disaster shows of the early 1980's, back when humiliating
flops seemed to be an NBC specialty. This one had two young
singers and a comic in a variety show format, and was called
"Pink Lady & Jeff."
The reason I bring this up is that the two young ladies who
sang under the name "Pink Lady," Mei and Kei, were popular
singers from Japan, who had a string of hits in Japan but were
almost unknown here in the States. That was before their
variety show ran here, of course. After the show, they were
completely unknown.
The record company thought they could be the next big thing,
and convinced the desperate NBC to give them a show. There was
only one minor problem: between them, Mei and Kei spoke about
eleven words of English. Realizing - dimly - that "Hello,
Goodbye, Thank You, Yes, No, Please" and "Where is the toilet?"
were not going to be enough to carry even a half-hour show, the
NBC brass provided the girls with a host to "banter" with, in the
person of comic Jeff Altman. It was obvious from the first
moment that the young ladies hadn't the slightest idea what they
were saying or what anyone was saying to them. They would just
read the lines off the cue cards phonetically, like a non-French
speaker loudly reading the menu in a French restaurant. Mei and
Kei would recite a "joke" and then stand there vaguely like a
pair of deer in the headlights. It was a weird and painful thing
to watch. If ever there was a TV Show that needed a simultaneous
translator, that was it. Mercifully, the show was canned in just
six weeks.
Among the folks that we understand are our friends and
contributors, who between them can manage a few dozen languages.
Sticking with English for now, there are a number of people we
need to thank for this week's contributions: Rosana & Stanley
Leung, Jerry Taff, Dennis & Fumiko David, Carol J. Becwar,
Caterina Sukup, Jan Michalski, Susan Will, Charles Beckman, R.J.
Tully, Chuick Maray, Tim McChain, Howard Lesniak, Bruce Gonzo,
Bob Martens, Brian Siegl and Kerry Miller. Thanks to all and
hope that, whatever language you call your own, you will...
Have A Great Week,
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
I HEARD IT IN THE MOVIES...
------------------------
In he early days of the movies, language wasn't a problem:
movies were silent and all you had to do was change the openings
and print up a few new title cards to make the film
understandable from East LA to Outer Mongolia. All that changed
when talkies came in. No one knew quite what to do about this,
and, in the first few years of the 1930's, some movie comedies
were filmed with the stars reciting their parts separately in as
many as six languages. Naturally, getting it right the first
time was hard. Making the same scene a half dozen times over was
nearly impossible.
The invention of dubbing was a great step forward, not that
it provided the whole answer. One memorable Hong Kong "chop-
sockey" movie I saw was dubbed so weirdly that I've always
remembered it. It's common that the mouth movements don't match
the voices, of course, but in this case the producers had hired
whatever English speakers they could find cheap. So this group
of friends from a small village in China each spoke in a
distinctively different English dialect, a weird mix of American,
Canadian, Cockney, Scottish, Australian and South African
accents. The producers had apparently hired the first dozen
folks who showed up, regardless of their original sounding
dialects.
Nowadays, virtually all movies are dubbed, with varying
degrees of efficiency. The process is so well-accepted that we
hardly give it a second thought... And neither do people in
other countries when they hear American movies. It has been a
long-standing practice that the same voice person dubs the same
actor, so folks in other countries are used to hearing completely
different voices than the ones we are used to.
This leads to some strange problems. Being that movie
producers are economical (i.e. cheap), one voice actor will often
do several star's voices. In Italy, a guy named Emilio Cigoli
did both John Wayne and Clark Gable, so you may actually have to
turn around and look at the screen to find out if you're watching
"Stagecoach" or "Gone With the Wind." And in Spain, Bruce
Willis, Kevin Costner, and Willem Dafoe are all dubbed by the
same guy. Another guy does both Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro,
which must have made the movie they did together in 1995, "Heat"
sound pretty odd to Spanish audiences. Kind of like one New
Yorker mumbling to himself, I suppose.
A dubbing voice can get to be so well known that local
audiences are disappointed when they hear the actor's real pipes.
For Italians, it's a real let-down to hear Marlon Brando speak
for himself, because the guy who voices all his movies there has
such fabulous pipes that the slightly raspy and mumbly real thing
just can't compare.
There are also silly problems that happen within a dubbed
movie, particularly when the language the movie is being shown in
is heard on the soundtrack. In the movie "Dance with Me" (1998),
recently arrived Cuban Chayanne has to explain to co-star Vanessa
L. Williams the meaning of song lyrics they hear while listening
to a Spanish station on the radio. This plays fine on the
English version, but is fairly stupid when everyone in the movie
is already speaking in fluent (dubbed) Spanish.
Local working practices can also lead to some dubbing
peculiarities. In Italy, it is customary for entire movies to be
dubbed, rather than recording the sound as the actors speak.
This is even done in Italian language films, which means that if
you hear Sophia Loren speaking in Italian in one of her early
films, you aren't hearing the real thing at all, it is actually
another actress doing the voice while La Loren emotes.
Dubbing can sometimes be so well done that it even improves
on the original. Greta Garbo, upon hearing herself in Italian
for the first time, sat down and wrote a fan-letter to her
Italian voice, owned by actress Tina Latenzi.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
JUST ONE VOICE...
--------------
Probably the only voice performer to ever escape completely
from dubbing was Clarence "Ducky" Nash, the voice of Disney's
Donald Duck. Because no one else could manage to get the
difficult duck sound just right, Clarence himself had to do the
movie in every language the film was released in, learning to
quack in German, Italian, Spanish, French and even Japanese.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
IN DUTCH WITH THE DEUTSCHE...
-------------------------
What's with the Germans, anyway? Though their language is a
first cousin of English, and many things will translate word for
word, the Germans seem to have some compulsive need to re-title
movies. The recent "Bridget Jones' Diary", which would work fine
in German in the local version of the same words, mutates to the
weird "A Bar of Chocolate For Breakfast." This is not the only
example... Check out the odd German titles for some well-known
movies:
Title German Tile (in English)
-------------------------------------------------
Annie Hall The Urban Neurotic
Dragnet Yellow Cops Don't Bite
The Juror Not Guilty
The Quick and Quicker than Death
the Dead
The Truth about Lies Have Long Legs
Cats and Dogs
Airplane The Unbelievable Journey
in a Crazy Airplane
Butch Cassidy and Two Bandits
the Sundance Kid
"Crocodile" Dundee Crocodile Dundee --
A Crocodile to Kiss
Die Hard Die Slowly
Going Berserk Into the Trees, You Apes
K-9 My Partner with the Cold Snout
Lean on Me The Tough Principal
Lethal Weapon Two Steel-Hard Profis
Lethal Weapon II The Profis are Back
National Lampoon's Help, The Americans are Coming
European Vacation
The Princess Bride The Prince's Bride
Ruthless People The Unbelievable Kidnapping of
the Crazy Mrs. Leary
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
THE FROG PRINCE OF GOOFY TRANSLATIONS...
-------------------------------------
It seems to follow that the cheaper the product, the worse
the translation. So it's no surprise that those cheap little
novelty toys have the worst translations of all. You can't
expect much from a toy from Taiwan that sold for a whole $1.69
each, right? Chance are, they hired someone's kid who was taking
English in high school - and getting C's - to do the translation.
So, without further ado, here is the legendary, semi-English text
of:
TOUNGE OF FROG.
Frog. If it is thrown with full of your strenght, it will
spit out the tounge, which is like the genuine one from the
frog.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR TOUNGE OF FROG
* A product has the stickness and is just like a soft
rubber band with high contractility. It can be played
to stick the remote objects.
* Inspite of it is sticky, it is never like the chewing
guns which is glued tightly and cannot be separated.
* If the stickness is not good enough, it can be washed
by soap. After it is dried, it cab be used continously
many times.
* The packing paper has printed the bug picture, which
can be cut as per the black frame and placed on the
table; then you can stick the picture with your tounge
of frog.
The key point for throwing far away is the same as the
throwing of fish rod, i.e. to throw out slowly with
full of your strength. Separate it with two hands,
then release one hand, throw it with full of your
strength. No matter what you make a round ball, it
will recover the original shape.
CAUTIONS:
* Never throw out the other person's head.
* Keep away fire.
* Inspite of it is non-toxic, it cannot be eaten.
* Never pull out tounge of frog hard, as it might be
separated.
* Its content has the oil, so if it touches on cloth,
precious object or wall, the stains will remain if you
don't care about it.
* Never put on surface of any object, shall keep in
polybag.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
DOES ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?
------------------------------
OK, so it's no surprise. A recent study by the European
Union concluded that the worst linguists in Europe are our
English speaking cousins, the British.
Almost two-thirds of Britons know no language apart from the
Queen's English, the highest figure recorded in the 15 EU
countries in the European Commission's "Eurobarometer" survey.
That compares to just 2.2 percent in top-translating
Luxembourg, 12.3 percent of Danes and an EU average of 47.3
percent of people who speak no other language but their own, the
poll of 16,000 EU citizens said.
But British travelers to Europe need not worry.
English is far and away the most common second language in
the EU, spoken by 41 percent of people in Western Europe. In
Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, at least 78 percent of
people speak English as a second language. (Reuters)
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
YOUR WRONG WAY GUIDE...
--------------------
Singapore officials were recently embarrassed to discover
they had invented a new festival - at least in their guidebooks.
Instead of the well-known Chinese summer tradition known as the
"Hungry Ghosts Festival," the guidebooks called it the "Hungarian
Ghost Festival." In addition, Chinese New Year was called China
New Year, and the name of Singapore's most famous street,
shopper's paradise Orchard Road, was also translated incorrectly.
The mistakes appear in a number of guidebooks produced by a
Shanghai agency in 2000 and 2001.
The head of the translation standardization committee for
the local Chinese media, Goh Choon Kang, said the problem arose
because officials involved were "ignorant of the fact that a
professional is needed for a good translation." (AFP)
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
WHEN LACK OF TRANSLATION IS GOOD...
--------------------------------
Well before 9-11, a Yemeni hijacker, claiming to be a
supporter of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, tried to take over a
flight from Yemen's capital Sanaa to the southern city of Taiz.
Quickly realizing that the hijacker, who was armed with a
miniature pistol, could not speak English, Pilot Amer Anis began
giving the copilot and flight engineer instructions in English on
looking after the passengers as soon as he realized the hijacker
in the cockpit, did not understand what was being said.
The man was also unaware that the Yemen Airways flight that
he commandeered was carrying U.S. ambassador to Sanaa, Barbara
Bodine, and four of her aides.
The pilot told his crew in English that as soon as they
landed at Djibouti airport they should open the emergency doors
and evacuate the 91 passengers. Passengers moved quickly to the
rear of the Boeing 727 and jumped, one by one, out of the plane
before the hijacker knew what had happened.
The hijacker, a Yemeni in his 40s, started screaming when he
saw the empty plane, waving a miniature pistol that looked like a
long pen. One crew member fired foam from a fire extinguisher
into the hijacker's face in an attempt to blind him while another
wrestled him down. (Reuters)
[ Local authorities said that the man would
likely have plenty of time to perfect his
English now - at least 25 years, or so. ]
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
ANOTHER INSECURITY ALERT...
------------------------
Police in Chemnitz, Germany, scrambled into action after a
retiree reported receiving a mysterious package from the United
States marked "poison."
Experts in chemical and biological hazards were called to
the scene because of current fears of terrorist attacks,
officials said. The alert was called off when it dawned on one
officer that the word on the package was in English, and the box
was opened to reveal only a poster. The German word for poison
is "gift." (Reuters)
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
© 2002 by Bill Becwar. All Rights Reserved.
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