• AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
    17·
    15 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”

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
      121·
      21 hours ago

      It said American not Epstein-Trump so it must be meant for the pre-2025 dialect

        • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          frus[0], ant[1], twirl[2]?

          • [0: abreviation for frustration]
          • [1: THAT’S ANTIST!]
          • [2: IDK, I just saw that word on the thumbnail beneath when fetching the ant vid, and then saw the frustration one and added it back in for a christie trinity [Bridget Christie trilogy]]
  • brsrklf@jlai.lu
    72·
    19 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
      3·
      11 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
      46·
      1 day 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
      22·
      1 day 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·
        1 day 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·
          1 day 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·
        1 day 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.