Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

English as She Is Spoke

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 137 posts

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#121

Post by tekknolagi »

hi41 wrote: post #117
lioeters wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that watching a lot of American television shows can be effective. I think that can help you get familiar with commonly used slang, cultural values, typical patterns of behavior. Also, it would be essential to practice in real life, by interacting as much as possible with the "natives".

Thank you! When I was talking , someone said that I talk like I am reading a book. Is spoken English different from written English in books? All English I know is from reading text books in school and college.

It can be. Dialogue tends to take shortcuts to make it shorter, to have run on sentences, and to use some colloquialisms not often found in books. I think watching people communicate in TV and movies is a reasonable recommendation, but you'll likely have to tone down the drama :)

EDIT: Also podcasts or talk shows, potentially. I had this problem with German and I solved it by going to bars and chatting with people, but that's not super possible these days.

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#123

Post by anaerobicover »

madrox wrote: post #24

A similarly unintentional comedy in translation was a book I found several years ago that I believe was an autotranslation: "How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?". The amazon reviews are similarly hilarious. https://www.amazon.com/How-Good-bye-Depression-Constrict-Eve...

There's a bunch of background on the book at Everything2: https://everything2.com/title/How+to+Good-Bye+Depression%253...

(and the title is thoroughly mashed up and reused across the site for comedic effect)

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#124

Post by Blikkentrekker »

joshspankit wrote: post #27

I hope this is not too off-topic, but I really wish there were more (excellent) “literal translations”. Yes: it would be tricky and unpalatable for much of the audience, but I personally find it fascinating to get in to the “mind” of a language and would like the opportunity without having to memorize (something I find particularly challenging) the “words” of a language. Movie and TV subtitles especially.

There isn't much of a mind of the language with such matters.

They are idioms and quite often native speakers do not actually realize what they are saying when they use them.

I remember that when I gained more proficiency at Finnish, that many Finns remarked that I was teaching them because I was manually analyzing what was actually literally being said and they never quite considered what they were saying.

Consider that many English speakers when they are saying “God damn it.” they are really not realizing that “God” is the subject, “damn” is the finite verb in the subjunctive mood, and “it” is the direct object, thus expressing a wish that God damn it, whatever “it” might be. — it is an indivisible idiom for them which is also why it is often spelt as one word.

Especially because the subjunctive mood is rarely used as such to express a wish in modern English.

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#125

Post by henrikschroder »

Symbiote wrote: post #82
henrikschroder wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one more example for the TV show I spent time translating: It's a teen high school drama, but it's a Norwegian high school, not an American high school. The characters have all just started high school, but during your first year in Norway, you and your classmates will vary in age from 15-16-17, and high school lasts three years, not four. If you use "freshmen" to describe them, you get the "new at school" aspe…

For what it's worth, "freshman" is American, and the related British/Australian/NZ term "fresher" only applies to first year students in their first weeks at university - not at schools. I'm glad you didn't use the word. It would seem really out of place. In England, we just said "6th year" (cf Harry Potter), "lower sixth" or "Year 12", depending on how old fashioned the school was.

And "first-grader" is something completely different, those are six years old, not sixteen, so that was completely out. Plenty of traps and completely inappropriate translations as well.

I ended up using "first-year", "second-year" and "third-year", and "firstie" for when older students were looking down on them.

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#126

Post by joshspankit »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #124
joshspankit wrote: post #27

I hope this is not too off-topic, but I really wish there were more (excellent) “literal translations”. Yes: it would be tricky and unpalatable for much of the audience, but I personally find it fascinating to get in to the “mind” of a language and would like the opportunity without having to memorize (something I find particularly challenging) the “words” of a language. Movie and TV subtitles especially.

There isn't much of a mind of the language with such matters. They are idioms and quite often native speakers do not actually realize what they are saying when they use them. I remember that when I gained more proficiency at Finnish, that many Finns remarked that I was teaching them because I was manually analyzing what was actually literally being said and they never quite considered what they were saying. Consider…

I agree with your point about idioms many times being used without awareness of what they “actually” mean, and while I would still say it’s interesting for me to hear/see the idiom anyway, it’s not really the meat of where the “mind” is to me.

There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).

It’s said that our language shapes how we think, and just the barest glimpse I’ve seen in to “literal” translations gives me a window in to not only how that’s true, but how particular languages can shape particular thought patterns.

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#127

Post by henrikschroder »

js2 wrote: post #107
henrikschroder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent a considerable amount subtitling a TV series, and there were subtitles floating around for it before I started, but they contained a ton of bad English; wrong idioms, and wrong word order. But when I did my translation, I tried to stick to the word order and expressions of the original language when possible . You could translate each sentence to the most likely way an English-speaking person would express…

There's multiple translations of the closing dialog in Breathless . (Of course, even the English title isn't a literal translation of À bout de souffle —that would be Out of Breath .) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless_(1960_film)#Closi...

That's a pretty cool example of how some pieces of dialogue are just untranslateable.

There's a common misconception among a lot of people, and definitely among the HN crowd, that there exists a good translation for every sentence in every language to every other language. I remember some articles a year ago or so here about how Google Translate had supposedly created some kind of internal language through its ML algorithms and data.

Yeah, but no. Google Translate would completely fail on that dialogue from Out of Breath, and if you were relying on it, you wouldn't even know it had failed!

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#128

Post by Blikkentrekker »

joshspankit wrote: post #126
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't much of a mind of the language with such matters. They are idioms and quite often native speakers do not actually realize what they are saying when they use them. I remember that when I gained more proficiency at Finnish, that many Finns remarked that I was teaching them because I was manually analyzing what was actually literally being said and they never quite considered what they were saying. Consider…

I agree with your point about idioms many times being used without awareness of what they “actually” mean, and while I would still say it’s interesting for me to hear/see the idiom anyway, it’s not really the meat of where the “mind” is to me. There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial rela…

> There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).

The last one is surely an idiom, and the other parts are the ones that are often hard to translate literally.

I wouldn't say that “the honorable front” as a translation would really do justice to the meaning of /omae/ in Japanese and how it differs from, say, /anata/. “the honorable front” is the literal meaning of /omae/, but it's again an idiom that Japanese speakers scarcely realize the origins of, though Japanese's ideographic spelling perhaps would serve to make speakers more aware of such origins.

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#129

Post by henrikschroder »

joshspankit wrote: post #109
SECProto wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end in your example, I feel like I would have a deeper understanding of kimchi as it relates to Korean speakers, how “green onion kimchi” is different, and why that means someone is dead tired. Picture this situation in reverse. If you were instead a Korean person, digging in to why Americans associate cats and dogs with heavy rain? Or why English speakers eat butterflies before they do something on stage? L…

Maybe I’m the odd one out, but as a native english speaker I also find english idioms to be interesting and to speak volumes about the person saying them. “Raining cats and dogs” I had not looked up before, but I don’t hear it much currently so I would likely associate it with someone of a specific older age range, or someone younger who’s been around (or who is emulating) older people. Even that small inference brin…

Many expressions and idioms like that are so goddamn old that they exist in most European languages: "Schmetterlinge im Bauch", "Papillons dans le ventre", "Fjärilar i magen", "Mariposas en el estómago", "Fluturi In Stomac", etc.

Re: English as She Is Spoke

#130

Post by saagarjha »

ggambetta wrote: post #93
saagarjha wrote: post #68

For those with an afternoon to burn, check of Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West , a fan dub of a poor roundtrip translation of The Revenge of the Sith : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XziLNeFm1ok . It’s filled with gems of this type.

An absolute classic. Here's a summary of the best parts: https://starwarsfans.fandom.com/wiki/Star_War_The_Third_Gath... Related: a long time ago, in a country far away where I grew up, I had a videotape of Star Wars with Spanish subtitles. It was awful . I think it was done by someone who didn't understand much English and knew nothing of Star Wars. I don't have that masterpiece anymore (nor a VCR player, for that m…

Having taken Spanish in high school, I would love to watch that if you happen to find it :)
Post reply on HN