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Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

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Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#131

Post by Chris2048 »

yes_i_can wrote: post #109
Hayvok wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree in general that the UK/Attenborough cut is preferable, but the American intro sequence is fantastic and dramatic. Gave me chills the first time I watched it.

I kind of hate the dramatization in newer nature documentaries, rife with cuts of sweeping landscape views set to loud, epic music. I'm probably just getting old, but it feels like they're trying too hard to keep my attention. I don't need blaring horns and pounding timpani to keep me watching.

The problem is it's a race to the bottom with these kinds of things, comparable to the over-salt-&-sugar-ing of American foods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I

"..until eventually, they’re shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more."

-- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/11/theres-no-place-li...

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#132

Post by pessimizer »

pikminguy wrote: post #25
eadmund wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His argument about digital watches did not age well. Didn't it? I think it remains true. Time is a continuum, not discrete; analogue watches demonstrate that, while digital ones do not. And yes, schools have to teach one how to use a clock, but at the end of the process one actually has enhanced one's understanding of time. Much like using a slide rule teaches one far more about numbers and maths than using a calcu…

Even if you're right that analog watches are better tools that's not what Adams was saying. "We all know, really, that [analog clock face] is a lot more instantly meaningful to us than 15:39" which is just wrong. Plenty of people, myself included, get more instant meaning from a digital readout.

> Plenty of people, myself included, get more instant meaning from a digital readout.

More from outside knowledge than from the digital readout itself. There's no way to tell from a digital readout there are 60 minutes in an hour or seconds in a minute, or that there's a 12-hour period that means something (and no hints to guess.) There's no evidence that the time represented on a digital readout changes at a constant rate or is sequential and doesn't jump around or go faster sometimes and slower others. Everything on an analog clockface is just there.

If you found an alien digital clock written in alien language, it would take you forever to figure out anything about it; it would take a while to figure out anything useful even if you knew it was a clock. If you found an alien analog clock, it would be immediately obvious what it was and what it was doing, and you could use it to help you understand the alien digital clock.

edit: also, when your alien digital watch did the equivalent of jumping from 12 to 1, it would throw everything off, especially if there were a different symbol for 1 second or 1 minute that there was for 1 hour. An analog clock visually explains the transition between 12 and 1.

I think all this stuff is obvious, I'm confused about the argument being made that it's not. There's just less information on a digital readout. I feel like I'm trying to explain that movies have more information than movie scripts, but Kolmogorov would say to compress them both and compare the filesizes.

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#133

Post by _23sd »

Freeboots wrote: post #126
mordechai9000 wrote: post #111

I've always been annoyed they replaced "Philosopher's Stone" with "Sorcerer's Stone" in the title of the Harry Potter novel, for American consumption. It feels kinda of insulting, frankly. I recently and randomly picked up a Japanese book, 1Q84. I was enjoying it quite a bit, when I started thinking about the cultural references it contained - it has numerous references to Western classical music and Sean Connery. It…

Sorcerer's Stone is particularly annoying i agree. Not like philosophers' stone is an existing mythos highly relevant to the story or anything. Another that bugged me was Northern Lights -> The Golden Compass. Apparently NL was too abstract for American audiences? Oh and Harlequin -> The Archer's Tale.

>Northern Lights -> The Golden Compass

According to Pullman that one wasn't really about an attempt at cultural adaptation, the title had been in flux and the US publisher had taken an early name for the upcoming series, "The Golden Compasses", and run with it before he settled on Northern Lights.

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#134

Post by mordechai9000 »

tristam_shandy wrote: post #115
mordechai9000 wrote: post #111

I've always been annoyed they replaced "Philosopher's Stone" with "Sorcerer's Stone" in the title of the Harry Potter novel, for American consumption. It feels kinda of insulting, frankly. I recently and randomly picked up a Japanese book, 1Q84. I was enjoying it quite a bit, when I started thinking about the cultural references it contained - it has numerous references to Western classical music and Sean Connery. It…

Haruki Murakami is particular that way. Western culture references are the reason he gets "exported" so much. But that cultural cross pollination isn't as ubiquitous as one would think.

I wonder if the western cultural references are part of the attraction to Japanese readers, the same way I am attracted to reading a book with a Japanese setting.

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#135

Post by leoedin »

Retric wrote: post #116
ghaff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Time is a continuum, not discrete; analogue watches demonstrate that, while digital ones do not While obviously true, we often treat time as discrete to an appropriate level of precision. Timekeeping in sports is essentially all digital these days for example. And generally speaking (at least for some contexts), 10am really does mean 10am, not 10ish. I actually normally use an analog display on my Apple Watch but I…

The issue is 10AM has real meaning but you’re only actually at 10AM for an instant mostly you want to know how long until something happens. Think of a meeting at 10AM with an analog clock you can get an intuitive feel for how long you have to finish what your working on. With a digital clock it’s easy to do the calculation but that distracts from the task at hand. It’s most noticeable with a seconds. Many analog clo…

I think much like reading is abstracted to a point where the "shape" of the words conveys the meaning (and you can muddle up the inner letters without much loss of information), when you use digital clocks enough the subconscious meaning of the shape of the numbers is what you see. I don't have to do a manual conversion to understand from the 16:54 on my phone screen that I have 5 minutes until 5pm - I just "know" that from a single glance.

Ultimately both digital and analog clocks are abstractions which convey meaning to whatever our internal sense of time is. I suspect the internal concept of time is quite different for everyone (hence why my mum is always late for everything...)

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#136

Post by gordian-mind »

pessimizer wrote: post #125
CalRobert wrote: post #5

There's a deeply frustrating infantilisation when something is localized in the same language. My kids and I love Bluey, an Australian show, but apparently the producers had to refuse to have it redone with US and UK accents to stop it happening. Never understood what the problem with having David Attenborough instead of Sigourney Weaver narrate Planet Earth was either.

Not everybody is a xenophile, some people are nationalist types who get annoyed (rather than aroused) whenever they hear a foreign accent, and may even have trouble understanding them. You're not going to change channels if you hear an American accent, but they very much will if they hear an Australian one. One out of every six big US movies would be black if it were proportionate to population, but they're not. The…

> The reason is because black people will watch white movies, but white people don't watch black movies.

What happened to "people just want to be represented in movies"? Simply put, since there are more whites than blacks in the U.S., then every film-maker has an incentive to represent them more to reach a broader audience.

This is absolutely not because "white people are more bigoted", which is laughable when you consider that they are surely, in proportion, the most xenophile people on the planet.

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#137

Post by thrdbndndn »

marlowe221 wrote: post #71
vlunkr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluey is a fantastic show, and the fact that it's unapologetically Australian is part of what's so fun about it. I think it's just the choice of nervous higher-ups to localize things like this, and not actually what people want. Like Douglas Adams says, people can survive hearing references they don't understand. And they might even learn something about another culture.

My kids (ages 6 and 3) LOVE Bluey. We are American and (sadly) English-only speakers. The fact that the show is full of Australian accents has not impacted their ability to understand or enjoy the show in any way at all. The exposure to places that are not-America is good for them!

>English-only speakers

I mean most of native speakers won't have much trouble understanding Australian accents. It's the ESL people that would have a hard time without having enough exposure.

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#138

Post by _23sd »

mordechai9000 wrote: post #111

I've always been annoyed they replaced "Philosopher's Stone" with "Sorcerer's Stone" in the title of the Harry Potter novel, for American consumption. It feels kinda of insulting, frankly. I recently and randomly picked up a Japanese book, 1Q84. I was enjoying it quite a bit, when I started thinking about the cultural references it contained - it has numerous references to Western classical music and Sean Connery. It…

I think the attitude that Japanese popular culture should ideally be completely rewritten for overseas release (a la Godzilla) is still common within Japan itself, but thankfully US publishers and film distributors have mostly realized audiences don't want that. It's still enough of an issue that you're right to be cautious, though 1Q84 is a big enough title that the translation would be heavily scrutinized. A lot of Western culture has become so permeated into Japan that it's common to see: the Brothers Grimm are so popular with Japanese SF authors that I think some Western sticklers for originality would despair at how often those stories are referenced and adapted.

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#139

Post by jonpurdy »

lucumo wrote: post #47
capitainenemo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever seen the 24h analog clock? :) https://m8y.org/images/24.svg

I've been staying at that click for a solid ten minutes, but I can't figure out why minutes and seconds start on top, but hours on the bottom. Any idea why that particular choice was made?

Adding additional info to my sibling comments. Since the bottom is designed to show night, it would be cool to grab a geolocation and draw the bottom based on sunrise/sunset times.

Re: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)

#140

Post by dylan604 »

Abekkus wrote: post #43
CalRobert wrote: post #5

There's a deeply frustrating infantilisation when something is localized in the same language. My kids and I love Bluey, an Australian show, but apparently the producers had to refuse to have it redone with US and UK accents to stop it happening. Never understood what the problem with having David Attenborough instead of Sigourney Weaver narrate Planet Earth was either.

The first planet earth wasn't just given different voiceover for American audiences, it was recut. The brass called the Attenborough cut "excruciatingly slow-paced", so once they decided to re-edit, it was probably easier to recast the narration than to try and edit down Attenborough's own speech. The Attenborough cut is my personal preference too.

I didn't even know there was a version that wasn't Attenborough. Where is this other version found (not that I'll watch this "other")?
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