191–200 of 326 posts
I am a non native speaker with an accent and I am often surprised to see that some US citizens have a very hard time with my accent while non native speakers have no problem understanding me. I suspect it is due to some US citizen not being used to dealing with a variety of sounds and inflexions.
His argument about digital watches did not age well. My kids have known how to understand a digital clock since they were toddlers, but even now, in elementary school, they require entire lesson units in school on telling time from a clock face. Beyond that, he argues that pie charts tell us more about the relationship between things than tables of numbers, and a clock face is "the world's most perfect pie chart." Bu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The '-ize' prefix is official International English - OED English. No partisanship (for example) necessary (in fact, '-ize' in OED is a Graecism, not, say, an Americanism). Trying anyway to link the idea to the context: there is no need to translate a Local Language work into an International Language transposition - no need already per se. But especially, it is most normal for works of arts to written using specific…
Gotta love HN. > The '-ize' prefix... Since we're doing flagrant pedantry, let's go all in: don't you mean suffix ?
By the way: no pedantry involved (unless you mean the "educating" value of information passed here where "intellectual curiosity" is the criterion for exchange). The purpose and implicit messages in your original post were unclear (many readings were possible).
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.
What we need to do is feed all of his narrations from the last 60 years into an AI and get it to process them; then we can use this corpus to have all nature documentaries narrated by him forever more.
I am, of course, joking... but would it really be that bad an idea? ;-)
From my experience in the media industry some producers/higher ups like making arbitrary changes to a work/show/whatever just so they can say they had an impact, or to say that they made that change at the end, most of the time it ends up making the final product worst.
Update: Actually, upon reading Adams's letter again more carefully, I'm seeing that he's probably making this very point! So I'll just leave my original comment as a more general one about where I think the issue originates.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It loses a lot of connotation, too. Philosopher's implies abstract, referring to the stone's elusive, impossible nature: having never been discovered, only theorized. In a story where everyone is a sorcerer, it dumbs that down a lot. It could be one of their kidney stones for all it matters.
The American version is more accurate and arguably better - I like to think the title was changed for our heightened intelligence and not the opposite.
For some reason, in Ireland and possibly the UK, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were instead called The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. 'Ninja' may have been too violent
The mythology for the rename was that kids copied them and hurt themselves, but that seems an unlikely reason as changing the name wouldn't change kids copying from them??