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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)

#141
post #43

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.

If you watch them side-by-side it's like they took all the long words out of the US narration.

UK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onELlblAI0U

US https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zt4wmjOpr0

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not really the accents that are hard to understand in Australia, it's the slang.

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

#144
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" th…

Except you just gave up a lot of precision doing that conversion. 16:54 might be 5 minutes and 0.1 seconds or 5 minutes and 59.9 seconds.

If you can get that same feel for 16:54:36 then sure, but I personally don’t.

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

#145

By far the stupidest Americanization I've encountered is when Netflix changed "The Great British Bake Off" to "The Great British Baking Show". They are honestly recording 2 versions of every intro for this?

Sadly, that's due to a trademark issue in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_British_Bake_Off

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also (as far as I understand it) not actually continuous motion. They just have much smaller increments of movement than a single second.

It seems there are mechanisms with fully continuous motion, eg: https://www.grand-seiko.com/global-en/about/movement/springd...

Is it "fully continuous" if it has a discret electronic controller correcting it all the time?

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

#147
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also (as far as I understand it) not actually continuous motion. They just have much smaller increments of movement than a single second.

It's still continuous, as even when fully ticking, it still goes from point a to b passing through all the in between points... well, up to planck length at least... Ticking just makes the motion jerky/abrupt, not discontinuous/discreet...

> up to planck length at least...

Well, we actually do not know that...

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I’m an avid fan of all of the “Planet” series precisely because of Attenborough.

It's deeply lamentable that in this day and age one has to resort to throwaway accounts to express their fondness of Sir Attenborough.

Is "ZoomZoomZoom" your legal name? :)

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

#149
post #138

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…

Murakami it's a special case: It's a Japanese feeling itself like an "alien" because he writes novels about being a mix between Japan's tradition and lots of Western influences.

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

#150

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.

Or when Mary Beard was cut from the American release of Civilisation.

She, a world-renowned scholar and classicist, was replaced by Liev fucking Schreiber.

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