11 ms·
I remember reading an interview with a British author, it might have been Neil Gaiman. He was just about to get his first book published in the US, and the Amer
by dagw 3y ago
I remember reading an interview with a British author, it might have been Neil Gaiman. He was just about to get his first book published in the US, and the American publisher contacted him and asked if it was OK if they changed a couple of British words to American, like "flat" to "apartment". Not wanting to risk the publishing deal, they said sure. A couple of month later they got the first edition of the US version back and found lines like.
"He looked out over the apartment landscape"
and
"'Come with me', he said apartmently"
- wly_cdgr 3y agoWhen I'm feeling down, reading about stuff like this always gives me an elevator
- ChrisRR 3y agoThat definitely must've been early. I would've thought Gaiman of all people knows how easily English humour can get lost in translation. Often even when not changing the text
- 2-718-281-828 3y agothe irony being that many readers probably attributed this to neil's sense of humor. i would have. "he said apartmently? what? aaah ... now i get it - haha - good one!"
- bombcar 3y agoClbuttic mistake!
- perihelions 3y ago- "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment." - "None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler..." - "F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught." - "Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me." https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ ("American Gods Blog, Post 24" [2001])
- daveslash 3y agoRe>> "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Ah, the Scunthorpe problem. [0] It's never a good idea, but the immature 12 y/o in my always giggles at the examples. One of my favorites is the word "ass" being replaced by "butt", resulting in this gem [1]... "'Prohibition on buttbuttination' states, 'No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political buttbuttination.'" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#cite_note-butt-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#cite_note-b... [1]
- nunuvit 3y ago> In February 2004 in Scotland, Craig Cockburn reported that he was unable to use his surname ... In 2010, he had a similar problem registering on the BBC website So the BBC was allowed to register their domain without issue, but Craig couldn't register his account with the BBC. That's Dick.
- hunter2_ 3y agoSome of those could be avoided by using a search regex such as "\bblonde\b". I believe a sophisticated enough regex could solve all of these, if it were a central library used and maintained by many.
- jwestbury 3y agoTroublingly, "blonde" isn't even a British vs. American English thing -- it's a gendered descriptor, of which we have relatively few remaining in English. Blonde is the feminine form, blond is the masculine/neuter form. Whether you want to preserve gendered adjectives is a different question entirely, but the definitions are rather clear, having carried over from French.
- ChrisRR 3y agoYou must be american if you think it's that easy. I think american don't realise how brits end up learning both our versions of words and theirs too because so much TV is american.
- madcaptenor 3y agoThere's an American sprinter named Tyson Gay. Or, as some conservative media referred to him, Tyson Homosexual. (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=294 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=294)
- jwestbury 3y agoThe best part of this link was learning about Reuters saying Queen Elizabeth lays 2000 eggs per day.
- madcaptenor 3y agoI missed that!
- arp242 3y agoWe'll all be homosexual when Johnny comes marching home.
- ignite 3y agoMy favorite bad translation was a Philip Jose Farmer novel where all measurements were given in Imperial and Metric units. As in: "It was about 1000 feet, or 304.88 meters". "He was 6 feet tall, or 182.88" meters." Every single measurement, converted with two or three decimal places. It got old fast.
- 2-718-281-828 3y agowith two digits precision even? that's bad ...
- lb1lf 3y ago-I'll see you and raise by some movie or other with Walther Matthau in it which I saw on the Hallmark Channel a few years ago - in a scene, he asks a kid if he knows Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The Norwegian subtitle? 'Do you know where in Gettysburg Lincoln lived?' Oh, and of course, from Star Wars - 'Luke, this is your father's light sabre' was translated as 'Luke, this is your father's lightweight sabre'
- pantalaimon 3y agoAnother classic is a Simpsons episode where Homer shouts „Isotopes rules!“ which in the German dub turned into „Isotopenspielregeln!“ (rules of the game Isotopes)
- actionfromafar 3y agoVery avant-garde. I like it. It must be possible to subtly translate an entire episode like that to make it be about something else entirely.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoTranslations of foreign media that make the story about something else entirely, are a well-established genre. For example, one of Woody Allen’s earliest films.[0] Granted, this wasn’t done “subtly” at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F
- duxup 3y agoI feel like folks in editing or similar roles put their "problem detection" hat on too tightly. I get lots of advice like that regarding code and UI and the suggestions about perspective problems are often absurd. Nobody has been confused by the thing yet and they're concerned that someone "might" be confused and not able to figure it out themselves so they change some words or UI and ... I kid you not more often than not the solution is the thing that trips up users. In the above example, maybe if the reader doesn't know what a "flat" is, maybe they'll just look it up or understand by context and they'll be ok?
- parminya 3y agoI don't think they're concerned so much by the people who don't know what a flat is, but by the people who do. There's more than a handful of bookreaders out there who are very protective of any difference between their national form of English and some other national form of English, who will get upset if a local publisher uses the foreign form.
- vram22 3y agoChatGPT, GPT4, 5, 6, ... : Change all occurrences of flat to apartment, intelligently! Got you! ;-)
- lionkor 3y agoAs a bonus it will even insert random facts about current political candidates!
- vram22 3y agoHa ha, good one. In fact, (shhh ...), that is the main purpose of all AI. ;-)
- drpixie 3y ago"He looked out over the flat landscape" -> "He looked out over the landscape, intelligently"
- vram22 3y agoNice try. Ch(e)ating, obviously. You omitted apartment in the replacement.
- golergka 3y agoThere once was a company in Russia who tried to make their own wikipedia — but of course, they didn't have any resources to build their own content, so in their world, Europe in the middle ages was terrorized by mighty Nordic warriors called encyclongs (w and v are the same letter in Russian language).
- reaperman 3y agoPlease help me understand this! Encyclongs doesn’t compute for me and also does not contain any w or v.
- PeterisP 3y agoIf you replace (in cyrillic script) viki[-pedia] to encyclo[-pedia] (because you can't do a whole word replace, since in inflectional languages like Russian every word has many forms with different endings, so you must replace the beginnings of these words to catch all the inflected wordforms) then vikings become encyclongs.
- VTimofeenko 3y agoVikings == wikings (in Russian spelling) > echo "wikings" | sed "s;wiki;encyclo;" # which is what enci.ru did "encyclongs"
- modernerd 3y agoDouglas Adams also battled with this: > One general point. A thing I have had said to me over and over again whenever I’ve done public appearances and readings and so on in the States is this: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it! We like it the way it is! > There are some changes in the script that simply don’t make sense. Arthur Dent is English, the setting is England, and has been in every single manifestation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ever. The ‘Horse and Groom’ pub that Arthur and Ford go to is an English pub, the ‘pounds’ they pay with are English (but make it twenty pounds rather than five – inflation). So why suddenly ‘Newark’ instead of ‘Rickmansworth’? And ‘Bloomingdales’ instead of ‘Marks & Spencer’? The fact that Rickmansworth is not within the continental United States doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist! American audiences do not need to feel disturbed by the notion that places do exist outside the US or that people might suddenly refer to them in works of fiction. https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/please-dont-let-anyone-americanise https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/please-dont-let-anyone-amer...
- mcv 3y agoSometimes it turns out great, though. Wasn't there a scene with an award for "best use of the word 'fuck'" that was changed to "best use of the word 'Belgium'"? That was an improvement.
- modernerd 3y agoYes! It was the “Rory Award” from Life, the Universe and Everything: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Rory_Award https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Rory_Award Definitely funnier as “Belgium”.
- jimmygrapes 3y agoThis hampered me when playing the HHGTTG text adventure as a youth. My memory is fuzzy on the specifics, but one of the early things needed is to relieve a headache or similar, and a search of Arthur's home would reveal an "analgesic" eventually. Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to do something else until you consumed the analgesic, and eventually you'd lose the game because the home was demolished while you're in it. I did not know at the time what an analgesic was, despite having a fairly broad vocabulary. If anything, I assumed it was some dirty adult toy; certainly not a thing to be consumed as a remedy for pain. It was frustrating because I searched high and low for aspirin, Tylenol, pain-killer, etc. but never got past that section until I had a chance to search the Internet for a solution - many years after I really cared to play a text adventure again.
- Ichthypresbyter 3y agoTo add to the many find and replace issues that have shown up, at one point TSR's style guide for D&D material said that "wizard" had to be used to the exclusion of "mage". So when proofs of a book arrived where the authors had used "mage" they did a find and replace job. Resulting in such lines as "The tower can take up to 200 points of dawizard before it is destroyed. Dawizard sustained is cumulative." and references to a spell called "Silent Iwizard".
- miki123211 3y agoAlso dawizard and wizardnta (when a tabletop RPG company tried changing "mage" to "wizard"), "amDanielan" (when an Eric was renamed to a Daniel) and a company that was "formerly in the red, but now in the African american."
- MollyRealized 3y agoThis happened with D&D. Someone replaced all instances of "mage" with "wizard", and as a result, you would incur "dawizard". [1] [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/s82mi4/til_that_in_1994_tsr_published_the_encyclopedia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/s82mi4/til_that_in_199...
- mcv 3y agoIs it so hard to only replace full word matches?
- kazinator 3y agoI laughed so hard, I let out an apartmentus.
- erhaetherth 3y agoThat's exceptionally lazy. When coding, unless the false positive rate is exceptionally low, I just find (without replace) and go through them by hand. How many "flat"s can there be in 1 book? C'mon. You might have to read 20 sentences, oh no.
- smcl 3y agoOh man, that's a clbuttic mistake!
- thangalin 3y agoI developed KeenWrite[1] to make using variables in documents trivial[2]. My editor has no search and replace function. For my sci-fi novel, there's a variable {{location.protagonist.tertiary.Type}} that has the value "Bavarian Village". I could change this to "apartment" and every instance throughout the document prose and reference diagrams would update automatically and contextually. My typical example for explaining the use case is changing the name "May" to "June", but flat/apartment is hilarious. [1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite [2]: https://youtu.be/CFCqe3A5dFg?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzPIoWZMKu_ https://youtu.be/CFCqe3A5dFg?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...