comment

bravo1102 at 1:03PM, Sept. 14, 2021

You'd be very surprised to find out just how much of the language you take for granted is colloquial that doesn't translate. I worked for years with a Cuban who had been in the country thirty years but I was always explaining English phrases he'd never heard before. He carried around a notebook to write everything down to improve his English. And yes, there are American Spanish speaking cultures that have all kinds of idioms and even slang that is unintelligible to other native speakers (Dominicans especially) As for the whole US high school culture, I'm from the USA and went to HS here and I don't understand some things because they're regional and not native to where I went to HS. Kevin Smith movies are closest because it's only a county over, but I was a local for the Jersey Shore and that's a different subculture too. Now where's my pork roll sandwich or should I go for a Philly cheese steak.

PaulEberhardt at 5:37AM, Sept. 14, 2021

I don't quite know where to start, but the German dubs of TV shows often take pains to be as accurate as possible, and that's not usually a good thing. It created a distinct way of talking that nobody uses, neither here nor in America. An advanced translation course I took years ago suggested I should just explain anything that doesn't exist in the other culture, which is Ok for rather technical, academical texts but makes it quite unreadable for any normal well-balanced person. As a result, I usually rewrite my dialogues from scratch when doing different language versions, acting as if the other didn't exist and in the course somewhat shift my point of view, you know, the way I look at my own very localised setting. I wonder if anyone can tell whether a page of mine was originally thought up in Platt or in English. It's in fact pretty much a 50:50 ratio.

Andreas_Helixfinger at 5:01AM, Sept. 14, 2021

I remember one time when I was watching this american reality show on TV about teaching these nerd-type of guys to get dates, and how one of the segments had these guys running around town (Don't remember which town) and ask women walking on the streets for their phone numbers. To my swedish brain that was a completely alien thing to do, it had to be setup, because that something we swedes would never do. So you can imagine how mindblown I was visiting London one summer vacation and noticing how many Londoners there were that would just randomly walk up to me and say "hi, how are you?". That just doesn't happen where I'm from (pandemic, or no pandemic), which I honestly find kind of depressing.