Re: CHAT: Eng regionalisms (was: German and English)

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Ray Brown :
>
>
> >After 22 years in South Wales, I had problems with some local
> >pronunciations and actually did once misunderstand "coat" as "kite".  We
> >southerners find some regional accents difficult to follow, especially in
> >the N.E. England and the Scottish border country.  During the "Troubles"
> >there were not infrequently reports from Northern Ireland and one would
> >dearly have liked subtitles given when some of the locals were interviewed.
>
> That's how it's done on Dutch and Flemish TV. People with a difficult
> accent or dialect are always subtitled.
The thing is, if you did that for English, someone would inevitably demand
that American tv. subbed/dubbed, especially given that it creates a danger
with 911 all over the place... (The Australian emergency number is 000.)

> And some channels (private ones)
Do you mean commercial ones?

> have a specialty of
> making "imaginative" translations when subtitling (I've seen for instance
> that the Flemish Temptation Island is aired on Dutch TV with subtitles
> which systematically replace vulgar words with benign expressions -
> although the vulgar words are just the same as in pure Dutch :))) -).
Well, I'll use things like 'cbf' and 'rtfm', but if you ask me what they
mean I'll say something like 'can't be bothered' or 'read the manual' :)
(I'm not a great believer in unnecessary swearing. If you use the word
'fuck'* for absolutely everything from minor annoyance to extreme
distress, you lose its value as an intensifier. So people who know me know
that if I swear, sómething is wrong.)

* I also don't understand the point of censoring a word if everyone knows
what I mean, anyway...

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still
be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
                -- Snoopy

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