Random #10

[rodo]

☞ Dear writers of FlashForward, please don't ever use German again. It was grammatically correct and the actors were actual German speakers (or plain awesome) and all ... it just wasn't really German. It sounded more like English. Imagine Japanese -> English translation that's grammatically correct but still not English, I'm sure there are a few.

☞ A propos German: Nobel Prize in Literature! Whoo! I'm always in a party mood when an author who writes in German gets the prize, because our language needs all the PR it can get (yes, even Tokio Hotel). There really isn't as much of a market for German books, and compared to English, few books get translated. Seriously, every idiot who writes their book in English can get it translated (e.g. Cassandra Clare), but German -> English is much rarer, I think. I haven't read any of Müller's books, but I think they sound interesting. I guess the east/west conflict is not of much interest in the US, but for me, it really is.

☞ Also: Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not sure how to feel about it. I kind of wanted Hu Jia to win.

ETA: Can someone explain to me why this post has a scrollbar?

Comments

[blnchflr]

I'm quite shocked that Obama has gotten a Nobel - I didn't even know he was a contender! I'm actually a fan of him (he is so above and beyond the last couple of presidents, Clinton included, that comparatively "fan" is not an unproper term), but uhm, what the heck has he done for peace, really?

ETA: Can someone explain to me why this post has a scrollbar?
Looks like your sidebar determines the length of the page, and your tags list is darn long.

[rodo]

but uhm, what the heck has he done for peace, really?

Yeah, I still didn't manage to come up with anything.

The scrollbar disappears when I add the ETA, though. And only this one post had it on the recent entries page (it showed up right next to the icon). All others didn't.

[dancing_serpent]

I was a bit surprised, too, until I found this link.

Quote: More often, the prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments.

Under that aspect it does kind of make sense to me.

[rodo]

Yeah, it does.

[dancing_serpent]

There really isn't as much of a market for German books, and compared to English, few books get translated.
I don't really know about the number of translations concerning German books, but I do work for a company that does pretty much nothing else but selling/shipping German books to libraries all over the world. So, my impression is a rather different one. *g*

[rodo]

Yeah, some German books are bestsellers overseas, even in their German version (One company in the GDR made quite a lot of money by selling Marx to the Japanese).

[dancing_serpent]

The bestsellers aren't the only things we ship, though. It's really everything starting from a doctoral thesis and ending with yearly reports of some local rabbit breeding club. *g*

[rodo]

People are interested in the weirdest things. Which is probably why the Japanese books at out university are ... an interesting mix. (A book about the mecha design of Gundam, really?)

[eumelkeks]

Watched FlashForward now and I agree, that sounded really off. 1:1 translations never work.

[rodo]

Well, they do. Sometimes. In really rare cases. Dialogues - not so much.

[khana]

finally watched the flashforward ep and i really have to agree, that sounded pretty off. which was weird, because the accents sounded pretty genuine. so the actors could have noticed how artificial it sounded. the 'herr xyz' in the middle of english sentences also really bugged me. nobody does that! especialy not the nazi guy, who claims to have lived 20 years in the us before. really. -.-

[rodo]

Yeah, that too. It was an obvious case of "we want to add local colour and are going to use the only words our audience knows, no matter how silly it sounds".

How the hell did this get past the actors? Or maybe they weren't allowed to complain.