Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)
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My kids have known how to understand a digital clock since they were toddlers, but even now, in elementary school, they require entire lesson units in school on telling time from a clock face.
Beyond that, he argues that pie charts tell us more about the relationship between things than tables of numbers, and a clock face is "the world's most perfect pie chart." But a clock face is not really a pie chart. It does not indicate distribution among categories, as a pie chart does. The arms are not delimiters; they merely indicate position.
Didn't it? I think it remains true. Time is a continuum, not discrete; analogue watches demonstrate that, while digital ones do not.
And yes, schools have to teach one how to use a clock, but at the end of the process one actually has enhanced one's understanding of time. Much like using a slide rule teaches one far more about numbers and maths than using a calculator.
More from outside knowledge than from the digital readout itself. There's no way to tell from a digital readout there are 60 minutes in an hour or seconds in a minute, or that there's a 12-hour period that means something (and no hints to guess.) There's no evidence that the time represented on a digital readout changes at a constant rate or is sequential and doesn't jump around or go faster sometimes and slower others. Everything on an analog clockface is just there.
If you found an alien digital clock written in alien language, it would take you forever to figure out anything about it; it would take a while to figure out anything useful even if you knew it was a clock. If you found an alien analog clock, it would be immediately obvious what it was and what it was doing, and you could use it to help you understand the alien digital clock.
edit: also, when your alien digital watch did the equivalent of jumping from 12 to 1, it would throw everything off, especially if there were a different symbol for 1 second or 1 minute that there was for 1 hour. An analog clock visually explains the transition between 12 and 1.
I think all this stuff is obvious, I'm confused about the argument being made that it's not. There's just less information on a digital readout. I feel like I'm trying to explain that movies have more information than movie scripts, but Kolmogorov would say to compress them both and compare the filesizes.
I disagree with this. This seems to assume that an alien analog clock would look/function more like our analog clocks than an alien digital clock would look/function like our digital clocks. I'm not sure there's any reason to make that assumption.
analog clocks are modeled around the idea that the time is circular because that's the natural cycle of day and night (same concept of the meridian, plus dark hours, when there is no shadow).
I imagine that any alien civilization that lives on a planet that rotates around its star and has a light/dark cycle would measure time in a similar fashion.
For whatever reason I get a faster and more accurate sense of what time it is from a digital watch. I am not alone in this. Therefor the assertion that an analog readout is more instantly meaningful for everyone is wrong.
When I am at the train station I can have an immediate idea of what time is it just looking at the analog clocks around (they are digital displays mimicking analog clocks) even if I can't read the numbers from afar.
Digital clocks are harder for me because I have to parse the information: is that a 6, 8, 9, or zero?
It doesn't make much difference in the end, bit having to actually read the number forces me to be precise and I can't rely on intuition.
The more I age, the more my vision deteriorate, the more I find analog clocks easier to read.
It is faster to visually parse two hands of an analog watch than it is to parse four digits of a digital watch. But the price you pay for this is accuracy, and if you wanted to parse the analog watch face as accurately as digital, it'd take you more time than just reading the digits.
Maybe I'm confused about the assertion. The sentence "A picture with a bird in it" is more quickly recognized by very fluent English speakers than an actual picture of a bird. But it conveys far less information to a far narrower audience.
That said, every single event on my calendar, and every single communication about time I have with other people is expressed as a written (or spoken) number, not as a position on a clock face. That makes digital clocks far more useful for me personally; it saves me the extra step of having to mentally convert to digital time before being able to reason about how the time on my watch relates to other events or significant times throughout my day.
To those who prefer analogue watches I have to ask; how does that process work for you? Do you find it easier to mentally convert written times to a visualization of a position on a watch, and then do whatever mental reasoning you need to do in that space? Or are you doing the same thing I would be doing if I had an analog watch; converting it to digital and then reasoning from there? If the latter, why does skipping that extra conversion step by using a digital watch feel worse from your perspective?
At this point in my life I am definitely much more used to reading a digital clock so I don’t think you can attribute this to familiarity.
> If the latter, why does skipping that extra conversion step by using a digital watch feel worse from your perspective?
I'm quite capable of doing it either way, but my preference is to do the single required conversion to "analogue" so that repeated comparisons are visual and do not require repeated arithmetic. I also find it easier to remember a time visually, whereas single-digit errors in remembering a digital time can result in a greater error.
But it is a reasonable low resolution drawing of it, with some squiggly lines for reference, and arrows pointing in the approximate direction of the light source.
I think this is Adams' point: digital watches pretend to give you information but only give you data. That's a reason to consider them silly: they make you work (translating their data to something with meaning) while pretending to do the work for you.
Note: analogue watches also require interpretation. But they support coarse- as well as fine-grained interpretation: is it before or after a whole hour? Closer to half than to whole? Or to a quarter? 10 past or to? Etc.
Granted, a digital clock won't tell you there are 60 minutes in an hour, but teaching analog time involves much more than that. For starters, you have to explain that for minutes, the numbers are in increments of 5.
Then ask them if there is more or less time (since midnight) until lunch.
I find the translation I have to do from 15:39 to 3:39 pm to have much more friction than reading a digital or analog clock in the first place, both of which I can do with equal ease.
The problem of course is that I'm not used to 24-hour times, so I don't equate 15 with any particular time of day. Similar to how I have to translate C to F to make sense of C temperatures.
Now, a 24-hour analog clock with an embedded digital temperature read-out in C, that would really hurt.
Apparently 24-hour analog clocks are thing:
https://www.amazon.com/Navaris-Hour-Wall-Clock-Non-Ticking/d...
Ouch.
So there’s a good chance he just picked 15:39 as a familiar train time.
Likewise, I perceive 1539 as an alternative symbol for 1536, as I like to keep my clocks three minutes fast.
"it's 10 till", or "5 minutes before the hour" are statements that capture the human concept of time much better than 15:52
Ticking just makes the motion jerky/abrupt, not discontinuous/discreet...
While obviously true, we often treat time as discrete to an appropriate level of precision. Timekeeping in sports is essentially all digital these days for example. And generally speaking (at least for some contexts), 10am really does mean 10am, not 10ish.
I actually normally use an analog display on my Apple Watch but I think it's mostly to have something different as pretty much all the other clocks I use, including the watch I usually wear, are digital.
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 clocks include a second hand because it’s actually useful, while few digital clocks do so.
Ultimately both digital and analog clocks are abstractions which convey meaning to whatever our internal sense of time is. I suspect the internal concept of time is quite different for everyone (hence why my mum is always late for everything...)
If you can get that same feel for 16:54:36 then sure, but I personally don’t.
I think the argument could be made for a clock face being a pie chart if you think of it the way the host of that video does. The categories are "time left in the hour/day" and "time passed in the hour/day".
All that said I was really happy to finally understand what Adams was trying to say with that joke witch, as a person who finds digital readouts more useful, never landed for me before.
I'm not sure our age difference, but as a millennial I'm pretty sure we did when I was in elementary school as well. I don't remember which grade though, I didn't learn about how to read those watches from my parents. Digital clocks became so common that I never cared for it. Same with cursive, because of computers making cursive really pointless, I don't know how to write in it outside of my own signature.
Just yesterday my toddler told me it was 6 oclock because the big hand was pointing at the six.
Trying to explain to a three year old that the small hand was for the hour, and the big hand pointed at a number which you multiply by 5 to get the minutes was beyond him.
But the digital clock, he gets.
In exchange for charging my cellular watch every night, I get a device on my wrist that can make phone calls, stream music, store 16GB worth of music, has GPS for when I run, monitors my heart rate, gives me notifications and let’s me send messages.
If I went into coma in 2009 and the most advanced piece of technology that I knew at the time was the iPhone 3GS or the then current laptops and woke up in 2022, I would be much more impressed with the Apple Watch than any other piece of technology.
(I've had people tell me that you just put an apple watch on the charger overnight. Then why does it have a sleep tracker app that requires the watch to be on your wrist?)
We didn't get downgraded. The "dumb watch" product category is still alive and kicking. Whether it's the more moderate priced quartz segment, or the less moderately priced mechanical segment it's not even slightly dying. What we've gained is choice.
And I say this as someone who would never buy a smartwatch because it would need charging. I have a perfectly decent Citizen analog watch that has worked perfectly every day since I bought it five years ago (not even needing a battery change because it's solar powered). I occasionally consider splashing out on a mechanical watch, but even a 3 year servicing interval would be tedious.
Three categories, and the distribution of the current hour's minutes between them
You can't get much useful information from the hands' relationship to each other without knowing their relationship to the imaginary up line. If I say, "The hour and minute hands are 30° apart", what does that tell you about the distribution of time into past and future?
The hour hand shows distribution of hours between most recent 12 and next 12 into past and future. The minute hand is an entirely separate chart showing the distribution of minutes in the current hour into past and future.
Trying to read a clock from the frame of a pie chart is kind of confusing though, given this overlap. I don't think I would call it a good pie chart, much less the most perfect one.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that children who understand how to read only digital clocks are quite capable of answering what the time is (just read the numbers right off), but have trouble telling how many hours there are from 10am to 3pm.
I have a large analog clock in our living room that I look at every other day or so. I still find that I instantly understood the digital watch, but with the analog watch example I had to actually stop and look carefully at it for a second.
If I had a analog wrist watch I used every day I'm sure I'd be equally good with both. But I really think it takes more time to get used to the analog version. At least in modern society when we have numbers all around us all the time anyway. I'm sure someone who's not literate would feel very differently.
I'd say that's a failure to teach them analog time as toddlers, not digital time being inherently superior.
But on this point there isn’t anything inherently more abstract about Arabic numerals as a representation of numbers than the angles of the hands on a clock face (ie a short hand to the right is 3 and upright is 12, etc is a pretty efficient way to convey a number). As for what can be read quicker probably has overwhelmingly a lot to do what was learned in youth. Similar to stenographic shorthand this can probably be acquired but there just isn’t much incentive to do so.
There isn’t necessarily any extra “cognitive step” in the pattern recognition of a clock face vs that of a numeral.
I don’t know much about research on this particular area but there is some in the related area of written language.
If they can understand how the hour hand goes around, they can understand how a fuel gauge goes from Full to Empty. They can tell how a battery gauge on their iPad means they're running out of power.
Kids that age are soaking up concepts.
Maybe if you fill in the area covered you could more easily see it’s relation to pie charts.
A clock face is actually 3 pie charts on top of each other, indicating the ratio between hours, minutes, and seconds left in a sequence.
It might not be intuitive that it only covers half of the hours in a day (12) but then covers all minutes in an hour (60) and seconds in a minute (also 60).
By looking at the long hand (minutes) you can see the fraction of an hour that has elapsed if you color in the area between the “12” at the top, and for example, the “6” at the bottom. That would be half an hour. Or if the hand was in the “3” it would be a quarter hour, and you and see at a glance that a good majority of the hour is still remaining.
Seconds work the same way, with the skinny hand. For minutes and seconds you can just ignore the big numbers (or multiply then by 5 because 12 * 5 is 60).
But because the hours only cover half a day the ratio covers only half of that day, but you can still use the clock to decipher how much time has elapsed (or is left) between midday and midnight.
Having grown up with digital clocks, and only sweated through the difficult lessons of learning to read a clock face and not used them practically, even at school, you may not have realized this ratio (staring at the clock waiting for class to finish does not obviously indicate this property because classes are not evenly divided into hours)
With a digital watch, I have to wear glasses and deliberately focus on it.
There's good reasons why cars and airplanes still have analog displays, and people present data with graphs rather than columns of numbers.
On analogue clocks, it doesn't usually matter if I think it's 8:32 when it's really 8:34 unless I'm running for the train. However, I often make the terrible mistake of reading the wrong hour entirely. For that reason (and that I'm frequently running for trains) I do generally prefer digital clocks.
For a rev meter on a car on the other hand, all I care about is if it's getting too far to the bottom or too close to the red. Whether it's 3218RPM vs 3389RPM is entirely irrelevant. So for that, analogue is far better.
For flying, I quite like that electronic flight instrument panels have both analogue and digital displays.
In the cockpit, airspeed and altitude used to be presented on a dial like a watch (one hand in the case of airspeed, two hands or even three in the case of altitude).
In modern cockpits with screens, they could be presented like that, or just as numbers, but they are presented as infinite bands that move up and down. One sees the number on it, but also perceives movement (and how fast it moves) "out of the corner of an eye". Maybe it combines the advantages of both.
See here, for example, for both styles: https://www.flight-mechanic.com/pitot-static-pressure-sensin...
I wonder what studies were made regarding this design.
People wanted to look up to the town hall or church clock and see what hour it was, maybe quarter hour.
Maybe keeping it more distinct from a distance during daylight hours was more important?
But then again as Adams said elsewhere, Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so. That one still rings true, especially if you're a freelancer like me who never needs to get up and go to an office at 9AM.
On the other hand, analogue might probably slightly easier if I just want to get an to the nearest 15 minutes approximation of the time. If reading from an analogue clock, I'll probably say it is 3:30, but would say it is 3:27 if reading from the digital clock, as reading it exact is faster than rounding it. I have had people seem bemused by my telling them the precise time like that, but like, I'm not going to make more work for myself to make the time less precise to better match tradition.
But unlike some other people I know, I don't have much difficulty understanding the progress of time with a digital clock either. 13:54, and the equivalent clock face both give me equally good impression of how much time is left until until 14:00, and I feel no need to translate either into the other for that purpose.
It's a funny little hole in their wide skillset!
As an American it baffles me that an American editor would change the word disused but not the word lavatory.
One other thing. I’d rather have characters say ‘What do you mean?’ than ‘Whadd’ya mean?’
Again baffling. Whadd'ya mean is an accent, not a word choice. Changing it in text is as ridiculous as writing 50 as "fifdy" when it's an American character's dialogue.
It is bad to do that as you just justify their behaviour, and allow them to keep behaving as such by giving them what they expect and want.
Maybe my attitude could land me some enemies and prevent me opportunities, but I decided not to continue that vicious cycle.
We need to surround ourselves with people we respect and respects us equally, somewhere were feedback is possible.
Not only for the better of our minds but also for the better of the things we produce.
https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2018/06/disu...
(and yes, I am that Paul)
I guess the main thing was that Douglas Adams had the chance to review it and gave helpful feedback.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”
Apparently that got changed from "zebra" to "pedestrian" which entirely loses the black/white joke.
What you’re describing is “taking credit”.
But I want to point out some counter-examples.
1. Digimon Season 1 English Dub is far superior to the Japanese original. Many people choose Cowboy Bebop as the "Better in English" anime, but... Digimon S1 is night-and-day. Stronger script with better jokes/puns, cooler attack names (English "Pepper Breath" vs the Japanese "Baby Flame"), everything is straight up better in English.
2. Cowboy Bebop is probably the better known example in anime community.
3. Final Fantasy VII -- Perhaps it is more obvious that "Cloud" and "Earth" would have a doomed romantic relationship if we stuck to the original Japanese. But "Earth" was chosen as a name for the Japanese audience because English sounds exotic. To return that feeling of "exoticness", they transliterated it into "Aeris", and suddenly we return back to the original exotic feeling name.
4. Power Rangers -- Okay, I don't know how to think of this one. Power Rangers took the original Japanese stuff and changed it so much, it no longer looked anything like the original Super Sentai.
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Saban Entertainment knew how to do dubs / Americanizations. (Digimon S1, Power Rangers, Samurai Pizza Cats, Dragonball Z '96).
Just because other companies failed where Saban succeeded doesn't mean that "Americanization" is bad. Its that "bad Americanization" is bad.
エアリス (earisu) is not how Japanese speakers would pronounce "Earth". That would be アース (aasu), which sounds quite different. And you may be aware, but "Aeris" is not the preferred rendering today, which is "Aerith".
Don't have an opinion on your examples in general, just wanted to correct a misconception.
Power Rangers is probably the weirdest East/West thing to ever happen, yet still work out. The amount of "translation" that occurred is nearly nil, it was pretty much a wholesale reinvention of the entire plot.
Update: Actually, upon reading Adams's letter again more carefully, I'm seeing that he's probably making this very point! So I'll just leave my original comment as a more general one about where I think the issue originates.
Science-fiction and fantasy UK book covers were better too, which is another example of the same weird parochialism of the U.S. publishing industry as it was.
My probably unpopular opinion is that it's a reflection of a more general, largely un-self-aware New York City parochialism, which was where most of the big publishing firms were based, at least until the last decade or so.
It's interesting that your pet theory is New York City parochialism. Mine is gerontocracy: the (mostly New York based) publishers of SF & Fantasy have been run by the same aristocracy for ~70 years. And those folks cut their teeth on serialized pulp fiction, comic books, and magazines, which culminated in a certain art style that (imo) peaked in the 1980s.
If you browse wikipedia, you will see that many, many, many roads lead back to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Books
Outside of the US market, newer publishing shops were started & run by younger folks with more modern artistic visions.
Original (Japan): https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/5b/d9/225bd9e4fda8aee8ed0c...
Americanized: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/351430897872-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
The Japanese one is washed out and the art kinda looks amateur and crayola. I assumed that was the one you were complaining about because it minimizes the demon-looking Blanka and just looks boring.
Kinda like how my mom (US) wouldn't buy me Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans because the large green orc on the cover looked like a demon, and you just couldn't be doing that in the 90s with all the stories of children worshipping Satan coming out on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Especially the first book. My impression when I first saw it was. It looks like it was done by a talented middle schooler for a community center assignment. Something to pin on a wall with a blue ribbon.
Granted I was in elementary at the time
I think you all in this thread (and I) are under appreciating how much of that opinion is just pure nostalgia.
I doubt many people even know (or care) about the slight differences.
As to covers, even Tolkien was complaining about Americanization decades ago: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_277
I can't find the lion...
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IZy3SQYu8bQ/T3ByGLMH9BI/AAAAAAAAE...
Same with video games back in the day. The Japanese versions had much cooler box art than the Western ones. But they were often abandoned because they used a style that wasn't as popular in the West.
I am a non native speaker with an accent and I am often surprised to see that some US citizens have a very hard time with my accent while non native speakers have no problem understanding me. I suspect it is due to some US citizen not being used to dealing with a variety of sounds and inflexions.
They are honestly recording 2 versions of every intro for this?
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 worried me that they might have actually replaced Japanese music and actors with western "equivalents". But of course, there has been a great deal of cultural cross pollination, so it is no more unusual for a Japanese person to be aware of Sean Connery or The Brothers Grimm than it is for me. I didn't want to spoil the book by reading reviews before I read the book itself, but I skimmed enough to gather the Sean Connery part, at least, seems to be original source material.
Part of the attraction in reading a book like that is the fact that it is a Japanese book. It feels demeaning to have take that away because they worry the foreigness of it will be disturbing or unwelcomed by American readers.
The current Western Godzilla from 2024 on fared better with Japanese audiences, but they consider him too fat or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla,_King_of_the_Monsters!
In a story where everyone is a sorcerer, it dumbs that down a lot. It could be one of their kidney stones for all it matters.
(In the D&D model her wizards seem to operate more like sorcerers, but of course D&D doesn't make the rules for everyone).
Imagine picking up a book called "John Smith and the Architect's Compass" and having someone tell you the title makes sense because there is a legend about an ancient cult who guards a a device that can locate the holy grail.
Aside from the fact that there can be nothing more 'accurate' in fiction than the Author's own words ... the 'Philosopher's Stone' has mythological reference that 'Sorcerer's Stone' obviously doesn't.
And using American words for 'the toilet' that the characters may not have used themselves, is not 'more accurate'.
And it mostly has little to do with intelligence.
As a reminder to everyone - America is a very big place, with a lot of different people, often with different roots, migration status etc..
It's feasible kids from New England would adapt to the English version without any fuss, but beyond that, a lot of this vernacular would just be 'very foreign'. We're talking about kids with limited vocabulary to start with, not the guy with an 'English Accent' in the documentary.
All the more amusingly (or insultingly?) the Canadian release was the UK edition. Canadian English is much, much closer to American than British in its spoken form, so most of the worries about Briticisms would apply to Canadian children. Somehow we managed to read it, despite the strange and foreign speech and ideas.
Edit: excluding Quebec where cultural references are completely different.
America is a vast, vast place with very large numbers of people who have no cultural connection to 'English' culture. I mean - because America is an English colony, everyone does to some extent, but it's much deeper in some places (and groups) than others. Even those with continental European background, the further S. and E. you go, the less the resonance. And of course people with European backgrounds ... that's only part of America. Huge swaths of kids speak a language other than English at home, there's going to be no direct resonance with an 'Alternative English' (i.e. beyond American) in those cases.
Also, most children do not have any resonance with anything but their immediate culture - it takes a lot to get kinds beyond what's on TV, and/or what's in their immediate family environment.
I have utterly no idea why my OP is being downvoted. Usually, going against the grain on something will get you downvoted, or saying something silly but I can't fathom either this case.
I thought we settled that particular dispute a while back.
Another that bugged me was Northern Lights -> The Golden Compass. Apparently NL was too abstract for American audiences?
Oh and Harlequin -> The Archer's Tale.
According to Pullman that one wasn't really about an attempt at cultural adaptation, the title had been in flux and the US publisher had taken an early name for the upcoming series, "The Golden Compasses", and run with it before he settled on Northern Lights.
Not only did the American editors change the title, but the device in question – the alethiometer, which is not a compass – is made of brass not gold in the original text. The US editors basically changed it to gold to fit their created title.
In fact they're so popular that everyone seems to have the idea he's going to get a Nobel Prize someday, but I don't see why they'd give a prize to a novelist who only writes "women are so mysterious, truly men will never understand them" novels like him.
There's a weird inverse to this in the manga/anime Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Many of the characters and their special abilities are named after well known American bands and songs (e.g. Steely Dan, Killer Queen, Crazy Diamond). But when localized, many have been censored due to potential rights issues. So Killer Queen becomes Deadly Queen, which is kind of sad since the references make me appreciate the cultural cross pollination you mentioned.
If you want more _Japanese_ Japanese literature, try Kawabata or Akutagawa. Though understanding the various cultural references is going to be a whole endeavor if you're not already familiar.
Consider the line, "Like Papa Wallenda said, 'Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting." If you don't get the reference, you aren't missing much, but for those who do it's such a delightful little moment in the film, made better by its lack of supporting explanation. Thank god they didn't add clunky exposition to inform the viewer about the Wallendas.
Another favorite: when Michael is walking back into KGB's place, the place where he previously lost all his money, he says: "I feel like Buckner walking back into Shea." Who is Bucker, what is Shea, and what does it have to do with KGB? The film takes the chance you'll get it.
There are lots and lots of poker terms and references, too, most introduced without elaborate fanfare on the theory that a smart audience will pick them up as they go, but it's these random lines -- "In the legal sense, can fuckin' Steinbrenner move the Yankees?" -- that have always stuck with me.
Danger Mouse got a "modern" reboot in 2015, and by comparison it's awful. It's more colorful and garish, the dialogue is more rapid fire and less funny, and though it sometimes features new landmarks like the Gherkin, it has less of a British identity. Later on I found out that the producers copped to making a more American style cartoon, which is what the market seems to want.
Also Count Duckula! David Jason (who is very English) did an American accent in that. Which I don't recall finding odd at the time, as a child.
https://watchranker.com/best-calculator-watches/
10-year battery life! Far superior to the Apple Watch and similar knockoffs.
Edit: I noticed you (and the article) mentioned pie charts, and one of my favorite smart watch faces is "Old Fogies Can't See Worth S**" by m3tropolis[0]. It's a literal pie chart showing % of the hour elapsed vs. remaining, with the hour number in the middle. I find it extremely easy to understand, but tend to use other faces when I need to know exact minutes.
[0] https://apps.rebble.io/en_US/application/558782c83ae5e507fc0...
Never understood what the problem with having David Attenborough instead of Sigourney Weaver narrate Planet Earth was either.
The Aussie themes have even led to some history lessons in our house: a handful of episodes reference Australian soldiers (including Bluey's grandpa) which led to my kids asking what wars Australia fought in. Queue the (very) gentle introductions to WW1 and WW2, and the Pacific War specifically.
The exposure to places that are not-America is good for them!
"it's just a bunch of singing monkeys I wouldn't read too much in to it"
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 very different tonally (much more serene), but fans of Bluey should check out the BBC kids’ show Sarah & Duck, which is aimed at a similar age range and also contains much for parents to love as well as children. It’s gentle and surreal, and I’d have been happy to watch it on its own merits even if I didn’t have a kid who loved it as well.
The Attenborough cut is my personal preference too.
What we need to do is feed all of his narrations from the last 60 years into an AI and get it to process them; then we can use this corpus to have all nature documentaries narrated by him forever more.
I am, of course, joking... but would it really be that bad an idea? ;-)
Or to provide an Americanized analogy, you wouldn’t replace Morgan Freeman in a situation where you needed the sage reflections of an old man in voiceover form.
"..until eventually, they’re shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more."
-- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/11/theres-no-place-li...
I'm not disagreeing (I'm a bit too old for Bob the Builder and I don't have kids), I'm genuinely curious.
https://twitter.com/matttomic/status/1158910781964083201
The Japanese dub from what I've seen is surprisingly okay, but also kind of wordy, which they make up for by speaking faster than usual. (But they have the guy who does all the anime priests as Rev. Lovejoy.)
One out of every six big US movies would be black if it were proportionate to population, but they're not. The reason is because black people will watch white movies, but white people don't watch black movies. It's the people willing to walk away that make the decision.
It's very expensive to redub a series just to change the accent; they're getting a return on that.
What happened to "people just want to be represented in movies"? Simply put, since there are more whites than blacks in the U.S., then every film-maker has an incentive to represent them more to reach a broader audience.
This is absolutely not because "white people are more bigoted", which is laughable when you consider that they are surely, in proportion, the most xenophile people on the planet.
You seem to be supporting that opinion, but angrily.
Would you mind substantiating this?
- reflect on how many white people have made a social virtue out of countersignaling their own group;
- point out how low the bar is in the rest of the world, and how easy this comparison really is.
We don't need more Americanized stuff. If anything it should be the reverse: USA needs more international content, accents, etc.
But some episodes I wonder if overseas audiences get the same tensions. IE Curry Quest, walk for a curry swap but have to deal with a magpie.
Do people really understand how "out to get you" magpies can be in Spring? As a kid, they can be vicious bastards.. when I realised they were dealing with one I was anxious over how it was going to go.
My brother tried to order an apple pie fritter in Canada and the woman didn't understand what he was asking for. When he proncounced it fridder, she did :-) I understood both ways perfectly well but hey!
I think it started with Pawn Stars and went downhill from there. MBAs saw $$$ and had no qualms about dumbing down their national audience and trashing the reputations of the channels in the process. American TV is unwatchable IMO.
I remember when my complaint about the History Channel was that it was WWII all the time. It was still massively better than today; at least I learned about the Battle of the Bulge over and over and over.
Now I'm sure there's variations of British accents, but the ones we were exposed to as children seemed to coincide with "scientific" or other educational content.
That's an understatement.
or maybe: Thaaats and aaandastatement.
I grew up reading Paddington books, and about 90% of what I know about British money came from those books. Re-interpreting it to American dollars would have ruined the immersion into the story, IMO. I was very glad when the Paddington movies were unapologetically British.
Edit:
> Actress and conservationist Sigourney Weaver was brought in to replace David Attenborough as narrator, as it was thought her familiarity to American audiences would attract more viewers.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(2006_TV_series)
I'm not denying that Attenborough is a category in himself and a wonderful narrator of course.
Freeman and Sigourney are in a different category. Both are excellent actors and narrators in films directed by another people. Freeman is "the" voice in the anglosphere, but Rodriguez de la Fuente was "the" voice in the latinosphere. Everybody was trying to imitate their style and accent decades after their death. He was the leader in a wolf pack when nobody was doing that, and don't hesitate to escalate a clift to take a good shot of a vulture nest. He was not an actor that just arrives to a set, say their lines and go.
By the end of his life, Jacques Cousteau seemed a caricature of himself. The red cap, the thick accent--the Cousteau aesthetic was so overripe that director Wes Anderson used it as the template for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/water-activi...
She, a world-renowned scholar and classicist, was replaced by Liev fucking Schreiber.
And it gives great ideas for playing with the kids.
PM: "TV Guide" is a Registered Trademark. You can't call it that! Non-US-folks: "Uhm, TV guide is just, ehhm, what it says" PM: "We'll be sued! We'll be wiped out" Non-US-folks: "Uhm, OK, so what about 'TV Listings'" PM: "Oh, yeah, that will be OK"
How any of this makes any difference still eludes me, but yeah...
Incidentally, I was recently very surprised to discover, via my young nephew, that the Turtles are still very much a thing. Who'd have thought of the Ninja Turtles as a piece of 90s culture that would endure?
The mythology for the rename was that kids copied them and hurt themselves, but that seems an unlikely reason as changing the name wouldn't change kids copying from them??
I think it's funny how for a brief moment there the digital watches joke became a thing again when everyone started pushing smart watches.
Funny enough, I kind of agree with adams that displaying a pictorial representation of time is better than it's numeric value, but honestly I find the classic representation too easy to trip up on.
>Incidentally, I noticed a few years ago, when we still had £1 notes, that the Queen looked very severe on £1 notes, less severe on five pound notes, and so on, all the way up to £50 notes. If you had a £50 the queen smiled at you very broadly
no way... https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/withdrawn-banknote...
oh my god it's kinda there! Go to 1992, What the hell?!?!
Edit: Oh I see. In 1992 they were rotating in new notes for 5 pound and above, but the series D pound notes were still in circulation, in those the queen was more demure, and in the new notes she's much happier.
Trying anyway to link the idea to the context: there is no need to translate a Local Language work into an International Language transposition - no need already per se. But especially, it is most normal for works of arts to written using specific localisms, well in a deliberate concept from the author - it is normally the duty of a translator to try and convey those choices, which makes it below absurd to suppose to instead nullify those features in a standardized relative of the same language.
But International English is Oxford, not Cambridge. The convention came to be OED.
> So I think it needs no explanation which DNA would prefer
I do not understand. "DNA"?
> The '-ize' prefix...
Since we're doing flagrant pedantry, let's go all in: don't you mean suffix?
By the way: no pedantry involved (unless you mean the "educating" value of information passed here where "intellectual curiosity" is the criterion for exchange). The purpose and implicit messages in your original post were unclear (many readings were possible).
He courted his wife entirely by letters on paper. This was not pre-Internet days, either; it was around 2000.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7LRg2NAfM&list=PL4ugKP-T4L...
I enjoyed Douglas Adam's letter though I can't help thinking it was meant for publication.
https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/the-fall-of-the-reven...
"The movie is pretty much all climax. The Autobots® and Decepticons® must not have read the warning label on their Viagra. At last we see what a four-hour erection looks like."
The Uk is full of dumb nonsensical names.
Curries is an electric store.
Oh yes, perfect sense.
It's named after its founders (Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer).
Doesn't the US have a supermarket called Trader Joe's, also named after its founder?
In Australia we have Bunnings:a pallet-shelving style hardware(paints/tools/wood/whatever else) store.
WTF is a bunning anyway?
With no proper definition the Urban Dictionary definition(NSFW) makes shopping much more amusing...
And translations are even worst.. .
TFTFY
That being said, "disused lavatory" is reasonable to change, although "unused lavatory" is entirely the wrong way to do it! That translation both changes the meaning of the phrase and doesn't even get rid of the obvious Britishism. I would have gone for "derelict bathroom" maybe? Maybe "dilapidated"?
When I first read HGTTG in 5th-6th grade, it was exactly this kind of language that drew me to it. It enhanced the humor for me, and it would feel dead to regionalize it, and lose an integral part of the character.
I expect any American older than this to cope with a few less familiar words.