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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

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"

View on HN

- "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/ ("American Gods Blog, Post 24" [2001])

My dad had a work anecdote about a company invite to an "African-American tie event".

It was a British company.

My South African sister in-law who recently immigrated to America said that her black peers in grade school would sometimes refer to themselves as African American.

Cultural hegemony complete.

It's not too surprising in America, but I know a person who would refer to any Black person as African American in Europe. In most cases, neither party would have had set their foot in America in their lives.

I think parent talks about people in South Africa referring to themselves as ‘African American’.

Yes, this was happening in classrooms in South Africa.

For good or bad, in many underdeveloped places where black people are rare, they are intuitively perceived as Americans (which stereotypically means rich, cool, free and capable of teaching you great English) and treated with additional respect because of this.

I had a South African friend in middle and high school. They fled the country when it became popular to put a tire around a white person's neck, full it with gasoline, and light it. Mandela's wife promoted doing this.

They gained American citizenship. She became my African American friend. Everyone told me I was terrible for talking that way.

Heard my daughter using the n-word for her school mates (they ain't black) - they all listened to rap music and obviously our schooling system don't cover American history i.r.o slavery.

Had to explain to her why it would not be good idea to do that in the US.

I never believed in the idea of embracing an offensive word and somehow "taking out the sting" like rappers did.

We have a similiar word - the k word for blacks - it is fortunaly banned and if you used it on social media you clearly identify as a racist.

I'm a little confused - are you talking about Black South Africans? Hmm.

I foolishly expected that people like Elon Musk could be truthfully called "African-American", but I did a survey of the definitions, and most all of them agreed that an African-American must be Black (and I'm not sure how that is recursively defined, or whether it has to do with race, ethnicity, or simply color of skin: it must be the latter if it has any meaning separate from "African"!)

Typically, African-American means black AND, unintuitively, American for generations IME. Maybe it shouldn't mean that but that's kind of assumed where I live at least. For first or second generation Americans you might use the country (eg Nigerian-American). For other races from Africa you'd also rarely hear them referred to as African American.

It's a bit weird from the outside tho cause if you're a white south-african and you hear the phrase used in America you'd be like "oh, I should refer to myself as an African-American" although unlike Americans, people generally only refer to themselves as being from the place once they have citizenship (and would therefore have learnt the intricacies of the American phrase) and even then many people choose not to.

American: "I'm Irish" Me: "No, you're not"

Of course, part of the issue here is that there isn't really a good shorthand term for "the group of American Black people of diverse African origin whose cultures were oppressed and destroyed by the white majority for centuries, leading to a mélange culture intentionally constructed out of the remaining scraps".

But "Caucasian" is (was?) used for people who for many generations weren't anywhere near Caucasus Mountains.

Oh God I hope people showed up in some outrageously... I don't even know what, but just some outrageous (not black bow) ties. That's brilliant.

I could see how some ties could upset everyone.

Alternatively, that's how you end up with an accidental cakewalk.

The Scunthorpe problem

In my experience Americans are shocked that it's perfectly fine to say that someone's black in the UK.

Those of us who follow usage guidelines more closely know that it's OK to use the 'b-word'. Case in point, https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-us-news-busine...

It gets an even more politically incorrect meaning when you read "tie" as a verb.

> It gets an even more politically incorrect meaning when you read "tie" as a verb.

The change from "black tie" to "african-american tie" seems much less like a goofy 'find and replace' fail when you read it that way.

I once worked on a project where we had the concept of a "case" and we had to change it to a "task"..

Suddenly, we had a lot of "switch/task" statements that somewhat perplexed the compiler.

An SEO bot stole my blog post about Old Street in London, it was now about Ancient Road instead.

You should check out the TV show Old Aliens.

Don't you mean Senior Citizen Foreigners?

Re>> "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-b...

[1]

> 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.

This was great, thank you.

One positive outcome though is the invention of a collection of excellent words: foreverything, foreveryone and forevery. I don't know what they mean, but I like them.

Some 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.

Maybe people can just deal with books having regional differences in the same way authors do. Is it so scary for F. Scott Fitzgerald to write about the color of the light, but Rowling to talk about the colours of the school houses?

This. Stop dumbing things down (like my browser's dictionary that apparently doesn't know the word "dumbing"). Let the readers find and delight in the differences of diction and usage.

I think the sort of people who read books can probably cope. It sounds like the publishers are making allowances for the sort of people who don’t do much reading anyway.

Uhh... People who count listening to the audio book as "reading."

Well people listening to the audio book:

- can’t hear the differences in spelling between American and British English

- are listening to someone read. That person probably is able to read either American or British English.

That said, some words really are different and could cause confusion/disconnect so probably are potential candidates for being changed even in audio books.

- the one he gave “apartment” vs “flat” is a good example. I think British people would all be fine with “apartment” whereas I think “flat” might confuse some Americans who hadn’t heard that usage.

- “pavement” means the road surface in the US vs it means the pedestrian path on the side of the road in the UK (that in the US you would call a “sidewalk”). “Sidewalk” wouldn’t confuse a British person but it’s not a word a British person would use. “Pavement” meaning the road surface does confuse British people.

- “jumper” in the UK vs “sweater” in the US

- Don’t even ask about “pants”

- etc

I'm not having that though - it's all one way in favour of keeping Americanisms because we're familiar enough with them to understand them. No thanks.

On the flipside, I was delighted to hear stories of US kids confusing their parents with British English because they'd watched so much Peppa Pig during lockdown. Very good.

> might confuse some Americans who hadn’t heard that usage.

Imagine learning something about the world after reading (or hearing) a book!

I basically agree and wouldn't want things to be changed in general. That being said, the choice of words in a novel should generally be governed by the artistic intent of the author rather than the desire to teach people stuff.

But here's an example that's worth thinking through. This movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110428/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 was called "The Madness of King George". It's based on a play called "The Madness of George III". They changed the name when producing the movie because of the difference between Britain and the US.

In Britain pretty much everyone would know that George III refers to King George III. However when they first started discussing this project in the US, a common reaction was "I haven't seen "The Madness of George 1 and 2". Now the differences between the titles wasn't that important and clearly this was just an impediment to understanding with no benefit.

Now you could say "Well the people could go on wikipedia and find out that there was a King George and a King George II and then this guy, George III" and that's true but the problem is negative self-selection. People who don't know that don't realise that's what's at play here and so won't do that search so nobody learns anything.

It's not particularly reassuring that "George III" (spoken aloud as "George the Third" ), and "George 3" (spoken aloud as "George Three" ) are apparently thought to be interchangeable in the US.

This! One of the things that used to happen is you'd pick up a book, and encounter a word or phrase you don't know or understand, and you'd go look it up. This is easier than ever with the internet.

Don't know why someone would "rent a flat?" You go look the phrase up and discover that it's British usage. Confusion over... because you learned. Reading Moby Dick and don't know what "scraggy scoria" is? You look the words up and learn they're the perfect fit for the landscape Melville is painting.

https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/scraggy

https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/scoria

My favourite anecdote is when an english bloke goes to the U.S. and asks if he can "bum a fag" from someone, meaning "ask for a free cigarette" in British.

At least it is the full book, unlike movie adaptations, also a nice way to "read" while driving.

That example isn't scary, of course. The -or/-our spelling difference is only the simplest example of what's different between American and British English. I think it's pretty clear to someone who's never even encountered the other spelling to infer what the word means.

But there are difficult examples, even in Rowling. She uses "revision" in a way that American readers don't know ("studying") and might have a hard time piecing together from context. It's not like the reader will be prompted to open a dictionary, since "revision" is a common word in AE. It just makes for a poor reader experience.

That's the most ridiculous thing I've come across in a while. It absolutely doesn't make for a poor reader experience, and that's some US Defaultism if I've ever heard it. And I'm neither British nor American! US writing is basically never localised to Australian English, why in the world must the converse be true?

If this is what the level of education has become in the US, well, I guess it kind of explains a lot

Doesn't quite have the same ring to it:

> Righto, mate, gimme a shout as Ishmael. Few donkey's years ago—don't get your knickers in a twist 'bout when exactly—findin' me wallet as dry as a dead dingo's donger, and not a bloody thing worth a squiz on the land, reckon I'd chuck a U-ey on life, put a bit of water under me bridge. Wanted a stickybeak at the wet half of this great wide world, didn't I?

(With ChatGPT assist!)

Donkeys years ago means a long time. You don't prefix it with a few.

Do you imagine people without any dialect of English as a native language read books and articles on the internet with a dictionary at hand or do you think they somehow cope with the unknown and manage with context alone?

As someone who reads fantasy fiction a lot, honestly I'd prefer if I read everything in American English. The biggest thing that gets me is e.g. "defence" instead of "defense" and other places where British English uses a 'c' instead of an 's'. It seriously diminishes the immersion for me, even if I've read probably 50+ books with the version I'm not used to by now.

It's never stopped me from reading a book before, but it does diminish my enjoyment quite a bit. For nonfiction, I don't care, I'm reading actively regardless. But when reading passively for enjoyment, it's noticeable and irritating.

For fantaſy, eſpecially, I diſagree. When I'm in charge, the long-ſ will be mandatory in any ſtory involving magick, to better ſhew the hiſtorical baſis of the mythology (unleſs, of courſe, a ſkinwalker were to be involved, in which caſe American ſpellings are indeed preferred)

Фор бетер іммерсіон, ол тектс ін сторіес И ред шѵд бе урітен уіþ олд сирілік летерс, регардлес ов þе лангѵадж.

ᚳᚫᚾ᛫ᛁ᛫ᚫᛞᛞ᛫ᚫ᛫ᛒᛁᛏ᛫ᚩᚠ᛫ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ᛫ᛏᚩ᛫ᛏᚻᛖ᛫ᛗᛁᛉ?

פור טקסטס סט ין אנשיאנט טיימס, אונלי עברית וילל דו.

Incredible. I sent that to Google translate and it translated fairly well.

(For those who can't read it - the text is English transliterated into Hebrew script, not actually Hebrew. I'm impressed that Google managed to make sense of it)

> уіþ Was the thorn really a part of old Cyrillic? Would make some sense given the shared history, but still.

> И I struggled for a bit with this one, but I don't know of a better way to represent it other then "ai" in Cyrillic I guess.

The "ѵ" is interesting too, never seen that before since you can make do with the sorta B-looking letter instead.

There're several mistakes:

- instead þ could be used ѳ;

- с in тектс is missed, it should be текстс or better теѯтс;

- ѵ is basically Greek upsilon which appeared in English mostly as u [auto] or y [system], therefore шѵд would be better written as шоѵд where /oѵ/ in old Cyrillic pronounsed as /u/ as in Greek, or just шꙋд;

- дж in лангѵадж could be writtend as џ;

And so on.

Thanks, these are good. I took inspiration from this horrible PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14YgpdJ-k5M-GiwRDblvnEtsFvok...

> Was the thorn really a part of old Cyrillic?

No, never was a thing. Early Cyrillic had a bunch of unique letters that are long gone, but it never had "þ" in there.

> The "ѵ" is interesting too

It's from Greek "Y" (upsilon) and it - depending on the place - could've meant either /i/ or /v/ sound (and /u/ when in "оѵ" digraph, so parent comment has it wrong): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izhitsa

I think you’re on to something

𐡅𐡉 𐡍𐡕 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡊

I have to say that the long-s looks quite horrible in Verdana, and probably most other sans-serif font. That makes sense, since most Sans Serif typefaces significantly postdate the abandonment of the long-s.

If you want to see how it should look in context, here's a typical 17th century example: https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/images/86066/paradise-lost-a...

The prints from the 18th century are even nicer with better quality and consistency in general. The Caslon typefaces are pretty exemplary here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/A_Specim...

Roman typefaces with a long-s are a very 17th-18th century thing. A blackletter (gothic) typeface gets you closer, but all of that is still not very much medieval. What you really want is a meticulously manuscript in Carolingian Miniscule[1] or Uncial script[2], complete with killer rabbits[3] and knights fighting snails[4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script

[3] https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2021/06/killer-rabb...

[4] https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-sn...

Sadly I still read the s as f so I keep got stumped. "fantafy?"

Reminds me of a Just William story where he copied a letter from a letter-writing guide book, studiously converting all the "f"s into "s"s.

I read someone saying that reading text with the long s is like hearing someone speak with a lisp, and that is SO true. I love it.

> seriously diminishes the immersion for me

Upvoting because this is seriously interesting. I can see old or Tolkien English being a hurdle, so I relate to what you’re saying. But small changes in diction tend to draw me into the world, by othering it from the familiar.

I think it might be partially because I've done & currently do some copyediting work. So I'm pretty trained to see any grammar or spelling mistake. To be clear, it's not the difference in language that bothers me, just words that are spelled differently from American English. I literally can't not see them.

...what? Why would this make a difference?

I've found this jarring only in one case: the dub of Mary and the Witch's Flower, where the setting was an emphatically English-style public school, the lead character's VA had (or was using) a strong Home Counties accent, but the lines were full of US-only terms like "Somophore". It just felt horribly fake (even in a fantasy story!) because you'd never see those things together in real life.

> but the lines were full of US-only terms like "Somophore"

“Sophomore”, maybe?

Oh probably, I don't really speak American and it was a while ago.

Somophore is the same thing but they carry flags with them everywhere.

A differense, please, GP's reading.

For me, it's reading words like 'centre' and 'colour' or 'practise' because I can't help but read them as 'sen-trey', 'col-ore' and 'prac-tize'

People knowing enough about regex replace to use word boundaries are most likely aware just how dangerous bulk replacing is, and will either be super careful, or just won't do it like that.

Troublingly, "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.

Surely, an LLM could handle this, if it were to get fed the entire book in chunks. "Change all mentions of the word 'flat' in its connotation as the British word for 'apartment', to say 'apartment'. Make no other changes to the manuscript." Then have it double-check its work afterwards. "Does every instance of the word 'apartment' in this text make sense? Does every instance of the word 'flat' in this text make sense in American English?"

and then run this prompt on each pair of words that you want it to do. When it's done, run a quick diffcheck on it & check its work to learn of any gotchas.

Surely the effort to manage LLMs is wasted on keeping a publisher from having to do the job they’re paid for.

Are we really going to let big corp automate away their role in the social contract? Ostensibly Random House needs to provide real output not just be a brand that farms out all the work to AI, and thus captures value on the fiat ledger.

The number of rent seeker non-contributors is too damn high. We cannot base society off dying peoples hallucinations about how the world works anymore. This is bonkers.

I never asked to exist. Why am I constrained to beliefs like Bill Gates and the like are divine in contemporary ways?

Why the hell does it have to be AI? A regex would be faster to run, test, and diff check. Even better,instead of paying a programmer to waste your time just pay an actual editor to proof read it

It doesn't. It perhaps shouldn't.

That said, I found myself doing little text mangling tasks with GPT-4 instead of appropriate command line tools, because fuck if I remember the flags to sort and unique, and it's much faster to just describe what I want and have the LLM take a crack at it.

This is why, I think, you'll see a lot of simple(ish) tasks being done by LLMs, at couple orders of magnitude more compute cost - it's just that much more convenient.

EDIT: nevermind. That was about just doing regex replace.

But if you want to do it correctly in an automated way, LLMs are indeed the best tool for the job in the general case, because they understand how language work, in a way that you can't really formalize in code. No, feeding the complete definition of English grammar to the computer won't help, because a) it probably doesn't exist, and b) even if it does, it's merely a suggestion - natural language is a living thing, and is not bound by fixed rulesets.

Typing out the instructions, copying and pasting the data, then analyzing the output for correctness is faster than running `sort -h` ?

It can be less mental effort, not necessarily faster.

Faster than recalling or finding out again that it's `sort -h`, and not `sort -n` or `xargs -wtf -- sort -xkcd {}` or whatever.

But the LLM already "understands" the changes that need to be made. A regex to figure out if "flat" means "apartment" or not? Consider the text (which I just made up & I'm really not a fiction writer so I apologize for it being terrible):

"Oh, I live near there too! House or flat?"

Stanley hesitated. These questions were getting more and more personal. Was this her idea of casual conversation? Or was she trying to get to know him personally? Well, he thought, what could go wrong if I treat this like a conversation. "Flat," he said. And then asked a question of his own. "What kind of pop do you like?"

How are you going to decide if "flat" is talking about non-fizzy pop/soda, or a dwelling space with a regex? It's a lot closer to the word "pop."

Of course, GPT handles this perfectly https://chat.openai.com/share/fb6a56a2-749c-4e71-9506-541bb8...

Some places in America do say "pop" instead of "soda," so I'm hesitant to call it perfect...

But I'll admit I agree that this is well beyond the scope of regex.

Because replacing all appearances of apartment with apartment just apartment out isn’t going to work?

If you're going to use an ML model, you might as well use an existing language translation model rather than asking ChatGPT or the like to convert words one by one. You'd probably get better results treating American English and British English as entirely different languages rather than assuming one is the same as the other but with a handful of different words.

instead of feeding it into a black box and hoping it does the right thing, how about just paying someone to manually find each instance and only replace it if appropriate. it's tedious and grueling but assuming every other word isn't "flat" should only take a few hours.

You 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.

It's a shame that part-of-speech analysis tools aren't more widely available or widely used. That could at least reduce the damage done on "flat" -> "apartment", even when only considering entire words.

This is not going to save you completely unfortunately. You still need to know if a flat is a flat tyre, a flatbed, or an apartment.

Douglas 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-amer...

This 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.

The word you really needed to know was dictionary, not analgesic ;-)

Analgesic isn't a British word, though. It's used plenty in American medicine.

No, Americans only know brand names because #capitalism.

...that's why everyone in the UK has a Hoover. The most common term I've heard for {acetominophen, ibuprofen, etc} in the US is "pain killer".

So aggressive. In Dutch it's a pijnstiller, or "pain silencer".

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CWGi1k1BHV0

Sometimes 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.

Yes! It was the “Rory Award” from Life, the Universe and Everything:

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Rory_Award

Definitely funnier as “Belgium”.

"So why suddenly ‘Newark’ instead of ‘Rickmansworth’? And ‘Bloomingdales’ instead of ‘Marks & Spencer’?"

Newark (on Trent) is in Notts. Rickmansworth is pronounced "Rick-uth" (not really but it should be) and Bloomingdales would be pronounced something like "Blimmin'dolls", if it ever showed itself over here.

The Adams quotes are from some time ago and we have all passed a lot of water since then. The entirety of en_* are now routinely bombarded with everyone else's TV/stream output in various guises. I might be a Brit but I am now (not really) intimately familiar with Australian and New Zealand police and "Border Force" etiquette and more. I can even hold my own when confronted with a particularly tricky issue in say Nunavut with the RCMPs. I am of course an expert in Texan rangering thanks to a bloke called Walker.

You say tomato and I say fuck that: viva la difference!

> The Adams quotes are from some time ago

I would be surprised if they were recent, but I wouldn't put it past him, either.

There's a Newark in England.

There'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)

We'll all be homosexual when Johnny comes marching home.

The best part of this link was learning about Reuters saying Queen Elizabeth lays 2000 eggs per day.

I missed that!

My 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.

-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'

> Star Wars

Putting this here for anyone who needs a laugh:

Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DI5WyiHQno

(Someone took a copy of Revenge of the Sith that had been translated from English to Chinese and back, and then re-recorded that dialogue and put it back over the original footage.)

And here's the entire 2h20 of this mistranslated movie: https://youtu.be/XziLNeFm1ok

(Baader-Meinhof is a funny thing. I have learned of this movie less than 12 hours ago and here it is again)

Thanks, I just watched a fragment of that video.

I'm amazed by how much more realistic the space fights looked in the first three Star Wars movies compared to the CG stuff.

I think it's worth citing the original source for this!

http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west....

It was originally bought from a DVD street vendor in Shanghai. And it's the source of "do not want" as a meme!

This is brilliant; I didn't know there was a well-known source for this. Thank you!

In the Finnish subs for The Royal Tenenbaums DVD, a character who says in English “There’s a dent in the car. There’s one here, too” gets translated as “There’s a dentist in that car. There is a dentist, too.”

A few years after I saw this, I entered the film translation business myself. Generally for anything Hollywood or otherwise big-budget, you can watch a copy of the whole film yourself to understand the context, and you can bill the client for the time spent doing that. Therefore, I tend to suspect that such cases of mistranslation are laziness or a company with an incompetent workflow.

Another classic is a Simpsons episode where Homer shouts „Isotopes rules!“ which in the German dub turned into „Isotopenspielregeln!“ (rules of the game Isotopes)

Very 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.

Translations 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

I've often seen TV series translations (both as subtitles and as scripts for later dubbing) done by handing over the text to be translated - without any access to the show itself. So the translator has zero context what is on the screen that they're talking about, for things similar to that Star Wars scene, the translator would have no way of telling whether that "light sabre" is bright or lightweight.

I mean... The first one wouldn't be confusing, if it was plainly called Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech.

So a Norwegian interpreter - who has no obligation to know of Lincoln whatsoever - can read it and reasonably interpret it as a request for an address in Gettysburg, for Mr Lincoln.

> who has no obligation to know of Lincoln whatsoever

Part of being a decent translator is having a knowledge of the common cultural references of the source-language’s country/countries. Films very frequently generally play on local history or previous films or literature, and you are expected to be able to deal with that.

I suspect it was an early attempt at machine translation, or perhaps that the translators are paid so bad there is no incentive to pause even for a moment to evaluate if the translation makes sense in context.

The problem is what you don't know you don't know. If your understanding is lacking, how do you know you're not watching a movie veering into the absurd?

The first one wouldn't be confusing, if it was plainly called Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech.

Do you seriously not know that a speech is an "address?"

The translator apparently did not, and it would probably have been fine if it was actually called Speach.

that was the entire point of the comment

The weirdest number translation I saw was on a package of spaghetti. The cooking time was 8-10 minutes in English, and 10-12 minutes in Spanish. Note that they were both in Arabic numerals, not spelled out. Why do I have to cook my spaghetti longer if I speak Spanish??

I've got a pack of rice that says put in X amount of water and cook until dry in danish, in swedish it says put in 2*X amount of water, cook Y minutes and strain the rice. Double confusion, why different instructions and who strains water from the rice

It's an official recommendation in Sweden due to arsenic content of rice.

https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/en/food-and-content/oonskade...

Thanks for the revelation of the mystery

For food to be kept in the refrigerator Danish, Swedish, and Finnish instructions differ by 1 degree centigrade each. Don't remember the values from the top of my head, something like 8, 7, 6 respectively.

To this day, living in US for 8 years, I have to stop and think if I need to translate minutes and seconds to American.

There's a handy rule of thumb for this: is the number of seconds per minute (60 aka 2*2*3*5) a weird, random-sounding number that's way too easy to make clean subdivisions out of[0], rather than a nice, math-hostile power of ten? Then it's probably already in American units, unless it's British.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number

Robespierre wanted to saddle us with metric time too, you know.

The 60 is from Sumer.

It's in the context of:

> I have to stop and think if I need to translate [] to American.

and I assume (reasonably though not certainly) that the commentor is not Sumerian.

After careful double blind studies, it was determined that if you directed impatient spaniards to cook for 10-12 minutes, they cooked it for 8-10 minutes?

This translation really is weird! :-D

Spanish speaker has different al dente preference?

We do. We tend to overcook pasta.

I'm surprised to learn that the English don't.

Because spanish people like their pasta mushy and overcooked (true story)

Many cities in Mexico are at relatively high altitudw (but probably not high enough to make a difference...).

Probably a cut and paste job from another style of pasta they offer, and the intern was asked to just change the pasta name and cooking times...

The English speakers will overcook it anyway.

Atmospheric pressure? Water hardness?

Go figure.

I remember seeing a snippet of a text talking about global warming that said something like "a rise of 2C(35.6F)"

Exactly 1,000 feet is 304.8 meters, but "or about 300 meters" would have sufficed given the context. "About 1000 feet" already implies not being exactly 1000 feet.

Of course, exactly 6 ft is 182.88 cm, but the precision is unnecessary there too. 189 cm if it was right on the 6 ft mark.

Precision might be an overshoot, but providing SI measurements along the obsolete yet better sounding to NA ear units is quite nice. Since most of the weird units offer no straightforward / memorable ratio to multiply by to get a regular one, so people outside the bubble cannot translate it to anything meaningful.

you have a small typo which is a bit humorous in this context: 182.88" meters (or about 183 inches-meters?)

That, and 6 feet is closer to 2 meters than 200.

I'd bet, it was centimeters which the way to give height in most countries using metric.

My dad wrote the gardening column in the local newspaper, and a yearly gardening book, when NZ went metric they updated the book with things like "plant seeds an inch apart" with "plant seeds 2.54cm apart" .....

maybe this actually are best space between seeds:)

Dad just thought it was stupid

There's several browser extensions which will do "metrication" for you. I leave one on just for the occasional amusement (although I'm actually more comfortable with US units), and it recently did that to the title of this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35539595

In Windows 10 the Polish translation for the emoji keyboard shortcut was translated [Win+Okres], which pretty much means [Win+menstruation]

182 meters tall? Dayum.

with two digits precision even? that's bad ...

To 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".

There 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).

Please help me understand this! Encyclongs doesn’t compute for me and also does not contain any w or v.

If 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.

Vikings == wikings (in Russian spelling)

> echo "wikings" | sed "s;wiki;encyclo;" # which is what enci.ru did

"encyclongs"

This 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_199...

Is it so hard to only replace full word matches?

Also 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."

Clbuttic mistake!

I 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?

I 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.

Seems really strange to me not to defer to whatever the author wants.

Having said that, I don’t disagree with what you’re saying.

Why would such people read things written by a filthy foreigner?

That'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.

When I'm feeling down, reading about stuff like this always gives me an elevator

I 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

[2]: https://youtu.be/CFCqe3A5dFg?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...

That 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

the 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!"

ChatGPT, GPT4, 5, 6, ... :

Change all occurrences of flat to apartment, intelligently!

Got you!

;-)

As a bonus it will even insert random facts about current political candidates!

Ha ha, good one. In fact, (shhh ...), that is the main purpose of all AI. ;-)

"He looked out over the flat landscape" -> "He looked out over the landscape, intelligently"

Nice try.

Ch(e)ating, obviously. You omitted apartment in the replacement.

Oh man, that's a clbuttic mistake!

I laughed so hard, I let out an apartmentus.

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