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Comment by ignite | Hacker News Reader

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.

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-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 ...

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