cerehling - Tumblr blog

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Taskmaster NZ (2020): Gluten Free.

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in guarani there's a standard greeting that literally translates to "are you happy" (ndevy'apa) and the natural reply is "i'm happy" (avy'a) and as americans learning the language we were so distressed like "but what if we're not happy....." and our teachers were like "that's so not the fucking point"

we kept trying to think of any other way to reply but our teachers kept trying to get it into our brains that it's an idiomatic greeting, it literally is not the time or place to traumadump, and as usamerican english speakers we are not some special exception for saying "what's up" with the reply being "not much" instead of "the ceiling"

but anyway while i was working in paraguay -- the country with the largest population of guarani speakers -- i got sent an article by some friends back home like "look! they're saying that paraguay is the happiest country in the world!"

and the methodology was "we went around and asked paraguayans if they're happy and recorded their responses" and i was like. oh. of course you did. and of course you got a 100% positive response rate.

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Taskmaster New Zealand

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This new season of Taskmaster NZ having Karen O'Leary kissing Paul Williams in two separate episodes just further cements my theory that Paul is one of those weird little guys that wlw just inexplicably become obsessed with.

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spn rpf is real if the ship you choose is niche enough

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DJ: [...] and then Ty and I were- became, like, inseparable at the very beginning. Like, just immediately. And over the last 10 years our relationship evolved to what it is today. And now we're getting married. It's just so crazy. That this person who was just my friend, now I think about all the time. And he sends me the best messages and he supports me and loves me unconditionally in the right way, cause I would never abuse that [...]

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The Group of Czech-Slovak Surrealists, The Fortune Teller’s Surrealist Cards, 1999

Talent, The Decisive Encounter, Health The Messenger from the East, The Sacred Cow, The Predator Death, Grief, Bad Advice The Ideal, Crematorium, Bath Lovers, The Lover, Moderation

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I’ve been having trouble putting this idea into words so you’ll have to bear with me, but I was struck when I saw a Japanese news program interviewing foreign tourists in Japan, and some australian women were dubbed over with a stereotypically feminine speech register (lots of のs and わs), and my first thought was “they weren’t speaking that femininely in english”.

A friend of mine from the UK recently mentioned that he noticed that australia has a generally more masculine culture than england - he felt that everyone is a bit more masculine here, including women. This kind of confirmed to me that my impressions of the dubbing were right - the tourists were speaking in a relatively (internationally) more masculine way. Yet their dub made them sound so much more feminine.

It made me wonder. When translating something, do you translate the manner of speaking “directly”, or “relatively” in terms of cultural norms? Maybe this graph will help me explain the question.

A direct appoach in this case might appear to a Japanese person to result in an unexpectedly masculine register, but preserves how the speaker's cultural upbringing has influenced their speech.

The news program translators chose the relative approach - I think I would prefer the direct approach. I think I prefer it because I believe translation should be a rewriting of the original utterance as if the speaker was originally speaking the target language, and the direct approach compliments that way of thinking the best.

Actually now that I type that, I’m second guessing myself. Does it? It does, if for the purposes of the “rewrite it as if they spoke japanese” thought experiment, we suppose the speaker magically learned japanese seconds before making the utterance, but what if we suppose the speaker magically grew up learning japanese - then maybe they would conform to the relative cultural values. But also, maybe they would never have said such a thing in the first place - their original utterance was informed by their upbringing and cultural values, so how could you possibly know what they would have said if they had known japanese from birth? Maybe my initial instinct was right after all?

If you work in translation, I’m very interested to hear if you have come across this problem and how you deal with it 🙏

Further reading: I think this question also ties into this problem I’ve been struggling to answer for a while.

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I think we should put all kids on puberty blockers. You shouldn't have to have a gender until you want to.

Now let me just post this on Facebook and see how long it takes for one of my relatives to attempt to kill me with their mind. They've all got psychic powers but my wards are strong so at worst I get a vague itching.

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i was obsessed the first time i saw someone post leon on that stupid panda rocker but i was never able to find raw footage of it lol, so i decided to compile leon with all the playground interactions because i love him <3

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Selva Aparicio: Childhood Memories (2020) hand carved tapestry directly into wooden flooring

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Nakba Day 2024

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funniest oopsie in fallout 4 is whoever made this signed baseball just googled random signatures and slapped them onto the ball asset and called it a day.

this club penguin character is canon to the fallout universe.

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Janlynn: Smokey Mountain Cats stitched by sgivens_i.

“Judgy Kittehs ask why it took 20 years to finish. Tsk tsk. Smokey Mountain Cats by Janlynn. So.Much.Blue.”