Perhaps, but in many countries districting is done by an independent commission rather than by politicians, so the concept itself makes no sense.
And it doesn’t stop there. Korn in Swedish means specifically barley and the word itself, as does the word grain, has the original meaning of something like ‘something small and hard’, giving us such pairs as Eng. ‘grain of sand’ = Swe. ‘sandkorn’ and Eng. ‘grain of salt’ = Swe. ‘saltkorn’. ‘Corned’ as in ‘corned beef’ comes from the corns of salt used when preparing it.
OT: Every word in “granite-ground corn grain kernels” has the same etymological root.
Based on an itty-bitty study I did for class last year (grad school in translation and subtitling), I’d bet you money that the original script had a Buffy one-liner.
From what the data said and my teachers confirmed, the original-language subtitles are usually taken straight from the script (even if dialogue changes), o-l subs for the hard of hearing are reviewed to match the actual sounds and dialogue, second-language subtitles are translated from the o-l subtitles (or worse, from the English-language subtitles which have been translated from the o-l ones, even if this second translator can see that the previous translation and/or the original subtitles are completely mismatched with the actual original dialogue).
kunilou, I don’t know when that story is from, but I’ve been seeing barbacoas (it’s a barbacoa if it’s the whole “coal burner + grille” assembly, a parrilla if it’s only the grille that you place over a fire) around for at least 30 years. The style of cooking is called a la parrilla if it doesn’t involve sauce and barbacoa if it involves barbecue sauce. It may have been that the problem wasn’t with the word itself being hard to translate, but with the guests being “big city boys” who’ve never killed anything bigger than a mosquito, hoed a row or cooked a rack of ribs over an open fire.
Ah, but it is still a joke to anybody who’s familiar with the Smurfs 
- and it doesn’t happen to need any kind of footnote. The footnote was a second joke.
I don’t get it, it’s barbecue too in French, nothing to translate. 
It probably depended on the exact order of the guests. Perhaps it was related to the German first, who translated it to the Frenchman as “grill” who then translated it to the Spaniard as “griddle” and was relayed back as “frypan” or something like that.
You get this playing Babelfish Bingo too. The word only has to fail to translate correctly once and it then gets increasingly incorrect with every subsequent translation, even if the *original *word is identical in all the subsequent languages.
I teach English in Korea. Four words that continually stump my students: **Favorite, glad, become **and hobby.
I teach at an English village, so I get a new crop of students every week and all of them have had at least some prior English lessons; for some reason, these four words slip through the cracks.
But of course:
Noun: smurf smurfis
Adjective: smurficus smurfica smurficum
Verb: smurfō smurfāre smurfāvī smurfātum
Adverb: smurficē, smurfiter
I guess, but the most commonly used obligation is the completely generic 用事があります (“I have something to do”).
Well, the English word “nut” is too broad, which is why we have to use “tree nut” to exclude peanuts (which are legumes). Even “tree nut” isn’t very good, as “pine nuts” are technically not really nuts per se, as they are not from trees of the order Fagales- but they do come from a tree.
In Norway when funds are distributed to municipalities some of the money is designated for specific purposes. Those funds are said to be “øremerkede” lit. earmarked.
And to pick up some other mentions, although taxi is often used for taxis, we also use “drosje” which is a loan from German, but originally Russian meaning light carriage. Take for granted, is “ta for gitt” lit. take as given.
I understand and suspect as much, but you’ve got it reversed. The one-liner was what played auditorily on the TV. The captioning displayed the lengthy exchange. I can see how the exchange may have been pared down/altered during filming, and the captioning is done independently/prior to completion of editing.
Yep. I’ve literally lost count of the number of parties that I’ve been obligated to attend. Everyone has had this experience. On the other hand, you can sometimes get away with saying that you’ll attend, and then just not show up. Japanese are sometimes not as offended as we would be in those circumstances.
I’ve never, in nearly ten years living here, had that suffice. Your experiences are different than mine. Doesn’t mean I’m universally right, just that we’ve had a very different time here.
Nous sommes ‘fuqued’!
The other students and I have yet to find a good Arabic word (or even phrase really) to communicate “already”. If you want to say “I have already done that.”, you just say “I did that.” which isn’t quite the same flavor. Plus, when you want to respond with surprise to someone getting something done early, we would say “Already?!” but the best we’ve found in Arabic is “Really?”
Fun is a hard one to translate into Arabic as well, add that to the tally.
Not to hijack, but the other way around, قد “qud” is untranslatable on its own into English. With a past tense verb it affirms, like “indeed”, but with a present tense verb it means more “may have” or “might”.
Ah, sorry, I’d understood the original post as “several spoken paragraphs were subbed as one line”. In any case, the “‘standard’ subtitles often follow the script instead of the spoken dialogue” stands. They prepare them in advance and the only touch-ups are for the timing, while the DHH subs do get matched to the actual spoken dialogue (and sometimes to music and noise).
I just completed some subtitles for an episode of King of the Hill, and the script included lots and lots of explanations for the words and phrases used. It included this:
Okay, next caller is Bill From Texas. Howdy, cowboy!
(Howdy: slang for ‘Hello’)
(cowboy: an informal term for ‘one who is reckless or careless’)
Bizarre!
BTW, I found it bizarre because, in context, he was using the word only because Bill’s from Texas.
I don’t think there’s a word in Spanish for “ever”
We use nunca for “never” and siempre for “always” but I personally have problems translating ever.
To continue on this…
You could ask
ni yao bu yao (you want or not?) which one could reply either “yao” (yes I want) or “bu yao” no I don’t want.
or of course…
ni dong bu dong - do you understand? (or more literally, do you understand or not?)
to which I invariably always replied “bu dong” because my Chinese was totally atrocious