how’s about ‘sploink’?
-
Sploink
When the penis misses the vagina completely and goes full force into the taint. The resulting force causes a severe bend or flex in the erect penis resulting in pain and discomfort to the penis and sometimes the taint region.
Cite.
Whatever you say…
D’oh! :smack:
Subtitles may seem longer, because it just takes longer to read a sentence than it does to speak it. That’s also why subtitles will always be an abridged version of the actual dialogue. A word for word translation would flash across the screen so fast that viewers could never keep up.
The question of which languages are more efficient is different. If you look at multi-lingual user instructions for almost anything, the English version will invariably be the shortest. Robert MacNeil, in “The History of the English Language” is fascinating on this subject.
He points out that English has incorporated words from other languages at a more prodigious rate than any other; hence, our base vocabulary dwarfs others too – and allows us a unique kind of specificity. This is particularly true with regard to France, where I believe it is at least quasi-official policy not to use imported words, but to develop a French equivalent. This often requires a combination of words, where a single word in English suffices. Per Google translation, for example, an English typewriter would be a French “machine à écrire.”
English is also very flexible. Things like turning almost any noun we like into a verb just by adding -ing, makes child’s play of inventing neologisms. No one will ever top Shakespeare, of course, but could a single individual add upwards of 2,000 words to the standard lexicon in any other language?
When it comes to subtitling, some languages are simply harder to translate back and forth for both structural and cultural reasons. Korean springs to mind. When a Korean character takes offense at being addressed disrespectfully, for example, it’s impossible to convey the distinctions at issue via subtitles. Not only is there no English equivalent for word endings which change according to a complex mix of relationships between two speakers (age, status, familial ties…), that kind of explicit, culturally derived, categorization of relationships doesn’t even exist conceptually in English. Translating in reverse, the sheer abundance and quirky etymology of English words can make it difficult to choose between words which might be close enough to be listed as synonyms in a thesaurus, but which really can’t be used interchangeably to the same effect. I also once tried to lay out the “rules” for using or leaving out articles in English, and it was like wading into a linguistic swamp. The absence of articles in Korean seemed decidedly more efficient!
While it may be an acquired taste, though, I’ll take abbreviated subtitles over dubbing any day. The better the actor, the more evocative the tone and delivery of his lines becomes. I could swear that the same handful of readers do all the dubbing, no matter where a film comes from or who is in it.
Oh, right, good point. For some reason I momentarily forgot about the bizarre dubbing mania of the wacky continental Euros. They’re all crazy, I tell you. 