My impression of that character was that he was a bit of a con man, that for some reason Bartlett liked to have around. I seem to recall Leo complaining about him.
So an obvious mispronunciation was part of the character - he was pretending to a sophistication he didn’t actually have.
Going way back, there was an episode of The Invisible Man set in Stockholm, in which a switchboard operator at the US Embassy tells David McCallum to meet someone at the “Sveridge (sounds like “Selfridge”) Hotel.”
Sverige (the Swedish word for “Sweden”) is pronounced “Sver-iye” (stress on the first syllable). Even a lowly switchboard operator would know this if she’d been stationed in Stockholm for any length of time.
Yes, that’s the guy. It’s still pronounced ‘Eyelah’ though.
That did occur to me as well but the other characters didn’t react to it as such.
Phonetically based transcripts are notoriously inaccurate and often hopeless. In one episode of Frasier, restaurant critic Gil Chesterton mentions a fancy French dish whose name in the subtitles was incomprehensible.
It’s worse when human translators have no idea what they’re talking about and just plug in words they know. Two examples:
Living in Arizona we get people all the time complaining that it just doesn’t feel like Christmas without two feet of snow on the ground and frosted windowpanes. We just point out that the climate here is more similar to the Holy Land’s than that ever was.
Fair point there. I also wonder how our Southern Hemisphere counterparts feel about the whole “white Christmas” thing.
Please allow me the side question, was the book already known in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union? Because I can’t imagine that it was allowed and common knowledge back then.
Apparently it was, because I was given this piece of information in early 1992. Keep in mind that Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, three years after the dictator’s death.
Yeah, I know that, but even with denouncing Stalin, Animal Farm didn’t reflect good also on post-Stalin Soviet communism.
Be that as it may, it was criticism aimed directly at Stalin and his subversion of socialism when it was published in 1945.
I think I would have too ( feel out of my chair )
Another one that makes me go silently Grrrrrrrr! is the media, usually printed/online refer to the thrust reversers on jet aircraft as “reverse thrusters”. That gets all our eyes rolling at work here at a maintenance base.
“Panzer tank” is another groaner.
I’m guessing it’s a lazy conflation due to the fact the Mk V’s “name” is a Panther?
Media: “Panther, panzer…meh. What’s the difference?”
I guess they just don’t realize it’s a redundancy: a Panzer in this case is a tank! (In German, nouns are always capitalized.)
More specifically, Panzer is an abbreviation of Panzerkampfwagen, or “armored combat vehicle.”
Another Fun Fact: Panzer is also the word for the shell of a turtle!
And the armor of a medieval fighter: a breast armor is a “Brustpanzer”.
In fiction pulling a fire alarm usually results in all of the sprinklers in the building going off. In real life sprinkler systems are triggered individually by heat. No school or institution would accept the risk of easy mass vandalism from the former.
It’s possible they’re done by bots. Lots of stupidity in same-language for-the-Deaf captions can be attributed to bots.
I’m sure many subtitles are generated by bots, just like many scripts are the product of machine translations.
The examples I gave above were overdubbed by voice actors who I think were unfamiliar with the material. I’ve done such work myself and have always corrected the text when I knew something was inaccurate.
That reminds me of one of my personal “didn’t get its.” There’s an old Deaf joke where a Deaf astronaut leaves earth, and discovers a planet called eyeth, where most people are Deaf, and everyone knows signed language.
While he’s there, he meets a little hearing kid who is upset because no one understands him, and he says “Don’t worry; somewhere out there, there’s a world for you.”
Anyway, a Deaf man published a book in the 1980s about a Deaf man who establishes a Utopia for Deaf people on an island called…
ready for it
…?
Islay.
I didn’t get that until I was almost done with the book, even though it was the fricking title. I was 20, and didn’t know how to pronounce it, until I looked it up, because I thought “Hey, maybe it actually means something.”
Of course, it took me 20 years to figure out why ABBA was called ABBA.