I am finding lots of translations of the Italian captain’s conversation with the Coast Guard. I am having trouble googling the original Italian. Have any pointers for googling for a non-English site?
Do you mean the audio, or a transcript? The audio is available on La Repubblica: 1, 2. Here’s the conversation with concurrent subtitles. Here’s Italian transcripts of the first call and the second call.
I was looking for the transcripts, the audio is a plus. Thanks!
BTW the Google tip: I put “transcript” into Google Translate to get the Italian (“trascrizione”), then Googled “Costa Concordia trascrizione”.
ETA: I also used google.it instead of .com
Thanks for the tips, jjimm. I do not habitually look at Italian web sites but I know a smattering of Italian and wanted to see the original version just as an exercise. I didn’t even know there was a google.it. And looking for *trascrizione *was one of those :smack: moments.
There’s a google.prettymucheverycountryintheworld
As to the translation, the now-famous phrase “va abordo, cazzo,” was translated, in the NY Post, picking up a British feed, as “get on board, for fuck’s sake.” The epithet is never used in America. One of the big Italian dailys picked *it’s[/I headline and translated it–not aware of the pun–referring to him as “chicken of the sea.”
(Is calling someone a chicken means he’s a coward in Italian? Guess so.)
“Cazzo,” like many epithets, has multiple meanins and uses. It can mean, “get on board, you prick/asshole.” For Americans, at least, I would translate it as “Get the fuck on board.”
One large Brit newspaper (I forget which) didn’t even use the old "$&@!"standby. They wrote the translation as “get on board, damnit!”
From an Englishman’s point of view, “for fuck’s sake” is perfect.
Literally “cazzo” means “dick”, though as you say it is as versatile as “fuck” is in English. The ways in which my girlfriend uses it would require an entire dictionary to explain…
Italian transcripts are popping up all over the Net now (and in printed dailys). Here is one on-line.
Leo Bloom: Did you see the advertisement in your link for Affonda la Flotta Schettino Limited Edition (Schettino Limited Edition Battleship)? I’m wondering what the rules are for that one.
Wait, do you mean Americans don’t say “for fuck’s sake”? We certainly do.
God, that conversation’s even more infuriating in the original. You can practically hear the Coast Guard wanting to reach through the airwaves and kick the captain’s pathetic arse straight onto the ship.
In this context I definitely wouldn’t translate ‘cazzo’ as ‘prick’ or ‘asshole’. It’s a furious emphasis, not an insult. I agree with jjimm - ‘for fuck’s sake’ is just about perfect.
Nope. We see it in movies. I like it when Daniel Craig says it.
Me and the gf had a chat about this last night, and she agreed that “for fuck’s sake” is really the only suitable translation into British English of the sense of De Falco’s order.
(Nominative determinism: isn’t De Falco a cooler name that Schettino? [Which by the way, despite the efforts of many English-language newsreaders, is pronounced sket-TEE-no.])
I say it plenty. Maybe I got it from movies, but it doesn’t sound “British” like, I don’t know, “sod off, you bugger”.
I agree with you. I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t say “for fuck’s sake” in some context. And I am not really exaggerating, either. It’s an extremely common phrase in my experience. That said, I’ve spent many years in an environment with a lot of British English, so perhaps I picked it up there, but it seems completely natural in American English to me.
OK, here’s a thread on another message board discussing the phrase. Note:
I’m fairly confident it is common in my dialect of American English, and I don’t think this is something I’ve picked up in my life away from the US.
For a few years I was a regular in a bar in Harrisburg, PA. I was well known among the other regulars since I guess they don’t get many Scottish people there.
In any case, whenever they wanted to parody me, they would yell “fer fucks sake!” I’m not totally sure that it was the phrase rather than the accent they picked up on.
I can’t think of any other maritime disaster in which the captain had to be ordered to return to his ship to do his #*&@^! job. Shameful.