Johnny Cash didn’t decrypt messages in the usual sense of decryption. Cash was a Morse Code transcriber for Russian messages He was in the Air Force from 1950 to 1954. He was assigned to the 12th Radio Squadron Mobile of the U.S.A.F., which was in West Germany. His job was to listen to Russian transmissions which were in ordinary Russian (not encrypted) using the Russian Morse Code letters. Russian letters are different from English-language letters. It takes a slightly different set of Morse Code symbols to write out a Russian text. Cash’s job was to write down the symbols as they were being sent out very fast. He was very good at that. He then handed the messages to his superiors. It’s not clear how much Russian he ever learned. In any case, he transcribed the Morse Code message that the Russians sent out unencrypted.
Another related interesting fact: Cash recorded some of his early songs also in German, with the transcriptions wildly differing from the original English. He had never learned enough German during his service, so he learned the German lyrics phonetically, which is obvious for a German speaker like me when listening to the songs:
“Wo ist zuhause, Mama?” (Where is home, Mama?) aka “Five Feet High And Rising”:
“Wer kennt den Weg?” (Who knows the way?) aka “I Walk The Line”:
I was aware that (some?) Laurel and Hardy movies were also voiced in phonetically parroted German:
And that kinda makes sense.
But Johnny Cash is a real headscratcher. My German is not good, but my first reaction is that those lyrics (for Walk The Line) are not a translation of the English. What’s going on there?
j
No, they’re not true translations of the original songs at all, but totally different lyrics that fit the meter.
ETA: Laurel and Hardy also made French versions of their films. I learned that from a great documentary about the two some years ago. I’ve been watching Laurel and Hardy (or “Dick und Doof”, “Fat and Stupid”, as the two figures are embarrassingly called here) since I was a little child, always in a real German dub, and never had seen them talking German in person before that documentary.
The title card on the video linked by Treppenwitz shows the names as “Dick und Dof”. Is that a typo on the card, or is “Dof” some kind of spelling variant of “Doof”?
No, it’s not an alternative spelling, it must have been a typo.
They did them in Spanish as well.
Well, they did have them first. Except they called them “Diaclones”.
And they were known as el Gordo y el Flaco in Spanish. Just as embarrassing as the German moniker: The thick one and the dumb one in German, the thick one and the slim one in Spanish.
And don’t get me started with die Väter der Klamotte (link to the German Wikipedia, no translation to other languages: too embarrassing. Really). Take old comedy classics, including the early Stan and Laurel, but also Charlie Chaplin and many many more, whatever was cheap, take them out of context, dub them badly, cut them up and put them together again willy-nilly, voice over stupid commentary, and make TV out of that. Early '70s to mid '80s, so depressing.
That is fascinating. Also dumb and tasteless. Do you happen to know whether this kitsch sold well in Germany, or was this all for nothing?
No, those German Johnny Cash records didn’t do anything on the market and went to nowhere. It took 40 years to resurrect them, by a compilation album of the German alternative label Trikont (sorry, only German link):
For what it’s worth, the double-O “oo” in German isn’t pronounced like you’d expect in English; it’s pronounced more like “oh” (e.g. Das Boot doesn’t sound like the footwear, it sounds like “das boat”).
So it’s possible the title card was written more phonetically (perhaps by a non German speaker, going by the spoken sound) than according to the proper spelling.
Or, indeed, it might just be a mistake.
It appears that he didn’t learn any Russian. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read online, he passed his transcription of Russian Morse Code messages to a Russian translator in his Air Force unit. Whether they read the translation of it into English immediately to him isn’t clear from anything I’ve found online. So at least one American (the translator) knew that Stalin had died before he did.
I’m sure I’ve told this before, but once, when I was teaching a lab on electromagnetic induction, one of the questions was “Why are there no DC transformers?”. One student answered “Because Marvel got the comic book rights”.
Of course DC voltage can be changed, it’s just not as easy. The least-lousy way of doing it are devices that essentially turn the DC on and off rapidly so the current flux is constantly changing.
Silent movies were easy to market to the rest of the world. People in other countries simply translated - or rewrote - the title cards and spliced them in.
When talkies hit, the studios panicked. Many tried to film movies in several languages, with various schemes. Casts who were at least bilingual, casts who learned languages phonetically, or different casts entirely who sometimes used the same scripts and sometimes had versions rewritten for local interests.
Wikipedia has a list of a zillion of them. Hollywood studios stopped the practice as too expensive within a couple of years, but they lasted in other countries.
One of those is Don Quixote (1933), made in English, French, and German (curiously not in Spanish), starring the Russian operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin. It is perhaps most famous for spurring the composition of Don Quichotte a Dulcinée by Ravel, who wrote the song cycle for the movie. It wasn’t in the movie, though: the producers commissioned five different composers to write for the movie without telling them about the others. The cycle chosen for the movie was written by Jacques Ibert, who is largely forgotten now.
(Tangentially, I sang the Ibert cycle on my senior recital.)
Saddest possible Christmas story ever: “At the height of the Transformers craze, for Christmas my parents got me… Gobots.”
And did you give him any less than full marks for this answer?
That was my normal Christmas growing up. I always got Go-Bots. The only Transformers I ever got were from garage sales.
But I also always got a Lego set, which was more important anyway.
And yes, @Pardel-Lux , the student got full credit. Though he also said the bit about the flux not changing.
In 1986, between “Dave Hollins: Space Cadet” and “Red Dwarf”, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor penned the lyrics for a parody of UK hits – which became a #1 hit itself.