Tag: right-to-left

Jews Do Not Run Hollywood – The Proof

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Shahar Golan · 6 comments

A British-American comedy starring Matt LeBlanc? Didn’t sound like much when I first began to watch it, but Showtime’s Episodes packs an unexpected punch. Its recent episode (s02e03) was funny yet moving, and also featured a brilliant reference to Friends. Towards the end, as the characters gathered in a cemetery, one headstone caught my eye:
Left-to-right Hebrew Spelling on Headstone - Episodes - s02e03

At first the Hebrew words did not make any sense, until I realized the letters were in reverse order: left to right, instead of right to left. Then I realized that even when read in the right direction, the words, while in Hebrew, sounded like a machine-translated version of English phrases; Someone might say ‘he will be dearly missed’ but its literal translation to Hebrew comes out as ‘he was pickled at great expense‘. It only took a minute or so to reverse engineer this kerfuffle:
Hebrew-to-English Reverse Engineering Using Google Translate - Episodes - s02e03

Yep! Someone at set design couldn’t find a Jew to save his life and decided to wing it. Which begs the question: Aren’t we running this joint?

Tags: , , , , , , , ,