frgdr.com » translation http://frgdr.com/blog Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:07:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 I Was Born on a Seathttp://frgdr.com/blog/2009/07/02/born-seat/ http://frgdr.com/blog/2009/07/02/born-seat/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:34:15 +0000 Shahar Golan http://frgdr.com/blog/?p=2687 Israeli newspaper Haaretz has an interesting article today on high school seniors’ misuse of electronic dictionaries during their English exams. Can you decipher what the students meant, from what they actually wrote?

  • I want you to barber about your experience
  • Drivers don’t curfew in red light
  • The weather was father-in-law
  • I was born on a seat

Read the full article in Ingleesh or in Ibroo.

H/T: Guy Yitzhaki

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]]> http://frgdr.com/blog/2009/07/02/born-seat/feed/ 0 Pay No Attention to the English-Speaking Israeli behind the Facebookhttp://frgdr.com/blog/2007/12/25/pay-attention-english-speaking-israeli-facebook/ http://frgdr.com/blog/2007/12/25/pay-attention-english-speaking-israeli-facebook/#comments Tue, 25 Dec 2007 20:39:41 +0000 Shahar Golan http://frgdr.com/blog/?p=11 There is no way around it, when it comes to computers, I am old school. When I first laid my hands on a keyboard, I was about seven years old and all the letters were in English. It was an Apple II clone, there was no hard disk, instead of a mouse there was a joystick, and of course there was no Hebrew involved.
The grown-up world was still trying to make these business machines work, so making them work in Hebrew, a language used by a few million people, was unheard-of.
To this day whenever I get an annoying ‘my computer does not work’ phone call from one of my computer illiterate friends, the first thing I am trying to establish is what pretentious action was executed to make a popular software fail. One time it was Nero not being able to burn Hebrew-named files onto a CD. Another time it was a graphics editor that kept refusing to open photos from a Hebrew named folder.
This is why I consider myself old school, as I always try to make it work and never insist on making it work my way. My thinking is always: it worked for a couple billion users, what possibly could Dana from Jerusalem do to make it break down?

Shahar with his Apple clone computer - 1984

I am aware, though, that I am pretty much alone in this battle: while I consider Hebrew an added bonus within the IT world, most Israelis approach it with a sense of entitlement. ‘If it does not work in Hebrew – it does not work’ some say. Others confess to not even trying to read any English, pressing the [Yes] or [No] buttons arbitrarily or by gut instinct.
The number 1 movie database is in English? Let’s use database number 700 – it’s in Hebrew!
You Google for answers in Hebrew and get none? Chances are you stumbled upon one of those eternal unanswered mysteries of the universe!

Shahar and his brother Liran with their Apple clone computer - 1986

This was pretty much the mentality around here, until MySpace and Facebook arrived. All of a sudden, Israelis found out they can read and write in English when they want to, and they started seeing the benefit in communicating worldwide using one universal language.
For all those people (some of which are my best friends) I hold the utmost disdain:
You who have frowned upon your (copied) software for not doing what you wanted it to do,
You who have allowed your personal computers to contract viruses, Trojan horses and venereal diseases because the warnings were in English,
You who have called your geeky friends in all hours of the day and night, horrified that your computer stopped working after clicking ‘Yes’ to an ‘Are you sure?’ message box you have not read,
All of you should be ashamed.

Only now did you discover you can actually put to use the second language your country made you learn from grade 4 to 12?

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]]> http://frgdr.com/blog/2007/12/25/pay-attention-english-speaking-israeli-facebook/feed/ 1 Why I Saw So Many Bad Movies in the Eightieshttp://frgdr.com/blog/2007/12/21/bad-movies-eighties/ http://frgdr.com/blog/2007/12/21/bad-movies-eighties/#comments Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:05:27 +0000 Shahar Golan http://frgdr.com/blog/?p=14 Engbrew Translation 101: Film NamesAs a teenager during the 1980′s we went to the movies a lot. Before a movie came out there was no hype, no buzz, no trailers on YouTube, and no behind-the-scenes shown on TV, so picking what movie to see often boiled down to the single-colored text-only poster that each cinema in my hometown published on the public billboards.
I guess the Israeli film distributors were aware of these facts, and decided that if all they have to work with is the name of the film, then by golly they would make it work.

You see, I believe a movie is a work of art from beginning to end, including its title, and when distributing it in another country one should try to translate it with great respect and fervor. I guess the local distributors here do not share my ideas, as they pretty much translate the titles whichever way they see fit, or whichever way they think would make more money.

Sometimes these translations are far-fetched like ‘White Palace‘ (1990, Susan Sarandon, James Spader) that was translated to Hebrew as ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, preceding the movie ‘When a Man Loves a Woman‘ (1994, Andy Garcia, Meg Ryan) that then had to be translated to Hebrew as ‘The Love of a Man for a Woman’.

Other times it seems the distributor was on vacation, as the movies were just phonetically translated and so Big (1988, Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Perkins), Heat (1995, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro) and Elephant (2003, by Gus Van Sant) remained the same words spelled phonetically in Hebrew: ביג, היט, אלפנט

But during the eighties the biggest film distributors’ shtick was riding the coattails of a successful film and naming an unrelated film in a way that would mislead a teenager to think this movie is a sequel to a movie he already saw.
The number one example for that is ‘Police Academy‘ (1984, Steve Guttenberg, Kim Cattrall), originally translated to Hebrew as ‘A Drill for Novice Policemen‘. After the movie became successful there were six sequels made, but in Israel all of a sudden many unrelated films became ‘A Drill for Novice Something-or-the-other’.

Here is a partial list:
Gotcha! (1985) – A Drill for A Novice Spy
Doin’ Time (1985) – A School for Novice Convicts
Bad Medicine (1985) – A School for Novice Doctors
Buy & Cell (1987) – A Drill for Gambling Convicts
UHF (1989) – A Station for Novice Anchormen
Beach Movie (1998) – A Drill for Novice Surfers
Miss Cast Away (2004) – A Drill for Novice Models
Gladiatress (2004) – A Drill for Novice Gladiatresses

The really sad part is that I actually fell for it and went to see most of these movies.

If you ever need to decypher the original name of a movie, you can check out Targumon, a website dedicated just for that purpose.

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]]> http://frgdr.com/blog/2007/12/21/bad-movies-eighties/feed/ 0 Franco-American Bag of Chipshttp://frgdr.com/blog/2007/07/28/franco-american-bag-of-chips/ http://frgdr.com/blog/2007/07/28/franco-american-bag-of-chips/#comments Sat, 28 Jul 2007 14:51:19 +0000 Shahar Golan http://frgdr.com/blog/?p=59 American French friesI just got a catalog from the local branch of Shufersal, Israel’s pioneer supermarket chain, and my eyes landed on a photo of a frozen bag of fries. I’m not sure if it is the oldest trick in the book, but it is certainly prevalent: take any Israeli made product, add the word ‘American’ in front of its name – and the indigenous people will buy it like crazy.
That’s how you end up with a bag of French fries that reads ‘French fries’ in English and ‘American fries’ in Hebrew.

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