Some sound systems (including mine) have a separate center speaker and on some discs the dialogue is recorded on the center channel so I can up the dialogue volume independently of the rest of the soundtrack. It's a nice feature but is dependent on the formatting of the soundtrack.
I wear hearing aids also. I all but quit watching tv before I got them. Mine are a few years old so they do not have Bluetooth but I have a device that broadcast the tv sound direct to my hearing aids. Even with that, I need closed captioning. The only use I see for something like google glass is to have closed captioning for everyday life.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens
Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts
"God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness.
If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up why would you have to lie?
... my parents used to speak Low German when they didn't want us to understand what they were saying.
That would have very likely also worked even if you kids could speak German (ie, Hochdeutsch). Even many Germans have trouble understanding some of the dialects. Swiss German (Schwyzerdütsch) is a prime example, but so is Schwäbisch and Bayrisch.
In 1973, I went to work in West Germany for the summer with a construction firm in the Black Forest. With five years experience in classroom German, I had fairly high confidence in my ability to understand the language, but then they had never taught us about dialects. For the entire first week on the job I could not understand anything I was told; if you had told me that was a different language I would have believed you. Then I met a Prussian ex-pat, an office worker at the construction firm, whom I could understand and he explained to me about Schwäbisch and that even Germans couldn't understand them.
BTW, he was the first to inform me of a bit of post-war history. In the late 1940's, the Soviet occupiers kept the eastern part of Poland they had taken at the beginning of the war and made the eastern parts of Germany part of Poland (ie, East Prussia and what looks like a crescent moon on the old maps), expelling the Polish population from the eastern part and the German population from the western part. That sudden influx of even more displaced persons made the housing situation even worse in Germany. That Prussian had lived through that expulsion as a child.
Also, my German ancestor came from Baden, so he was either Schwäbisch or Alemannisch (a bit to the west of Schwaben and not any easier to understand). Contact with the Alemanni tribe is what gave Germany its name in French and Spanish.
I liked the subtitles better because, though I only understand a little German, the dubbing didn't ring true.
That happens a lot for a number of reasons:
It's just the way that language works. That makes it a gold mine for language learners as it provides them examples of what they've been studying. For example:
In French, the impersonal pronoun (in English: "you", "they", "one") is expressed with "on". After having read that, I kept hearing it being used in French content. They -- er, "One" -- even uses it instead of "we" so that "Are we going now?" becomes "Is one going now?" ("On part?").
There was a German TV version of Valkyrie that somehow made it to US cable (Sundance or IFC, I think). I especially remember a scene where the von Stauffenberg family is chatting as they're having a meal. Nobody says more than one or two words at a time, but because of how German works (especially the use of cases) it was all perfectly intelligible. The translators had quite a job to render that into English.
This is a parody of the phenomenon rather than an actual example. In the 1964 US comedy, What a Way to Go!, a wealthy widow recounts her many marriages in which they married poor and were very happy, but then her husbands would become obsessed with success which ended up killing them.
The pattern of the movie's narrative was that she would imagine her marriage when they were poor (and "lebten von Luft und Liebe") as a particular genre of film. Her marriage with an artist in Paris (Paul Newman) was like a foreign movie with subtitles. One would deliver a single line of dialogue which generated several sentences of subtitles, then the long and protracted response would be translated with a single English word. That parodied many Americans' perception of subtitled movies, something that was new at that time.
They are trying to work around a cultural, linguistical, or historical reference that they assume the subtitle audience wouldn't understand. For example:
In the second OSS 117 movie, OSS 117: Lost in Rio (OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus), Hubert de la Bath is assigned to deliver a blackmail payment of 50,000 francs to someone in Brazil. He asks his boss whether that's in new or old francs and his boss replies new francs. Assuming that the English speaking audience wouldn't know about the franc's revaluation in 1960 (I learned of it in the late 60's through a Bond novel), it went something like this:
Le chef: "... 50,000 francs." ("... 50,000 francs.") de la Bath: "Nouveaux ou vieux?" ("New or old?", but subtitled as "Could you repeat that?") Le chef: "50,000 nouveaux francs." ("... 50,000 francs.")
This is a linguistical example. In a French rom-com a successful businessman tries to escape his family's pressure for him to marry by entering into a business deal wherein he gave her a place to live and she would pose as his fiancée to his family. They start out hardly able to stand each other, but over time they start to like each other and, true to the genre, end up falling in love.
Linguistically, English has lost having familiar versus polite forms of address whereas French (and German and Spanish and Italian) has retained that feature, so dialogues often make use of that. So in this film, they would address each other in the familiar ("tu") when his family was present and would switch back to the formal ("vous"), but as they start to like each other they slip into the familiar more often.
Then in one scene as they're conversing over a dinner that he made, they start out with "tu" but as it turns into an argument he abruptly switches to the polite address to which she responds "Oh, so now it's back to 'vous' again, is it?" Not easy to express in English and I forget just how the translators did it except that they made a good attempt, but I remember it as an example of something more easily expressed in the other language.
This attempt to get around an "unfamiliar cultural reference" was totally unnecessary. I'm pretty sure this was in the second Swedish Millennium movie, The Girl Who Played With Fire (the first was Men Who Hate Women (Män som hatar kvinnor), but in English that had gotten changed to The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo). A female cop puts down a sexist colleague as being extremely primitive by asking "Are you from Jurassic Park?" (literally, though in Swedish, but she did explicitly say "Jurassic Park"). Who will ever know why, but the translator must have thought that the English-speaking audience would never have heard of Jurassic Park so the subtitles had her say something like "What are you, a troglodyte?"
Sometimes the subtitles mismatch for political reasons. And sometimes for other reasons, whatever they could be.
Both of these examples are in German, so first a cultural note: Germans like to have their foreign movies dubbed into German, but they'll keep the songs in the original and subtitle them.
On the student charter flight back from Europe, we shared some of our experiences. One had been to East Germany where he had seen West Side Story. Instead of translating the songs, the subtitles would describe the lyrics in Marxist terms, such as describing the song as protesting the exploitation of the workers, etc.
In Müchen I saw Cabaret dubbed into German. The scene where they meet came off kind of odd with her starting off stumbling with the simplest German before she breaks into fluent German asking him for a cigarette. Na ja.
Then in the big finale song ("Life is a Caberet"), the line, "That's what comes from too much pills and liquor.", was instead rendered as "zu viele Pillen und Ficken." Odd, that.
On a different note, I assume you've also seen these memes on YouTube which take Hitler's enraged rant from Downfall (Der Untergang) and give it new subtitles in which he rages against something current (eg, the Watchmen movie changing the ending, Star Trek: Discovery). I tried watching one and it proved impossible. I could hear what Hitler is actually saying and the subtitles mismatch it so completely that my brain rebels -- I have to stop before I suffer terminal motion sickness (which happens when your senses send conflicting messages to the brain).
I couldn't figure out what the title meant - 72 Metpa - until I remembered that the Cyrillic "p" is our "r". 72 meters.
I had four semesters of Russian nearly half a century ago. I've forgotten most of it, but I do still try to read what I see in film, usually storefront signs. In the documentary, Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom (covering the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv from 21 November 2013 to 23 February 2014), I saw early on a storefront sign in cursive Cyrillics, so I sounded it out. "Sushi", which elicited a chuckle. Ironically, that same restaurant later served as a make-shift battle aid station for the wounded protestors especially after the government troops had started shooting them (and later raided that aid station).
There was a German TV series sequel, Das Boot, which also dealt with the Resistance back in port at La Rochelle. I swear that I could recognize that same road used in the beginning of the movie. I saw it when it was included with my Amazon Prime subscription, but now it's only available for sale.
The submarine pens that you saw in Das Boot and also in Raiders of the Lost Ark are the ones that are still intact in La Rochelle. You can see them on Google Earth at 46° 09' 30.96" N, 1° 12' 37.37" W, but I was not able to find any street view where I could see them, so the photo at that Wikipedia link is the best I can offer.
The biggest problem for submarines was their limited range under battery power. For example, in The Winds of War an American destroyer before the war (and hence could not be torpedoed) held off a German submarine until the sub's batteries ran out and it had to surface and leave. In a documentary, they listed the first uses envisioned for nuclear power and nuclear submarines was on that list.
In Cartegena, Spain, we saw the submarine, Peral, the first fully capable military submarine. Launched 8 September 1888, she had one torpedo tube, two torpedoes, and her interior was crammed full of batteries. She had no way to recharge her batteries while underway, so for the most part she was a proof-of-concept vessel. She was withdrawn from service in 1890 and is now preserved at the Cartagena Naval Museum adjacent to the naval base.
Across from the naval base there's a hill between the harbor and the sea. Into that hill we could see two tunnels that had been started. Our tour guide told us that they were part of a submarine pen project Spain was building for Nazi Germany, were never completed.
I was from the generation that fell in love with stereo and then quadrophonic so that every group would play around with those features. Having abandoned pop music towards the mid-70's (I saw the 50's Revival as a sign that rock music had run out of ideas, which some could argue was the case given Disco, the 80's, etc), I don't know how sound systems have fared since then.
A friend at work, about my age, told me about having introduced Beatles music to his granddaughter. She liked it and would listen to it a lot on her iPod, but with only one earphone instead of both. He said that was because modern music is no longer recorded in stereo and you can hear everything in just one earbud, so the kids have taken to using just one earbud. He said that one day he had her put the other one in her other ear and she was so surprised to learn that there were words to those songs.
Edited by dwise1, : added "so that every group would play around with those features"
That's something I didn't know. In the early days of stereo, they loved to greatly vary the left and right channels, so the music was swirling around from ear to ear which was a truly cool experience! Music would be too flat if it's the same in both ears.
Even many Germans have trouble understanding some of the dialects.
My mother professed to understand only plautdietsch. Her father, my grandfather, spoke English to his 47 grandchildren but my dad spoke plautdietsch to him.
To complicate matters, all four of my grandparents were born in Ukraine. My dad's dad, my other grandfather, did a hitch in the German Army around the turn of the 20th century. His parents, my great-grandparents, were from West Prussia.
dwise1 writes:
Germans like to have their foreign movies dubbed into German, but they'll keep the songs in the original and subtitle them.
It isn't something I brag about but the German martial music still stirs my Canadian blood.
In The Enemy Below, U-boat captain Curd Jurgens plays a song on the phonograph which transmits through the water to Robert Mitchum's destroyer to show that they're not dead yet:
"To YOU My Friend, and YOU My Friend To all of us together Here's a toast to life, And to laughter and song...."
In The Battle of the Bulge, Robert Shaw and his fellow Germans sing the Panzerlied in German (but they sing the same verse six times).
In Cabaret, Michael York and his German friend stop at an outdoor cafe; a young boy gets up and begins to sing, "The sun on the meadow is summery warm, the stag in the forest runs free...." The camera pulls back to show he's wearing a Hitler Youth uniform. Then an old man joins in and another and another joins in untill everybody (except Michael York and friend) is singing, "Tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs to me!"
"I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!" -- Lucky Ned Pepper
Plattdeutsch (AKA "Low German" because it's in the low lands of the north) uses different consonants than Hochdeutsch (because it's in the high lands and mountains of the south). The changes of the second Germanic sound shift (die Zweite Lautverschiebung) had started in the south and worked its way northwards stopping around Köln (Cologne). It explains the patterns of differences in English's German cognates (eg, deer -- Tier, garden -- Garten, earth -- Erde, pipe -- Pfeife, thief -- Dieb, give -- geben) and also why those differences do not appear between Dutch/Frisian and English. And they do not appear much between English and Plattdeutsch.
Another thing I had noticed in Plattdeutsch (and Dutch) is the practice of making a vowel long by doubling it. Hence, we get the word for "boat", "Boot" (as in "Das Boot") with a long "o" that has it sound like the English word "boat" (not like English "boot" as in something you wear for marching and as I keep hearing Americans mispronounce it).
Somewhere I had been told that while most standard languages are based on a particular dialect (eg, Parisian French, Tokyo Japanese, Oxford English), Hochdeutsch is basically an artificial language that nobody speaks as a native dialect. Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German formed much of its basis, but for pronunciation they basically combined the consonants of the south and the vowels of the north. Or so I've been told.
BTW, we only had English in my family, since our German ancestor from Baden had been killed during Quantrill's Raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863. He had married an Irish girl and after that my father's side was primarily Irish while my mother's side was completely Scottish. I chose to study German in high school because of my 1-16th German ancestry, plus I had failed to learn conversational Spanish whereas I flourished in my grammar-intensive German class (it meshed with my engineer's mind). I'm the only one in my family who knows German, so it's my job to track down our great-great-grandfather in Germany.
In The Enemy Below, ...
The first-season Star Trek episode, Balance of Terror (which introduced the Romulans and their cloaking device), is supposed to have been based on The Enemy Below. Someone even pointed out that the heading home is the same in both works.
Robert Mitchem also played the destroyer CO in that scene I had described from The Winds of War (1983) in which he interposed his ship between a German sub and a convoy (again, this was before 08 Dec 1941) until the sub's batteries had depleted enough to force it to surface and disengage. He remarks to his officers how the Navy works in such cases: "Either you're a hero or you're a son-of-a-bitch."
"Tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs to me!"
Somehow I remember that as having been in German: "Das Morgen gehört ja mir!" I was surprised when I saw the movie again and it was in English. I forget how it was when I saw the dubbed version in München in 1973, but I would assume that the song had not been dubbed.
I had also seen the stage production at my university around 1974. I kind of seem to remember that in the play when they perform that song it's in English at first but then the final verse is sung in German. That might have been where I had heard that.
Look into the history of Kraft durch Freude (KdF -- Strength through Joy). Through it the Nazi party inserted itself into everybody's life. They organized after work activities, concerts and shows, excursions (eg, ski vacations), stays at their resorts, sea cruises, etc. Basically, they made available to workers activities that before only the wealthy could enjoy. At one point, KdF had the largest and most active travel agency in the world. And many of the activities and shows were steeped in German culture, meaning that the party had appropriated them for their political purposes. The VW Beetle started out as the "KdF-Wagen" since the savings plans for buying one was administered through the KdF. Of course most of that went away once the war started. Though a lot of television programming during the war would include German culture.
Edited by dwise1, : Gender correction: "der Morgen" = "the morning", but "das Morgen" = "tomorrow" as a noun
It explains the patterns of differences in English's German cognates (eg, deer -- Tier, garden -- Garten, earth -- Erde, pipe -- Pfeife, thief -- Dieb, give -- geben) and also why those differences do not appear between Dutch/Frisian and English.
I read somewhere that the Angles who crossed over to Angle-land with the Saxons and Jutes spoke a language quite similar to plautdietsch. The plautdietsh-speaking Mennonites who migrated to northern Poland also picked up some of their language there before continuing on to Ukraine.
dwise1 writes:
Hochdeutsch is basically an artificial language that nobody speaks as a native dialect.
My dad used to say that Germany was made up of a hundred little countries, nominally the 'Holy Roman Empire' before it was unified/conquered by Prussia. I suppose the artificial borders helped to foster separation of dialects.
"I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!" -- Lucky Ned Pepper
They recorded the first test images from all the mirror segments today on the camera sensor. The same star projected 36 times. Now they will focus each mirror on a single point.
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that is has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that is has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
If you ever make it to Germany, go to München (Munich to English speakers -- I have a bad habit of pronouncing names as they should be), visit the Deutsches Museum which is a museum of technology. It's located on an island in the river Isar just east of the Altstadt (durch das Isartor und dann 'n bissl südlich). Absolutely fascinating for any tech nerd. I saw a WWII Schwimwagen which looked like a VW chassis in a boat hull. And a Tropfenwagen, an aerodynamically designed car (the designer started as an automobile engineer, then designed aircraft during WWI, then had to return to designing cars because of Treaty of Versailles restrictions for German aircraft) whose basic shape was like a canoe with the driver at the narrow front (go to the Italian Wikipedia page for an interior view of that).
I didn't see it when I was there in 1973, but one of the current displays is of the interior of a German submarine, the U-1, of which there are a number of YouTube videos; eg:
Share and enjoy!
ABE: When you visit the Deutsches Museum, arrive early and be prepared to spend all day. Or maybe even plan to spend two days. There is so much to see there.
Another good museum if you're interested in science history is the Museo Galileo in Florence (Firenze). It's on the river Arno a few blocks upstream of the Ponte Vecchio and right next to the Uffizi. In Florence it's a good idea to buy a museum pass; a lot of major cities offer the same deal. The best part of the deal was that we had front-of-line privileges so we didn't have to wait in the long lines.
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that is has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
If you ever get to Chicago the Museum of Science and Industry has a captured WWII German U Boat, the U-505. I was surprised at the amount of wood work there was inside the sub.
Yeah, Oregon has one also. Kids love them, and some adults too. I was pretty young when i decided I didn't want to die in a cave or trapped underwater.
quote:USS Blueback (SS-581) is a Barbel-class submarine that served in the United States Navy from 1959 to 1990, and subsequently was made into an exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. She was the second Navy submarine to bear the name.
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that is has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
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