• brsrklf@jlai.lu
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    4 hours ago

    Long ago, I watched a youtube video of a girl singing a song from an anime that I’m assuming she’d translated herself in French. A bit bold because she didn’t speak French. It was a nice try, but overall quite funny.

    The part that really got me was a line about “a beautiful blooming spring” that she translated as a “un beau ressort qui fleurit”.

    “Ressort” is the mecanical part that goes “boing”. The season is “printemps”.

    • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      There was a story going around some time ago of someone who got a tattoo in Hebrew writing and asked for the word “butterfly” (🦋) but it instead read “butter fly” (🧈 🪰).

    • Leon@pawb.social
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      3 hours ago

      This reminds me of a translation I saw for a spring themed song. Not the mechanical spring, the flowering one.

      Japanese has three writing systems 漢字 which are essentially Chinese characters, the traditional kind rather than the simplified ones, ひらがな and カタカナ. They each complement one another and offer context, but sometimes you can also use different sets as a stylistic choice, which can deviate from general practise.

      So there is this one line in the song

      人ゴミを掻き分けては

      Typically you’d write that first word with hiragana, 人ごみ, meaning crowd. ゴミ is a different word meaning rubbish, garbage, trash, litter, etc.

      Whoever translated the song must’ve been decently new to the language, and did a valiant attempt, but they separated words out too much, and read 人ゴミ as two words, and 掻き分け again as two words.

      • 人 person/people
      • ゴミ garbage
      • 掻き arm stroke (like in swimming)
      • 分 part/portion

      And thus translated it to something like “the people rummaged through the trash.”

      • 人ごみ crowd
      • 掻き分ける push aside/push through

      So the actual meaning was roughly “I made my way through the crowd”

      • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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        1 hour ago

        depending on the composition of the crowd the translation might hold up, e.g. trying to get through a crowd of tech CEO millionaires lol

      • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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        18 minutes ago

        Not sure, but I don’t think so… I think it might have been the opening from Ouran Host Club. IIRC that’s what my sister was watching back then, and she showed me that video.

        There’s a line about beautiful spring in there, it’s not a perfect fit but obviously the person doing that started from an English translation, and there might have been some creative liberty here and there.

      • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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        4 minutes ago

        I can’t check the link directly, that store’s site might be geolocked for some reason… But yeah, good one.