Hello, everyone! Long time no talk.

I'm Malaysian, and I live in Hong Kong - both of these countries are non-English countries, so seeing the languages/dialects I speak called 'foreign' is definitely a little weird for me. English is not my native language, but as I grew up speaking English in school, and to some extent, at home, I'd consider English to be (somewhat) of a first language? (My family lives and breathes in a plethora of different dialects. It does get confusing when everyone changes every two seconds, but it also forces you to keep up with the conversation.) I learn basically everything in English anyways :))

I think Asian representation in Hollywood is definitely lax (there goes my dreams of being a movie star). I do think it has a lot to do with the cultural differences between USA and Asia - in a lot of movies, I find the portrayal of China/Chinese to be ????!??!?! Just don't do it. Transformers: Age of Extinction did a terrible, terrible job in Hong Kong - in both depicting the language and the place. Um, the Cantonese they spoke was pretty much 2 sentences of cuss words/screaming, and none of Hong Kong looked like Hong Kong??

If anyone wants to learn weird swear words in another language, I'm here xD

I went a little off-topic, I'm sorry :P

I would gladly accept anyone's offer to learn new words just so I don't have to google stuff and STILL get it wrong. ;)

I'm here to help :D If you want to learn anything in Chinese (e.g: Mandarin, Hokkien, Cining, Cantonese) or Malay, I'll be here! My Malay isn't amazing but I can always double check with my Malay friends :))



Edited 2016-05-20 02:08 pm (UTC)

That's a fabulous offer!! I can "retaliate" in German, French and Dutch (and Latin, in a pinch). :-)

PS: Why aren't we friends yet ...? ;-)

Oh, wonderful! You know the best languages, sigh. I'm currently learning Latin and would really appreciate to talk to someone with it, so why aren't we friends xD *goes off to fix that* (btw, do you have tumblr?)

I sent a friend request! :-) Also, yes I have a tumblr. Same username!

Okay, if someone called 'bishoping' follows you, it's me :)

I wonder sometimes what it must be like listening/watching something in English as a language that you speak and then it switching to your first langauge/another language that you speak and it being in subtitles. Is that weird? Because it feels like it would be weird.

Out of curiosity - and only if you want to answer - have you read much about the Doctor Strange casting and what do you think about it?

Okay, if I ever do get around to a Firefly-esque character who is Asian, speaks Chinese, and swears in English instead, I'm so coming to you for advice *grins*.

Nope, all talking is on topic!

Usually, I tend to gravitate towards English -- and, um, I don't know? When I switch languages, I tend to do it subconsciously. Right now, my grandparents are watching a Chinese show, speaking in another dialect, and I'm typing in English - and it's kind of like one language in my brain? So, to sum it up, it's not really that weird, unless the person speaking the language is doing a terrible job xD

YES. I was going to talk about that, but I thought it went waaay off topic, so I deleted my Doctor Strange rant. It might be the first marvel movie I don't watch - I really am very, very pissed. WHY IS A MOVIE SET IN NEPAL FILLED WITH WHITE ACTORS? There are so many great Asian actors out there, Marvel??? Plus, they wouldn't have to dress white people up as Asians and put so much makeup on them to make them LOOK Asian.

I'm happy to help! <3

Huh, that's interesting, that your brain just filters it all into 'I understand this'. Gotta love the brain :D

The background characters aren't even Asian? The things I've read around have been around the casting of the Ancient One. Oh, people *sigh*. This article was interesting in that it gives on reason as basically Marvel doesn't want to acknowledge Tibet is a country for fear of losing the Chinese market. So...no background characters either? Um. It also seems...weird that they've gone 'it's okay, we can do diverse, we'll make the Ancient One a woman'. Um, racial diversity is also a thing? And women being fifty percent of the population, why is this super diverse changing a guy to a girl? I'll watch it, because i don't like to debate things without knowing the source, and also because it's Marvel and I have some trust. But there is some odd stuff circling this film. I'll be interested to see what comes of it.

Shiny :D

Yeah! It just.. flows. Like I read somewhere that you start to really grasp the language when you stop translating it in your brain. How that all works, I don't know :P When I don't know certain phrases/words while speaking a dialect, my brain will just..switch to the closest dialect. And that is where the problem lies, because I always mix everything up and I look like a klutz in front of my family xD

Ew, Marvel. They really do play up to the Chinese market, because, well, money (Fan Bing Bing was in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and that did wonders for the international box office. She's really well known in China, so even that small role really did help to boost publicity for the movie). I'm not too happy with the casting, but what can I do? I'm a little biased as I'm not the biggest fan of Benedict (I'm sorry, I'm sorry!) but well, it could be good. I just doubt I'll watch it, and if I do watch it, I'll stream it online for free XD

I gather they added Helen Cho to Ultron for the Asian market, plus apparently there are some scenes that weren't shown in the North American version. Marketing, for better or (usually) worse is A Thing.

On the languages, I'm a native German speaker but now consider English my primary language. (My German is actually getting a bit rusty.) As a Canadian civil servant, I also have to be "bilingual" in French, our other official language. Some years ago I was travelling with the Canadian national fencing team; 2/3 of us were francophone, the rest anglo, and we were in Germany for tournaments. Given my German, I was the one tasked to communicate with restaurant waiters -- and suffered complete language short circuit. I'd open my mouth and wouldn't realize what came out -- speaking English to my Francophone teammates, German to the anglos, French to the waiters... Total Babel brain, even if it all made total sense. My teammates laughed at me for months.

Fascinating!

A pet peeve of mine is when American shows (tv, movies, whatever) caption English dialogue when spoken by someone from Ireland, Scotland, or some other English speaking country because of the speaker's accent. Seriously? Are most Americans really that confused by accents? It kind of drives me nuts.

Yeah. But then again, they even translated the title of the first Harry Potter, for fear that North American audiences might not know what a "Philosopher" was. It's a criminal under-estimation of the sophistication of the reading/watching public.

They do that? Huh. To be fair, sometimes people in the UK can't follow other UK accents/dialects, but we don't get subtitles. I tried the first episode of The Wire not so long ago and I found that difficult to follow at times. But then I kinda liked that, because it embedded the story in a sense of place. Not-here place. (If that makes sense.)

Great topic!! Many different observations here, in no particular order, plus it's after midnight at the end of a 60 hour work week so I'll just list them:

1. I LOVE Hawkeye #19 and the visual absence of language. Absolutely brilliant.

2. Language and POV are closely linked. There's more to language than different tongues -- it's also got to do with class, and education, and frame of reference. One of my favourite things to do as a writer is to make sure that you can tell which characters speak by the way they express themselves. For me, Clint tends to use contractions, often speaks in monosyllables and staccato, and drops verbs ("You done with that?"), while Natasha speaks in longer, more sophisticated sentences. For Lucky, in a story where one subchapter is written in his POV (By the Book (http://archiveofourown.org/works/5797621)), I used repetitive imagery, trying to capture verbally the way David Aja had him think in pictures.

3. Pretty much everyone with a German accent in the MCU is HYDRA. (Except that old Gentleman in Stuttgart.) For an organization that is pretty much global and considered the Nazis an impediment to their expansion, why is the entire leadership German-speaking? And that the idea of having, say, a black or Asian HYDRA agent would "complicate" things, even though HYDRA, unlike National Socialism, has no noticeable race- or religion-based ideology? So, instead, German accents are still, 70+ years after WW2, profiled so as to equate evil -- a lazy shorthand.

4. The worst thing in fanfic is when someone, in an effort to appear cosmopolitan and well-travelled, uses Google translate for whole sentences/passages (it's okay for single words that require no conjugation or declension). Seriously. Just .... don't.

5. Having immersed myself in Star Trek mostly after I moved to Canada, it is the oddest thing to read Voyager fanfic in my native German. It sounds so ... stilted and unnatural! And don't get me started on dubbing! Where we live now we get a lot of German TV and I actually watched a bit of the Avengers with Other People's Voices once, and man! That was bizarre. *shudders*





Edited 2016-05-20 10:56 pm (UTC)

1. Aja was so. damn. good. at visual depiction of language and lack of language. When I reread I'm in awe all over again.

2. YES.

3. Ha, also yes. I think it's coded into Western media that German = bad guys, also Russian and that entire branch of the European language tree, but definitely German. Let's have a German SHIELD Agent or something, buck the trend!

4. This is one of the things that puts me off using other languages in fic, to be honest; lack of knowing what I'm really doing and not wanting to rely on unreliable translations. So I tend to use italics or formatting to signify when someone isn't speaking English, but I think I'd like to play around with other ways.

5. Really? Do you think that has anything to do with - to my limited, mainly sister-school of Star Trek knowledge - how American Star Trek is?

5b. Dubbing. Just no.

This is such a great topic! I only speak English and am super jealous of people who grew up learning two or more languages or were able to learn later on (I had five years of Spanish and remember how to count to forty-nine, ask for the bathroom, and tell people I don't speak Spanish). And I LOVE the empty speech bubbles in the Hawkeye comics - such a clever idea!

I'm totally guilty of using Google (mis)Translate but always try to translate it the other way, as well, to attempt to fix any inconsistencies in meaning if not grammar. I always put other languages in italics. As for making sure the meaning of foreign languages comes across to the readers I'll adjust the narrative a little to make the meaning apparent. Sometimes this can lead to inharmonious text but it usually isn't too bad:

The woman pulled the door open a bit more, revealing a creased, weathered face and gray hair like wire. "Van pénzed?"
Money. Did they have money.
"Nincs pénzünk. Holnap mi lesz pénz." No money. Tomorrow they would have money.
The old woman shook her head sharply, "Nem. Megy el." She began to shut the door.
Natasha slid her fingers around the knob to stop her. The woman's eyes went wide with fright but Natasha kept her voice gentle and pleading, "Kérjük, ossza meg velünk belsejében. Van hová menni."

Otherwise, if it's just one or two words or phrases, I'll put a list of translations in the author's notes. I hate, hate, hate, when someone interrupts the flow of their story to insert parenthesized translations: "Cómo estás? (How are you)," said the woman.

As for languages in film, I usually don't have a problem with subtitles as long as I'm relatively awake while viewing (though totally agree with the whole don't-subtitle-accents thing). However, one of favorite movies is Hunt for Red October and I liked how they dealt with Russian-into-English by starting with subtitles and then moving into spoken English - making it clear they were still supposed to be speaking Russian. Any future interaction with English-speaking characters would mean reverting back to Russian and subtitles.

When you meet people from places like the Netherlands for example where they actually, after a certain point, can have their normal classes, like maths, science, whatever, in another language like English. And I know in other places. My mind boggles at that, having to juggle two lessons in one!

Yeah, I'm not a fan of doubling - having things in both languages. I mean, pick one? But then I do like knowing what's been said. Except for when the experience of the fic/protagonist is that I'm not meant to know what's being said. (I like lots of things *grins*)

Ooo, interesting point with Red October. I like that, like showing it's meant to be another but then...I guess that would also make an English speaking audience sympathise more with the characters and sink into the story more too.

What I loved about "Red October" was that the language turned with the one word that is the same in both English and Russian, and that defines the movie as such: "Armageddon". That was so, so clever.

And as to your approach to translation, that's what i do when I use another language. I only use languages I actually know, like German, French or a bit of Dutch, because I really don't want to use Google Translate for anything more than individual words -- it's too unreliable.

What I loved about "Red October" was that the language turned with the one word that is the same in both English and Russian, and that defines the movie as such: "Armageddon". That was so, so clever. OH. That is excellent!

Couple of thoughts for now - i'm sure I'll get more later ;)

- I much prefer subtitles to dubbing. It probably helps that I'm a fast reader, so it doesn't mean I miss parts of a film or show because i'm too busy trying to read the subtitles. But also I think it gives more of a sense of place. I get to hear what people's names and place names actually sound like, and I feel like I'm somewhere else, and I think...language feeds into culture and everything else, so it creates a different...I don't know, atmosphere, than it otherwise would.

- I recently started watching The Bridge - which, it's old now I guess but in case you haven't heard of it, is about a body found on the border (a bridge) between two European countries and the two different police forces have to work together. And interestingly it draws on social commentary for each country and difference between them. It's all in subtitles, which works. But I realised the characters are actually speaking two different - if in many ways similiar - languages and I think I'd like it if that was reflected in the subtitles too somehow.

- it took me an embarrasingly long while to work out that in the Saga comics the foreign laguange of 'Blue' - as opposed to the widely spoken Language, which is depicted as English - was actually a real language called Esperanto (fitting for the comics themes). I'd thought I wasn't meant to understand the other language, even though I could recognise some words that seemed vaguely Spanish, At first it was a bit frustrating in the sense that I wanted to know all of the story, but once I got into it, it worked. Because it was part of the experience, something I wasn't meant to know. Like in the Hawkeye comics when he can't hear people or it's 'something Spanish sounding', heh. But anyway, another clever language use there. I like that I can go online and find out from fans what the translations are, because I like the extra knowledge, but I don't interupt my reading of Saga to look it up and I kinda like that the comic doesn't spoon feed me a translation at the end of each issue.

- I have limited school French and Spanish, and I did a level one course in British Sign Language. I don't feel like I have enough of a grasp to use those in fic, so in at least one I'm working on I have the other languages I use in italics - my reasoning being that my protagonist understands the languages, even if not all the other characters do, so so can my readers. I'm not sure sometimes if this feels like cheating, or missing an opportunity to show something.

- Allspeak. Universal Translators. Babble Fish. No, yeah, I think that's cheeky ;p

Oh, oh, oh! Universal translators. You know how it's implicit in Star Trek that everyone speaks their own language and the UT takes care of the direct communication somehow? I always find it amusing, having spent a good chunk of my life hanging around the UN with a thingy in my ear, that this can be done through a badge instead of a brain implant. But, eh.

You don't read "Voyager", so I just have to tell you that I once wrote a story in that fandom where the Voyager crew meets a race that communicates biochemically, by pheromones, like ants do. And they manage to re-program their Universal Translator to include that language -- and then after they leave, the UT goes absolutely haywire on the crew, reading their pheromone emissions to each other (without them noticing, because that's how the UT works). And B'Elanna, the half-Klingon engineer, is pregnant ... Man, that was a lot of fun to write. It's called "Arachnia's Vial (http://archiveofourown.org/works/265154)", a reference to a very funny episode where Janeway has to play the totally OTT holodeck character of Queen Arachnia, whose own pheromones are contained in a vial as a plot point.

Invasive surgery for communication though, seems...a bit not good. The Babel Fish in Hitchiker's Guide wierded me out enough.

Ha, oh I like that :D Yeah, I've read bits of Star Trek, but only what I can follow from having watched the new films - oh, I'm one of those people *grins* - but I like anything space-y and futuristic that takes human concepts of things like communication and says, no, now wait a minute, if an entirely different species doesn't work like that...and then culture clash.

I would love a universal translator. And a holodeck. And a transporter. (Mostly the transporter. Or a TARDIS. That would work too.)