Beware of subtitles!

I tend to watch all TV with subtitles, as my ears are not what they were! On Reporting Scotland tonight, I looked up and saw, “Muddy field is best!” What the person had actually said, in a survey on opinion as to which ground should be used for International Football, Cup finals etc., (pel -droed) was Murrayfield!

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Oh, yes, I feel you, sista!

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Unfortunately ‘voice recognition’ is used and selection of the nearest word which sounds like it leads to the many stupid translations.

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I did realise that, but it demonstrates why some people get wrong ideas about the meaning of some Welsh words.

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Several times last year I tried to watch the news in English on a TV that was in a communal room with the sound off, but the voice recognition subtitles on. It drove me insane!! How anyone can make any sense out of those subtitles is beyond me. I had to go back to playing Duolingo on my tablet and ignore the TV :grin:

At least when you watch a programme with subtitles on S4C you can be fairly sure they are reasonably close to the actual dialogue. I used to watch Pobol y Cwm with English subtitles when I first started learning Welsh, and it helped me heaps to glance at the English, get a feel for what they were saying, then listen to how they said it in Welsh. I learnt a lot like that, until I pushed myself to turn the subtitles off and just immerse in the Welsh. It felt like taking training wheels off a bike, but it was a good move.

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This must explain why in a S4C news item I was watching a while back, a mention of “Bangor” was mangled into “Bangladesh” in the subtitles :grinning:

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Subtitels are better then dubbing. Never liked when John Wayne spoke German.

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Sometimes, the German voices are, you know…not better, but bloody cool, like the ones for Terence Hill and Bud Spencer (Mario Girotti and Carlo Pedersoli). Still love these epic brawls and their humor!

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Oh, I,remember remember reading a Star Trek story of mine which a fellow fan in France has translated into French. I understood Spock said but the following flood of French induced from me the reaction , “no he didn’t!”:Also, the TV dubbed featured poor Bones called Mac-coy in a very French accent! And M Soo-loo!

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All my life I believed that “Am fuß der blauen Berge” was a German tv series, until I realised later in life that it was a dubbed “Laramie”. It just doesn’t sound right to me in English. :slight_smile:

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A German friend once gave me a German-dubbed version of “The Name of the Rose”. It would have worked as well, except that the face of Sean Connery was so familiar that I couldn’t take his speaking in German seriously.

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Quite right - everybody knows full well he spoke Latin!

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:slight_smile:
“Nomen meus Bond est, Iacobus Bond…” (aka “nihil nihil septem”… ) :wink:

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I first came across ‘The Avengers’ on TV on a visit to France - and the French dub everything. For me, they will always be - to a certain extent - M John Steed and Mme Emma Peel.

The original “Avengers Girl” was Honor Blackman. With her husky smouldering voice, she’d have made a great “femme fatale”. (This was back in B&W TV days).

I went on a working holiday to a farm in Switzerland near Basel once years ago. I didn’t get to watch TV most of the time, but when they had a young boy come to visit, he was watching The Wombles dubbed into German. I’ll never forget Großvater Bulgaria! It sounded hilarious to me.

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