cohsae posted:

They should go MK style and Velma tries to rip off their mask but they aren't wearing one so she tears their face off

cohsae posted:

They should go MK style and Velma tries to rip off their mask but they aren't wearing one so she tears their face off

Your Gay Uncle posted:

https://twitter.com/pcgamer/status/1568567288416112640

Tbh calling the cops seems like more of a Daphne move but the last Scooby Doo thing I watched was the movie from the early 2000's

Skwirl posted:

I really feel bad for whoever manages their twitter account. But they really brought this on themselves.

https://twitter.com/ExploreIGO/status/1568673629856043010?s=20&t=GnLHuetSoJiLCQy-Mk57ig

FFT posted:

Lots of comments recommending "Caelus" as the Roman counterpart to "Uranus" and well, today I learned one of the planets has a Greek name.

cohsae posted:

They should go MK style and Velma tries to rip off their mask but they aren't wearing one so she tears their face off

Skwirl posted:

I really feel bad for whoever manages their twitter account. But they really brought this on themselves.

https://twitter.com/ExploreIGO/status/1568673629856043010?s=20&t=GnLHuetSoJiLCQy-Mk57ig

ultrafilter posted:

https://twitter.com/whelanmichael/status/1568606680992079872

cohsae posted:

They should go MK style and Velma tries to rip off their mask but they aren't wearing one so she tears their face off

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

https://twitter.com/urinalsoup/status/1568315199035248640?s=46&t=rJhiYyk5X5ZG9I8eRmEhzA

Clyde Radcliffe posted:

Meanwhile squirreled away in the middle aisle you can get 4 tins for £3.49, which is cheaper than the £4 Clubcard discount for members pictured here.



A big flashy display to convince people to hand over more of their money is exactly what Liz would have wanted.

zoux posted:

Also you just become king instantly with no coronation? We make veeps take the oath of office before they replace a dead president.

Sir Terry Pratchett posted:

“The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.”

FFT posted:

Lots of comments recommending "Caelus" as the Roman counterpart to "Uranus" and well, today I learned one of the planets has a Greek name.

thepopmonster posted:

Mr.Radar posted:

https://twitter.com/dril/status/1568631563558191105

Milo and POTUS posted:

Face clearly doesn't match

Warbird posted:

Terry was a goddamn international treasure and it still bums me out that we lost him. I wonder if those novels work at all in other languages. It seems like a transition nightmare to keep the feel/intent.

trapped mouse posted:

thepopmonster posted:

Some attempts worked better than others:

https://lithub.com/the-time-terry-pratchetts-german-publisher-inserted-a-soup-ad-into-his-novel/

Also, copied from a reddit comment:

In the back of the first edition of The Discworld Companion (published in 1994) there's an interview with Terry. Amongst other things, he says he can't see himself still writing Discworld in 5 years time... There's also a question about translations:

The Discworld must be terribly difficult to translate. Do you have much to do with the translation?

I know the Spanish translator won a prize for The Colour of Magic! And someone attempted to translate The Colour of Magic into Polish, read the first page and said he didn't believe it was possible to think like that in Polish. I get on very well with the Dutch translator, who takes a kind of skewed delight in tracking down the 'right' words, and the German translator also contacts me quite regularly - someone recently told me that they thought Reaper Man was better in German, which is some kind of triumph for the translator. I do get some occasional enquiries from the others, but mostly the translators do their own thing. I don't envy them. A lot of foreign fans are bilingual, and it's hard to please everyone.

The book also contains a 'brief history of the Discworld,' which I think was mostly written by Stephen Briggs, though presumably with Terry's input, or at least his approval:

The Language Barrier: It's all Klatchian to Me

The Discworld books are translated into eighteen languages, including Japanese and Hebrew. They present astonishing pitfalls for the translator.

The problems are not (just) the puns, of which there are rather fewer than people imagine. In any case, puns are translatable; they might not be directly translatable, but the Discworld translators have to be adept at filleting an English pun from the text and replacing it with one that works in German or Spanish. What can loom in front of a translator like the proverbial radio on the edge of the bathtub of the future are the resonances and references.

Take Hogswatchnight, the Discworld winter festival. It's partly a pun on hog but also takes in 'Hogmanay' and the old Christian `Watch Night service on 31 December. Even if people don't directly spot this, it subconsciously inherits the feel of a midwinter festival.

Or there's the Morris Minor. To a Britisher 'an old lady who drives a Morris Minor' — and there's still a few of both around — is instantly recognisable as a 'type'. You could probably even have a stab at how many cats she has. What's the Finnish equivalent? The German equivalent?

Translators in the science fiction and fantasy field have an extra problem. SF in particular is dominated by the English — or at least the American — language. Fans in mainland European and Scandinavian countries must read in English if they're to keep up with the field. This means that a foreign translator is working under the eyes of readers who're often buying the book to see how it compares with the English version they already have.

Ruurd Groot has the daunting task of translating not only the plot but also the jokes in the Discworld series into Dutch. Translating a pun is difficult but not impossible, he says, as long as it is a pun in the strict ‘linguistic’ sense: making fun by crossing the semantic and formal wires of words or expressions. And even when it proves impossible to invent an. equivalent pun for the destination language, a deft translator may solve the problem by ‘compensating’ — introducing a pun for another word somewhere else in the sentence in such a way that the value of the original pun is restored.

Strangely, the similarity of the English and Dutch languages is not always helpful. Many Dutch words and expressions have been borrowed from English and, of course, the same thing has happened in reverse, especially i in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the English word ‘forlorn’, , for example, comes from the Dutch verloren = ‘lost’. The side effect of this circumstance is that many Dutch readers of Terry’s original English text do not always catch what he really wrote; words may look familiar, but meanings have changed with time.

In The Colour of Magic, Terry refers to the ‘Big Bang hypothesis’. Sadly for Ruurd, the erotic Bang-pun proved untranslatable. In Dutch, the theory translates as oerknal, which provides no hand-holds. However, they do refer to het uitdijend heelal — ‘the expanding universe’. Ruurd altered this slightly to the het Uitvrijend Model — sounding much the same — and which could be taken to mean ‘the Making Love Outwards Model’. When the author heard this he apparently sat there grinning and saying it’s the best-ever title for a scientific theory.

Much more difficult is the translation of jokes on local traditions or institutions well known to English readers. And there are special considerations here. Dutch readers of some sophistication (as readers of TP tend to be, it goes without saying) would never accept substituting a reference to a Dutch television series for a similar reference to a BBC serial.

Brits may blithely assume that everyone knows about morris dancing or ‘A’ levels, but it is the experience of the Dutch that most foreigners’ knowledge of their country tends to run. out somewhere south of the cheese, clogs and windmills department. Strangely enough, to a Dutch reader a reference to strictly Dutch ephemera would be jarring; they couldn’t imagine someone in Britain, let alone on the Discworld, being aware of them. Sad but true.

Translators for ‘large’ nationalities - German, French, and so on — can maintain the fiction that everyone else is German or French and just localize the jokes in question. ‘Small’ nationalities have to replace little items of English/British arcana by references to globally known international, or more famous English, items. On the Discworld, that most international, or rather interstellar, of locations, strictly English or British references are allowed in a Dutch translation only if they are globally known — like the works of Shakespeare in Wyrd Sisters.

Ruurd could rely on the fact that many Dutch people. know: Shakespeare, if only from television — played by British actors and subtitled in Dutch. But in Moving Pictures, problems.for the translator exceeded all reasonable proportions. The films referred to in the book are well enough known,but the average Dutch reader might not recognize many of the translated quotations from the dialogue.

In that case, he says, a translator can-rely on a harmless version of snob appeal. If someone doesn’t know or recognize something, the translator can write in a tone as.if anyone reading it of course will know all and... it turns out that they do ...

IK WEET-NIET WAT JIJ ERVAN VINDT, MAAR EEN BORD ROTTI ZOU ER WEL INGAAN

This is the closest that Ruurd could. get to Death’s line from Mort: ‘I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. YOU, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.’ A line for line translation here is impossible: a different colonial past means that ‘curry’ is not a household word in Holland. Also ‘I could murder a...’ in the sense of ‘I could really enjoy a...' makes no sense in Dutch.

Casting aside. the avoidance of ‘localized’ Dutch expressions on this occasion, Ruurd opted for ‘rotti’. It is a near-funny word itself; having the same echo of ‘rotten’ as it-would in English. It belongs to the Surinam culinary tradition — Surinam having been. a small Dutch colony in South America. ‘Rotti’, like curry, is very hot stuff. Its mention in the context, with the vague implication that Surinam is cosmically more famous than the Netherlands, helps to replace for Dutch readers some of the fun lost during translation.

Granny Weatherwax, on the other-hand, presents no problems (at least, not yet: as Ruurd says, translators of a series have to try to avoid painting themselves into a corner). Her name translates. more literally into Opoe Esmee Wedersmeer, although Wéerwas. would be more direct. Weder is ye olde form of the word weer, meaning ‘weather’. The smeer part is a word used for greasy substances as applied to shoes or cart axles, but also for the stuff secreted in our ear passages (earwax = oorsmeer). There is an etymological link with the English word ‘smear’. Ruurd felt that the ordinary word in Dutch for ‘wax’ — was — seemed less suitable, as being too ordinary.

'Esmee' is, as in English, short for Esmerelda, and Ope is an obsolete endearing way of addressing grandmothers in Dutch. The term is still used to refer to certain old-fashioned ladies' bike - opoefietsen = 'granny bikes.'

This has overtones of the 'Morris Minor' ... you see? They have one after-all...

And finally, while googling, I came across an interesting issue with the french translation of Weatherwax. In French she's translated as "Mémé Circdutemps" a literal, grammatically correct translation. In the English Witches Abroad, Lilith goes by the name "Lilith du Tempscrire" (a grammatically bad translation of Weatherwax). This is a subtle hint to English readers, but if the name was used in the French books it would be a bit on the nose, so in French translations Lilith is known as Lilith Weatherwax.

trapped mouse posted:

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

Biplane posted:

ban this sick filth

Read After Burning posted:

I cannot believe this post is only a few months old, it seems eternal.
https://twitter.com/liminalfunnycat/status/1523906986181488645?lang=en

grittyreboot posted:

It seems exhausting to speak with that accent all the time