Chatter post

[trashmod]

For all your discussion needs.

Ground rules:
- Try to keep it loosely trash party related, or at least Cap fandom related.
- Disagreement is fine, nastiness is not.
- Being offended is not carte blanche for nastiness.
- Trashmeme ground rules apply. Read at your own risk, no romanticizing your noncon garbage, no wank about the moral acceptability of noncon kink.
- Body shots, sniper shots, and tetanus shots are all available at the open bar. Party like it's 2014, kids.

Comments

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[flootzavut]

(Additionally: I have noticed that people have this tendency to put something very colloquial (or sometimes downright wrong) into Google translate in English and then accept whatever it spits out. I noticed that in a story I read recently, where somebody had some Russian that literally made no sense, and it turned out they'd just written something in English and made the assumption Google translate would understood what they *meant* to say. To me it seems fairly obvious that if you give Google translate something in shaky English, then you're liable to come out win a result that may not be what you intended, but people assume it's a mindreader 8-o)

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[(Anonymous)]

Do you remember what it was? (I ask because I desperately hope it wasn't me and I want to go back and edit if it was. :)

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[flootzavut]

Haha, no, don't worry - it was in a different fandom and I know the perpetrator. (Also, you write better English than she does - native speaker, but borderline incomprehensible a lot of the time.)

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[(Anonymous)]

:wipes forehead:

I mean, I can't imagine even Google translate can get a simple declarative sentence *too* wrong, but you never know. :)

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I think much of the Google Translate trouble people get into involves things that they don't even notice are idiomatic/metaphorical statements--like, I wouldn't normally think of "I have her" meaning "I am about to get possession of a person (to do bad things to them)" as idiomatic. It's very easy not to notice that stuff about your own language until you realize it doesn't translate into another one.

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Yeah, it's really easy for that kind of thing to slip past a native speaker.

And with English>a lot of other I-E langs there's the case problem, since we basically don't have it except in (some) pronouns.

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[flootzavut]

Yes, that's true. I think this is one reason I'm grateful I did languages to a high level, because you basically can't learn any language to any degree of fluency without, sooner or later, bumping up against stuff like this sooner or later, and it's just good training for being forced to think about things analytically/not making assumptions. Because when you do make assumptions, you end up making a complete berk of yourself by saying things you really didn't mean to say... ;)

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[flootzavut]

I'd say that Google translate works surprisingly well at times, and surprisingly poorly in others, but if you are starting with a healthy scepticism and you're aware of the limitations, you are probably on the right path. Hell, you're probably doing better than, y'know, Marvel lmao ;)

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[(Anonymous)]

Well, we're stuck with черная вдова and зимний солдат since that's what Marvel uses whether that's what an actual Russian would use or not... :)

Re: Beta/resource/Q&A thread

[flootzavut]

I hadn't got around to looking up either, but if someone had asked me to guess, I'd have gone with зимний солдат for winter soldier, and apparently the actual spider is called чёрная вдова in Russian (I just looked at the wiki page on Russian wiki), so for once I think you're golden with those two! (If you look at Russian wiki it'll have it as a plural, чёрные вдовы, but that's when it's a species name.)

I imagine any page in Russian will use the title Marvel gave to TWS, but зимний солдат seems logical to me. зимний is the adjectival form of winter, and I know Russians do use that metaphorically, similarly to how we sometimes use it in English (ie it doesn't have to literally pertain to the winter season), so I think however you take its meaning in English, that's a pretty good Russian rendering - with the I am not a native disclaimer firmly in place ;)