[id: Tweet by @byekenobi, which reads: "not to sound like a boomer but social media teuly has made some of you incredibly cruel and callous and the worst part is i don't think you even care". end id.]
Y’all in the American SW and west Mexico better check the national hurricane center and your weather for this weekend and next week.
Hurricane Hilary is about to make landfall and that whole desert area is supposed to get a years worth of rain or more. Death Valley is supposed to get twice the annual rainfall. Severe winds, massive flooding, and landslides are all strong possibilities.
This is gonna get ugly. Please spread the word. This is a majorly anomalous event and people may be unaware of the threat headed their way.
Flash floods are definitely gonna kill people, so here’s your regularly scheduled PSA:
Desert soil does not absorb a significant amount of water. It reaches maximum saturation very very quickly, and all the rest of the water rushes downhill. Even if you can’t tell that the ground is not perfectly flat, the water can. And it will move. Quickly. No, faster than that. Nope, still faster. If you try to cross moving floodwater, you will get swept downstream and probably die.
Do not try to wade in/cross flood water that is any deeper than the thickness of the sole of an average athletic shoe, no I am not kidding, the water will get deeper literally while you’re standing in it.
This goes for cars, too. I’ve seen entire vehicles getting swept downstream in flash floods because the driver thought they could cross the “puddle” and Found Out.
haggard from her battle (psychologically terrorizing my mom’s golden retriever for hours) the warrior (inbred 9 pound cat) cautiously trods towards the celebratory banquet (Rae Dunn bowl full of kibble)
I will be 70 years old and I still will never have gotten over the time the Mythbusters used a rocket powered steel wall to - and I use this word as literally as possible - vaporize an entire car into red mist
If you haven’t seen this episode of Mythbusters I feel so bad for you because “What car?” remains to this day as a defining moment of my adolescence and my entire life
Thinking about a world where there is a village that has a pet dragon. The dragon lives in a nearby cave but comes to visit, and the villagers have taught the dragon to accept scritches, and to use its claws to help plow the fields, and sometimes the dragon even helps the blacksmith with extra hot fire. They reward the dragon by giving it shiny things, since dragons love gold!
Meanwhile the dragon is very pleased at how its human village is coming along! The humans were afraid at first but it's finally convinced them it doesn't mean any harm, and finally they cuddle with it! It takes time to build a relationship with humans but it's so worth it. They've even started trying to pay the dragon back with trinkets! Humans don't really understand what dragons want, but the dragon treasures the gifts anyway.
I'm a big fan of localisation. I believe the goal of a translation should be to keep as much meaning and nuance as possible from the original. Localisation is key to this. Language and culture are inextricably linked, which means you must engage in cultural education and/or localisation to successfully translate. Cultural education is preferable, but in many cases it is not appropriate (not great having to pause every few seconds to read a translator note when you want to turn your brain off and watch a show). However, I think sometimes, translators take the wrong approach to localisation, and I want to talk about that here.
There was an example of "bad" localisation given by a twitter user in this Sarah Moon video: the example was anime characters subbed to use zoomer slang like "sus" and "cringe". I actually think that is an example of good localisation. I am not talking about that kind of thing.
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This scene from 深夜食堂 (Midnight Diner) made me want to write this post. パチンコ has been translated as "pinball". I'm sure there are people reading that translation and cringing, just like I did! I tried to put my finger on what irked me so much about it and I realised: this localisation is localising the wrong part of the meaning of パチンコ.
Part of localising is choosing the closest cultural equivalent of a concept. This inevitably means losing some of the specific details of the original word, but usually those details aren't important (if the whole cultural concept is important, you should probably just use a translator's note IMO). For example, the word パチンコ has lots of bits of meaning in it: "gambling" "played on a machine", "time killer", "uses small metal balls", "generally played by older men", "big flashy lights", "money sink", and so on. In this context, the character is talking about "winning money" from パチンコ, so you'd expect at the very least that the localised word would preserve the "gambling" and "money sink" bits of meaning. However, instead they chose to preserve the "small metal balls" and "big flashy lights" bits of meaning (まさかの！). This is a very silly choice because those bits of meaning don't have a shred of relevance to this scene, or any other scene in this story at all. I can see a context in which "pinball" is the best possible localisation for パチンコ. But this was not it, and not even close. I've never heard of anyone winning money from pinball.
I think if I were a translator, my process for localisation would be to break down the word into those bits of meaning, then rank the bits of meaning in terms of relevance to the line/scene/story, then pick a localised word that hits as many of the higher ranked meanings as possible. In this case, there are many better localisations (read: localisations with meanings more relevant to the scene). If I were localising it, I would probably do this: "He took all the money I won from the pokies." but I am aware that pokies is an Australianism. Assuming I was localising for a global english speaking audience: "He took all the money I won from a slot machine".
(TBH though, I don't think パチンコ needs to be localised because the english equivalent loanword, pachinko, is already well known enough to be used in english subtitles imo)
Also shoutout to my manager in the (remote) meeting this morning saying "I didn't even realize covid was a thing anymore" with his brand new case of covid that is making him feel sicker than he has ever felt in his life (except the last time he had covid).
This is the manager who refused to get a vaccine and isolated as much as he could but one of his kids brought covid home and made him so sick that he was hospitalized. Then he refused to get a vaccine because he thought he'd have immunity since he'd had covid and stopped isolating because it was "like he was vaccinated."
Covid is still here, there's yet another omicron variant fucking people's shit up right now in August 2023, cases are on the rise, MASK AND GET VACCINATED AND ISOLATE YOURSELF FOR 10 DAYS AFTER THE SYMPTOMS END
We keep getting new mutations because ofevery. single. person.who acts like covid doesn't exist and then gets covid.
there's like 10,0000,0 accounts with names like "Best Heritage Posts" and "Tumblr Hall Of Fame Posts" and "So Funny Hellsite Posts" but where's the shitty posts accounts. where's the hall of fail accounts. i want to see the worst of the worst
