Orange Ya Glad I Exist?

It was Modduck who first introduced me to this cake. As a fellow allergic-to-dairy person, he and I often share dairy-free foods, and whenever one of us buys / makes a cake for work, we'll often make sure to have a dairy-free alternative for the other as well, which is really nice.

Le Petit Gâteau is where it's from, and the orange cake is really nice, despite being dairy and gluten free.

I never even knew I liked candied orange peel until I tried this cake. It's a bit pricey, at $8.90 for a slice, but I think it's definitely worth it.

I don't really know what else to say today, I'm mentally exhausted. Oh, good news, I finally have motivation to study French again (somewhat related to today's post, as the store has a French name - The Little Cake (Google translate says The Cupcake, but then offers le cupcake for a translation of that. I'm trying to rely less on Google translate, after the_boss made a bad-sounding comment to a French co-worker (accidentally!) due to a poor translation (although I don't know how much of that was also due to his poor pronunciation, and the fact that he likes to troll people))). Fortunately, she took it in her stride and just laughed. I have no idea what he was trying to say, but he kept insisting that "Google translate told me to say that!"

MrMoustache said he's going to go back to learning Greek, and since I like leaderboards, it motivates me to go back to learning French. He's currently level 7, and I'm only level 5, so I have a bit of catching up to do. Super Chris is my other target, but he's so far out of my league (7k exp to my 1k) that I'll keep my goals small for now.

It's been a while since I fired up Duolingo, and a lot seems to have changed since last time. One of the things that I looked forward to doing the most was translating texts into English. Unfortunately, I never got good enough at Italian to be able to start that, and the feature seems to be gone now. Plus, the app has a lot more ads than I remember, but I don't really mind, as the courses are free.

The other stupid thing I did today was decide to replace the lenses in my glasses instead of getting new ones. So now I'm without glasses for up to two and a half weeks. All because I didn't like any of the frames they had in the store. #firstWorldProblems

I think there's just too much happening at the moment, and my brain is too tired to process anything properly. A sad thing happened this morning. I injured my foot on my run. It wasn't even very far, only 3kms in. I iced it in the morning, and it's feeling better now, but it's already psyching me out for Sunday, and A said the hardest part of running is getting past the mental block. I don't think I'll go to barre tomorrow, just going to stretch and stretch and stretch until Sunday. The cake was a much needed morale booster.

Japanese Language Speech Contest

redbeanpork and I went to see the Japanese language speech contest held at Melbourne Uni. I was too late to hear any of the speeches from the year 11 and 12 students, but I was there in time for the open speeches.

I honestly don't know what I expected.... I barely understood a thing. The first person sounded really eloquent and she barely had an accent. She only stumbled on one sentence, which she had to start over, but that's the only thing I noticed. Not that I could comment on the grammar or anything like that, but her flow was amazing. The second speaker was also great.

The third and fourth speakers weren't there, so they skipped to the fifth speaker, and she also barely had an accent, but her speech sounded a bit stilted, like someone who was pausing to make sure she enunciated each word clearly.

As neither redbeanpork nor I were fluent enough to understand anything, we decided to call it quits after the third speech.

It's amazing how people can learn another language. It makes me really regret not keeping up with Italian in high school when I had the chance. It would have really helped when we went to Italy. I have been listening to some Italian podcasts though, and I realised I can watch movies in other languages on some of my DVDs. There are some movies that I've seen so many times that I know what's going on even when I can't hear the dialogue.

When I need to focus at work, I'll plug in some earphones and start coding. I've found that my French Disney music is great for that, because I don't get caught up in trying to sing the song in my head, since I don't even know the words. At least, it did. I'm finding that I'm actually starting to be able to distinguish some words - even for songs where I've never heard the English version, like Au Bout du Rêve, from The Princess and the Frog.

Someone on my team was in a refugee camp with her family when she was a child. She speaks five languages, and said that two she learned from the country she was from, but she picked the rest up from the refugee camp: two from the other refugees, but one she picked up entirely from listening to the radio that the staff had playing all the time. It's really amazing how much people can pick up just from listening.

Impress Me

This might be the dorkiest thing I've ever admitted in a blog post, so please don't laugh too much!

I've been thinking of organising a talent show at work. As I've gotten to know my new team a bit more, I've realised that there are so many people in the team with amazing talents, and because work is work, nobody really gets to know these things. We have team meetings all the time, and the information is important, but it can get a little dry sometimes.

This got me thinking about what my talent could be. I still haven't answered that question, but that led me to think what I would like my talent to be. What would be the thing that would impress me the most?

After watching Let It Go, from the movie Frozen, sung in 25 different languages (YouTube link), it rekindled my love for Disney music, but I also thought it was one of the most amazing videos I'd ever seen. Now.... imagine if one person could do them all. Not quite all, but Saara Aalto manages 15 languages. I guess it doesn't mean she needs to know all those languages. The woman who sung the song in my farewell video said she is often asked to do music for cultural events, and she just asks them to break all the notes down into the phonetic characters, and she sings based on that.

Ignoring the fact that I can't sing at all, I decided that I wanted to start collecting Disney songs in other languages. There was that short-lived moment of jubilation when I found out I could listen to them on Spotify, only to find out that most of the songs weren't available in Australia. :(

This is the beginning of my collection. I'll ask GD if he can get me some Japanese ones next time he visits Tokyo. The one that I'm looking forward to the most is the German and Italian ones, but I'm waiting for Captain to reconcile with his cousin so she can send them to me.

I don't really know what's so impressive about it, but I think it'd be something awesome to be able to do. I particularly like A Whole New World in other languages (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Jf7tJf2Ag), though it might just be because it's one of my favourite songs.

Then there's I See the Light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dznfrlu74ds
And Reflection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf6qtr7PMbs

I'm going to be here all night at this rate....

And here's a small collation of Disney songs sung in their "native" language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cezg7F4NkX4

And Jackie Chan singing Make a Man Out of You: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Fox6v-L8k. So good! And him singing it in Cantonese, and performing, too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SLJJc8siyU

Maybe wasting my night watching YouTube videos is my talent! I think the Chinese versions of songs has moved up my priority list.

Lost in Translation

I came across an interesting question on the French Stack Exchange site today: What languages are perceived as classy or fancy to French speakers? (the original title was "What do the French do when they need a French word?" which I thought was funnier, but less clear what the meaning of the question was).

The gist of the question is that when English speakers want to sound fancy or posh, they will often throw in some French phrases, one of the examples is choosing to say au contraire rather than on the contrary, but what do French people do when they want to do the same? My initial assumption was that they'd simply do the opposite, and throw in some English phrases, but according to the answers, that doesn't seem to be the case. Some answers proposed German, Italian or Latin, but the general feeling is that they don't seem to do it. One answer proposes a historical reason why this might be the case: in the 17th - 19th centuries, French was often spoken by nobility, even in the Russian, German and Scandanavian courts, so it makes sense that being able to speak French was seen as a sign of power or wealth.

I actually feel pretty embarrassed speaking French to non-French speakers for that reason, because I feel like I sound a bit too tryhard. A few my former co-workers know that I'm learning French, and so when a French developer visited the team from London, they were trying to get me to speak with him. I really wanted to practice with him, but I didn't want to practice in front of everyone else, so I ended up hiding behind my monitors the entire time he was there.

Anyway, that's not the part I found most fascinating. One of the answers goes into some of the difficulties that translators can face when trying to translate things like movies. The example given is a movie where two people are escaping from a POW camp in Germany. One is able to speak French and German, and the other only English. They seem like they're able to make it past the German guard, but when the guard says, "Good luck" in English, and the Englishman replies, "Thanks", there's a bit of an uh-oh moment, because English wasn't commonly spoken in Germany at the time, so he is exposed as a foreigner. To do the reverse, and have the guard say "Bonne chance" and the person reply "merci" wouldn't have nearly the same effect.





SPOILERS FOR THE GAME OF THRONES TV SHOW COMING UP....









TURN BACK NOW.





LAST CHANCE.







EH.... I GUESS BY THIS POINT YOU DON'T CARE.







That reminded me of a post I saw on reddit, asking about how Hodor's name got translated in other languages, since season 6, episode 5 of the TV series revealed that the reason he always says "Hodor" is because Bran warged into him in the past and he could hear Meera saying, "Hold the door" in the future. The answer can be found on the Movies Stack Exchange site, but I'll paste it again here in case you're too lazy to visit it:

• German: "Halt das Tor!" whereas Tor is better translates to gate than to door. This actually works well for "Hodor".
• French: As pradyot commented "Qu'ils n'aillent pas au-dehors!" becomes "Pas au-dehors!" and then "Hodor".
• Russian: "затвори ход" ("close the passage") which transitions to "hodor" in quite a strange and unusual way. Word "ход" here closer to "hatchway" than "door".
• Spanish: "Aguanta el portón" (Not Ocluye el corredor) in Spain the word door "puerta" was replaced with main/front door "portón" in order for an easier transition to Hodor.
• Spanish (Latin America): "Déjalo cerrado". A strange way to say "keep it closed", also needs some imagination to make it work.
• Turkish: "Orada dur!" which means "Stand there!". It is not dubbed but subtitled. It evolves as: "Orada dur! -> Ordadur! -> Hordor! -> Hodor!". Our interpreter guy, esekherif, translated it that way and I think this is the closest that Turkish language can possibly get.
• Japanese: "ホーダー" [Ho-da-] which is a transliteration of "Hodor", coming from the English "Hold the Door". Interestingly in Japanese, door is pronounced ドア (doa) which if transliterated as such would make the name a lot closer to the English pronunciation. In Japanese, "hold the door" would be ドアを持って (doa wo motte) which would have more chance of making his name something like ドアモ (Doamo) in a purely Japanese version.
• Brazilian Portuguese: "Segure a porta" ("Hold the door") -> "a por-" -> "Hodor"
• Italian: First shown in English with italian subtitles (literal), then in Italian with integral translation after one week. Translators decided for a little addition to maintain the original meaning and then make the "Hodor" works: "Blocca la porta, trova un modo!" (Hold the door, find a way!) -> trova un modo -> rov...odo.. -> hodor
• Danish: "Hold døren!" (subtitles, literal translation, no attempt to preserve alliteration).
• Swedish: "Håll dörren!" (subtitles, literal translation, no attempt to preserve alliteration).
• Norwegian: "Hold døra!" (subtitles, literal translation, no attempt to preserve alliteration).
• Finnish: "Pitele ovea!" (subtitles, literal translation, no attempt to preserve alliteration).
• Serbian: "Hodi, dobro drži vrata!" ("Come on, hold the door tightly...")... then "Hodi... dobro..." ("Come on... tightly..."), then just "hodor...". Alliteration was preserved as much as possible, while it's obviously not the best way to say it.
• Czech: “Drž vrata! Honem!” (“Hold the gate! Quick!”), where the evolution to Hodor is quite a stretch…
• Greek:"Κράτα την πόρτα!". It sounds nothing like Hodor, so from one point on they used greek letters to write "Hold The Door" (Χολντ δε ντορ) which eventually became "Χόντορ". This is a common practice in Greek and it's called Greekglish.
• Hungarian: The meaning was changed "Holtodig óvd!" (Defend him till your death!), but the sound works more or less: Holt-óv > Ho-tó > Hodor

MrFodder asked his Chinese co-workers, who said that in the *cough* unofficial *cough* Chinese version they just had a subtitled version, with the English audio, so they got the gist of it from what the characters were saying.

(This post goes into more detail in how the name transformed in certain languages, and how it didn't really transform in others: http://www.livinglanguage.com/blog/2016/05/25/sosten-la-puerta-game-of-thrones-and-challenge-translation/)

I guess it's just one of those things you tend to take for granted unless you tend to watch foreign movies or read foreign books. One that I thought was particularly funny is in the English translation of the Erast Fandorin novel The Winter Queen (originally written in Russian), some characters are mentioned playing "American Roulette", which involves taking a revolver, putting a bullet in a random chamber, spinning it, pointing it at your head and pulling the trigger...

The Russian developer at work who originally put me onto his novels asked me whether there are other differences, so I guess I should start making a list. He speaks fluent English (though with a somewhat thick Russian accent), but he read all the books in Russian.