Shall I pretend to be surprised?

This is an amazingly stupid court decision.

But when theres a technical word that you could easily look up, its insane to me that the translator decides to just guess what it might be.

A friend of mine used to translate subtitles as a part time job while being a student and I can assure you that he wasn’t paid anywhere close enough to waste any time at all on looking up anything he didn’t readily know.

Luckily movie theatres in Switzerland and Belgium regularly show foreign movies with original soundtrack and French subtitles for all who prefer it that way.

My experience is that most subtitles in most languages are all generally rather poor and I haven’t really encountered any general quality differences between different languages, but quite noticable quality differences between different kinds of publishers.

Perhaps not surprising, some of the best subtitles I’ve ever read have been fansubs published for free by enthusiasts on the internet, people who care deeply about the material they’re subtitling and spend much more time on getting everything just right than what anyone would ever pay for. But of course the worst subtitles I’ve ever read have also been random finds on the internet.

Big public service broadcasters tend to have solid subtitles in my experience, not perfect, of course, but almost always on a serious level.

Netflix not so much. I’ve regularly encountered some seriously questionable subtitles across languages there. (On the other hand, they’re rather great at always providing subtitles, in lots of different languages.)

But cheap DVDs take the prize, that’s where you consistently find the bottom of the barrel, all the way from from simply confusing to hilariously absurd.

I will immediately assume that they haven’t read Machiavelli.

So they want us to believe that the company that knowingly profited from genocide in Myanmar also knowingly profited from child exploitation? Really? OK then, I can believe that.

No, you can’t, I quite enjoy having some measure of anonymity here.

Thanks! 😁

I have a URL that’s 30 years old this year and it’s still valid and it still redirects to my personal homepage.

(Bonus: The oldest Internet Archive snapshot of it is from 1997.)

Funny thing that, a personal homepage, I first created one 31 years ago, at a time when it was rather unusual to have one. I still have one, and now it has become rather unusual to have one once again.

The minimum legal age for drinking beer or wine at a pub or restaurant is 16 years in Germany and many of its neighbouring countries so, yes, it’s not at all unusual around here to drink before turning 18.

Exit (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9612102/)

All arguments against them have been debunked to hell, if they were at all true we wouldn’t see China now mostly running of of renewables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China

A posting made by an organic life form, typically a human.

“Und wenn du lange in Systemd blickst, blickt Systemd auch in dich hinein.”

The point is that after you’ve travelled yourself, you will no longer believe anyone who tries to tell you that people on the other side of the border are evil flesh eaters.

Maybe you wouldn’t have believed this before either, in which case travelling wasn’t as transformative for you as it has been for others, but that’s the primary reason.

It was very sweet.