Actual English Subtitles Used In Hong Kong Films

One, Two, Middlesboogie · #1 01-04-2002, 05:27 PM

I am darn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.

Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.

Gun wounds again?

Same old rules: no eyes, no groin.

A normal person wouldn't steal pituitaries.

Darn, I'll burn you into a BBQ chicken

Take my advice, or I'll spank you a lot.

Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?

This will be of fine service for you, you bag of the scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your toenails and leave them out on the dessert floor for ants to eat.

Quiet or I'll blow your throat up.

I'll fire aimlessly if you don't come out!

You daring lousy guy.

Beat him out of recognizable shape!

Yah-hah, evil spider woman! I have captured you by the short rabbits and can now deliver you violently to your doctor for a thorough extermination.

I have been scared silly too much lately.

I got knife scars more than the number of your leg's hair!

Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.

The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?

How can you use my intestines as a gift?

Greetings, large black person. Let us not forget to form a team up together and go into the country to inflict the pain of our karate feats on some but of the giant lizard person.

You always use violence. I should've ordered glutinous rice chicken.

Eibu · #2 01-05-2002, 02:13 AM

sugoi

***Wil*** · #3 01-05-2002, 08:20 AM

The Worst Phrasebook

Pedro Carolino is one of the all-time greats. In 1883 he wrote an English-Portuguese phrasebook despite having little or no command of the English Language.

His greatly recommended book The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English has now been re-printed under the title English As She is Spoke.

After a brief dedication:
'We expect then, who the little book 2for the care what we wrote him, and for her typographical correction) that may be worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the youth, at which we dedicate him particularly'.

Carolino kicks off with some 'familiar phrases' which the Portuguese holidaymaker might find useful. Among these are
Dress your hairs
This hat go well
Undress you to
Exculpate me by your brother's
She make the prude
Do you cut the hairs?
He has tost his all good

He then moved on to 'familiar dialogues' which include 'For to wish the good morning', and 'For to visit a sick'.

Dialogue 18 - 'For to ride a horse' - begins: 'Here is a horse who have bad looks. Give me another. I will not that. He not sall know to march, he is pursy, he is foundered. Don't you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? He is unshoed, he is with nails up'. In the section on 'anecdotes' Carolino offers the folloing garanteed to entrall any listener:

'One eyed was laied against a man which had good eyes that he saw better than him. The party was accepted. I had gain, over said the one eyed; why I se you two eyes, and you not look me who one'.

It is difficult to top that, but Carolino manages in a useful section of 'idiotisms and proverbs'. These include:
Nothing some money, nothing of Swiss
He eat to coaches
A take is better than two you shall have
The stone as roll not heap up foam
And the well known expression:
The dog han bark not bite

Carolino's particular genius was aided by the fact that he did not possess an English Portuguese Dictionary. However, he did possess Portuguese-French and French-English Dictionaries through both of which he dragged his original expressions. The results yield language of originality and great beauty. Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of 'to craunch a marmoset'?

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Reading this post just reminded me of this. It is taken shamelessly from 'The Book of Heroic Failures'. Enjoy, and for to wish the good morning.

One, Two, Middlesboogie · #4 01-05-2002, 09:01 AM

www.engrish.com is a good site; it's full of examples where Japanese has been poorly translated into English.

Blimey, those phrasebook translations are bad!
I was amused by the subtitle "we're tossed out" meaning "we've been evicted" in 'Mon Pere, Le Hero' (sorry, can't do accents over e's), but that was nothing compared to those!

DarkHoodness · #5 01-05-2002, 09:53 AM

Speaking of bad translations, "All your base are belong to us" is a result of a badly translated japanise game (Zero Wing).

- DH

Steve · #6 01-05-2002, 12:25 PM

I played DOA3 at my friends house and one of the charecters says "did you think you could outbeat me?"

Danny · #7 01-05-2002, 01:46 PM

I have the Book of Heroic Failures! It's fantastic! I haven't read it in a while, but I seem to remember that Pedro Carolino also had no access to a Portuguese-English Dictionary, but he did have a Portuguese-French Dictionary and a French-English Dictionary, so he made use of those. That may go some way to explaining his superb phrases...

***Wil*** · #8 01-05-2002, 06:19 PM

Ha! Isn't that what I put in my post?

I don't like the AYBABTU cult - there's something dark and sinister about it. Sadly the only sources I had on its wicked side have been...well, annihilated.

Lampion · #9 01-06-2002, 07:35 AM

Everything was extremely funny, hehe. Being myself a native Portuguese speaker (from Brazil) I hope I never said any aberration like that Mr. Carolino. I reckon that Portuguese and English have completetly different gramatical strucutures, and if you try to make a literal translation (that is, word by word without respecting the structure) the result would be a meaningless mess.

A little example:

It might be weird, but every Portuguese word has a "gender". It is denoted by two article("o" to male, and "a" to female) rather than only one in English(the article "the"). POrtuguese doesn't have a pronoun like "it". Everything is a "he" or a "she" The table, for instance is female, and we say "A mesa", in Portuguese. Obviously, "the man" is male, and we say "O homem", and "the woman" is female, hence "a mulher" in Portuguese.

The main rule is: if the word ends with an "o", it is male: the car - o carro, the hair - o cabelo, the glass - o copo. But there are several exceptions that make this language even harder to learn. The tribe, for instance, is "a tribo", and there is no apparent reson to that. The umbrella is "o guarda-chuva", and so on.

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Lampion ]

Cool Paramite · #10 01-06-2002, 04:43 PM

O, there are so much languages in which words have "genders": French, German, Dutch... In the case of Dutch, I don't need to think about it the whole time because I speak it the whole day long.