#/me shrug. it's a thing

[chloesimaginationthings]

Abby finally meets FNAF game Michael Afton

[conditioned-to-obey]

Anyone can be a squirter if you aim for the jugular.

[chanrizard]

SKZ: The Kitten Interview 😺 adopt a little kitten~

[waveoftheocean]

"i can see it in his eyes" 🥰

[samipekoe]

IM SO NORMAL ABOUT THIS ASCENSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[liauditore]

how many belts and buckles does she need someone save me.

[mattzerella-sticks]

I'm too angry and in my feels to make a coherent response to Lex's "You can't control Superman" and "Earth is for the Earthlings" lines, but it is exactly this narrow view regarding the capability of Superman's powers that has these people becoming the very weapons/villains they see Superman as, because none of them can comprehend having so much power and using it for good.

If you could fly why use it to rescue a cat from a tree or help an old lady cross the street?

If you could shoot lasers out of your eyes why use it to repair a bridge when you can kill?

If you were invulnerable, why throw yourself in front of a car to save a child when you could cause harm without reproach?

Though they label Clark an 'alien', they see him as too human to be anything but genuine in his desire to help people, and that's why they fear him. Because they can't understand him.

[puppyeared]

Odd couple <3

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

ive described my culinary diet like raccoons that live in a michelin starred restaurants' dumpster before but its just legit Like That.

Like for breakfast I ate baloney sandwiches with baloney and mayo I found on sale.... and bread that's a pullman's loaf recipe I modified to be both made from sourdough starter and half whole wheat that takes a full day to go from cold starter to piping fresh bread

[humbuns]

late night visits

[mlobsters]

supernatural s1e11 scarecrow (teleplay: john shiban, story: patrick sean smith) part 1, 2, 3

I'm proud of you, Sammy.

be still my beating heart part 4 of ∞ || will he stay or will he go part 2 of ?

[royalarchivist]

Pac: Oh man, what is this, what is this, what is this man? Where can I buy this? [Slaps his desk] I'll buy two.

Pac: [Laughs] It's very good man, very good. "I love you, Fítche!" [Laughs] You're going to think the worst, this is the worst phrasing you could think of. Like, I mean– a guy might say 'I love being fit, I love go to the gym,' but it was a certain way… I don't know, in English it seems wrong, right? "I love you, Fίtche" I don't know if that makes sense, right? Because it would have to be "I love fitness," right? There should be the 'ness' there at the end, right? Or am I crazy? My understanding of English there should have been an 'ness' at the end, right?

[teambyler]

Will's lie about the painting is Chekhov's Gun

The Painting Lie HAS to be resolved. And it will likely be resolved in the first episode of Season 5.

Milevens like to call Bylers delusional. But seriously, how do they think this is gonna play out?

El: "I had nothing to do with that painting." Mike: "Oh, cool. So I guess I was the person he was secretly painting for. And he sacrificed his own happiness for me. ANYWAYS, I still totally meant it when I said I loved you even though Will lied and made me think you thought all those nice things about me." El: "Haha! Will's so silly! I love you, too!"

-teambyler

[lurkingteapot]

Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It's so interesting. I'd wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of "yeah, that's what it literally translates to, but that's not what it means" or has answered a question like "how do you say _____ in (language)?" with "you don't, it's just … not a thing, we don't say that."

I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.

Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.

Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.

And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse. And that's even before cultural assumptions come in. It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.

Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).

Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.

This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!

As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).

For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …

ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I'd love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don't speak the material's original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we're basically working from a secondary source, and if we're doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there's nothing substantial being (literally) lost -- or added! -- in translation?

[bayleafpaprika]

thinking about how Oda chosing Luffy, a pirate, to be the protagonist of One Piece may be one of the most brilliant story moves by any shonen mangaka ever. by virtue of its main character being an in-world criminal, OP naturally lends itself to becoming a story about the exposure of a society festering with corruption for what it really is, and the dismantling of a dystopia and its propagandist facade. you simply do not get a story like that with a shonen protagonist who conforms to or tolerates the shitty system they're born into