Eggs Ackley strikes again
Saturday night me and my wife typically watch some movie on The Movie Network. However, last Saturday the movie was something that we didn't feel like watching --- I believe that it was "Sahara",
starring the flyover country's new favourite heartthrob Matthew
McConaughey as Dirk(TM) Pitt(TM). My wife was flipping around and came
upon the channel Omni 1, the local multicultural channel that caters to Asian minorities. They were also playing a Saturday night movie, "How Young" that looked so interesting that we started watching it.
It's a good thing we did, since this movie was quite funny and educational in many unintentional ways. The movie was subtitled in both Chinese (?) and English, but the English subtitles were obviously created with some kind of semi-automatic translation program whose result was then fine-tuned by a human translator. For example, in many places there was an apparent confusion about nouns, verbs and adjectives. Fortunately natural languages have so much redundancy that it didn't really matter. It's been a while since I have watched anything with subtitles, but I noticed that since the viewer doesn't really read the subtitles but merely quickly scans them for the important explanatory words, and the main action on screen provides the information content once the important words in the subtitles have set up the context, I bet that subtitle text could be randomly rearranged and they would still work. Now there's an experiment that some psychologist or cognitive scientist could perform.
The movie itself was similar to "Stand by Me", but the gang of kids were looking for a treasure in a cave instead of a dead body. Near the beginning of the movie, the boys were walking along the median of a busy highway, which looked pretty dangerous to me, but apparently this was a perfectly normal thing for the boys to do. Several other cultural differences and similarities were equally amusing (Asian cultures are known for their politeness, but they seem to totally lack many aspects of political correctness), as were the commercials targeted to the Asian population in Ontario. Perhaps in future Saturday nights we will enjoy other movies by this channel. Especially "Drink Drank Drunk" and "Please Teach Me English" look like they would be entertaining.
On the lazy Sunday morning I flipped around the channels in an effort to avoid cleaning, and came upon the History Channel that was playing the the 1973 movie "Dillinger". Apparently any movie that is suitably old is a historical documentary: I kind of keep expecting to see "The Quick and the Dead" one day there as a documentary of life in the Old West. But the movie was surprisingly good for an old movie so we started watching it, and it was amusing to notice young Richard Dreyfuss as Babyface Nelson, and that one guy from Dallas as Prettyboy Floyd. I also learned many useful expressions and one-liners for future use to annoy my wife, although in this respect, I doubt that anything will ever beat the movie "Barfly".
It was so nice outside on Saturday (the temperature climbed up to +18 so it was practically summer) that after watching the movie, we were inspired by the movie the night before and decided to go to the new big Asian supermarket a few miles away. This supermarket had actually been operational for a year or two, but then it mysteriuosly shut down almost overnight. I could never understand why, since in its tidiness and efficiency the place was such a massive improvement over the ordinary Asian supermarkets and their overwhelming stench of fish (in that new place, fish was sold in a completely separate section) that it was always full of customers. Fortunately, this supermarket recently reopened under a new name, and it is still pretty much the same inside. The small restaurant section had changed to Vietnamese, but for some reason it sold mainly Taiwanese fare. Unlike in the movie, they didn't sell beef noodles, which disappointed me a little. But the store had lots of good products that we liked, and the good prices were made even better by a general 10% discount during the opening weeks.
Perhaps it is also some cultural thing that Asians don't use credit cards and debit cards, but like to pay cash instead. One of the commercials between the movie "How Young" even tried to convince people to put their money in banks instead of hiding it. This is somewhat surprising, since you might expect that Asians would be heavily into electronics and efficiency. Of the checkout lanes, less than half were equipped with card readers, others having prominent signs of accepting cash only. On the other hand, each lane had a bagger in addition to cashier, which is something that I haven't seen in any other supermarket around here after my first visit to Canada in 1992. During my next visit in 1993, I noticed that the baggers had been replaced by a simple contraption that keeps the bag open for the cashier so that she can just put the groceries in there, and when the bag is full, a swift movement of hand opens the next bag to be filled.
It's a good thing we did, since this movie was quite funny and educational in many unintentional ways. The movie was subtitled in both Chinese (?) and English, but the English subtitles were obviously created with some kind of semi-automatic translation program whose result was then fine-tuned by a human translator. For example, in many places there was an apparent confusion about nouns, verbs and adjectives. Fortunately natural languages have so much redundancy that it didn't really matter. It's been a while since I have watched anything with subtitles, but I noticed that since the viewer doesn't really read the subtitles but merely quickly scans them for the important explanatory words, and the main action on screen provides the information content once the important words in the subtitles have set up the context, I bet that subtitle text could be randomly rearranged and they would still work. Now there's an experiment that some psychologist or cognitive scientist could perform.
The movie itself was similar to "Stand by Me", but the gang of kids were looking for a treasure in a cave instead of a dead body. Near the beginning of the movie, the boys were walking along the median of a busy highway, which looked pretty dangerous to me, but apparently this was a perfectly normal thing for the boys to do. Several other cultural differences and similarities were equally amusing (Asian cultures are known for their politeness, but they seem to totally lack many aspects of political correctness), as were the commercials targeted to the Asian population in Ontario. Perhaps in future Saturday nights we will enjoy other movies by this channel. Especially "Drink Drank Drunk" and "Please Teach Me English" look like they would be entertaining.
On the lazy Sunday morning I flipped around the channels in an effort to avoid cleaning, and came upon the History Channel that was playing the the 1973 movie "Dillinger". Apparently any movie that is suitably old is a historical documentary: I kind of keep expecting to see "The Quick and the Dead" one day there as a documentary of life in the Old West. But the movie was surprisingly good for an old movie so we started watching it, and it was amusing to notice young Richard Dreyfuss as Babyface Nelson, and that one guy from Dallas as Prettyboy Floyd. I also learned many useful expressions and one-liners for future use to annoy my wife, although in this respect, I doubt that anything will ever beat the movie "Barfly".
It was so nice outside on Saturday (the temperature climbed up to +18 so it was practically summer) that after watching the movie, we were inspired by the movie the night before and decided to go to the new big Asian supermarket a few miles away. This supermarket had actually been operational for a year or two, but then it mysteriuosly shut down almost overnight. I could never understand why, since in its tidiness and efficiency the place was such a massive improvement over the ordinary Asian supermarkets and their overwhelming stench of fish (in that new place, fish was sold in a completely separate section) that it was always full of customers. Fortunately, this supermarket recently reopened under a new name, and it is still pretty much the same inside. The small restaurant section had changed to Vietnamese, but for some reason it sold mainly Taiwanese fare. Unlike in the movie, they didn't sell beef noodles, which disappointed me a little. But the store had lots of good products that we liked, and the good prices were made even better by a general 10% discount during the opening weeks.
Perhaps it is also some cultural thing that Asians don't use credit cards and debit cards, but like to pay cash instead. One of the commercials between the movie "How Young" even tried to convince people to put their money in banks instead of hiding it. This is somewhat surprising, since you might expect that Asians would be heavily into electronics and efficiency. Of the checkout lanes, less than half were equipped with card readers, others having prominent signs of accepting cash only. On the other hand, each lane had a bagger in addition to cashier, which is something that I haven't seen in any other supermarket around here after my first visit to Canada in 1992. During my next visit in 1993, I noticed that the baggers had been replaced by a simple contraption that keeps the bag open for the cashier so that she can just put the groceries in there, and when the bag is full, a swift movement of hand opens the next bag to be filled.
Lämpimimmin suosittelemme : http://www.tieteessatapahtuu.fi/0206/rotkirch%20roos.pdf
Posted by H-Baari | 12:59 PM
Interesting idea about subtitles, but judging from my own experience, it seems that only people who have experience learning a language actually apply this method.
I have a lot of friends quite interested in Asian culutre (which I am also into) and I have noticed that a -lot- of them really do read the subtitles extensively, to the point that garbled, machine-translated subtitles will turn them away from a program faster than anything else. This is the case among native speakers of English who don't speak other languages and have never tried to learn.
However, among the subset who do speak a second language (French or Chinese usually), the ability to find key words and match them up between the subtitle and the reference in screen is obvious.
I'd suggest that since you obviously speak at least two languages, you probably follow the same pattern.
Definitely something I'd like to see investigated more thoroughly.
Posted by Nanani | 1:15 PM
The Asian groceries in Stockholm also seem to encourage cash payment, as did many Asian shops in San Francisco when I lived there. My assumption has been that they are in cash businesses and don't like paying taxes. Why Asians should be more tax-resistent than indigenous northern Europeans (and even if it's pretty multi-culti, San Francisco still has an anglo core culture) is not immediately obvious. I suspect they are more oriented towards family-based safety nets than communitarian solidarity.
Posted by Anonymous | 5:04 PM