5590: Linguistics with Liz: Hong Kong Fansub
| Linguistics with Liz: Hong Kong Fansub |
 Made by: shiningpikablu252 |
Explanation[edit | edit source]
This strip was one of the author's earlier brainstorms for Square Root of Minus Garfield strip ideas after he had started becoming a regular reader of the strip; he had started thinking of the idea before what eventually became 5026: Watch Where You Toss That Thing! and 5112: Lawrence Welkenstein, but ended up being made after them, the first strip the author had made based on earlier brainstorms with research over previous trends (#5026 and #5112 were spur-of-the-moment remix ideas). The author already knew "Linguistics with Liz" played fully straight was way overused, so he decided to play some ideas differently from the typical. The author also knew that attempting something in this vein would give him material to be used later rather than sooner.
The strip appears to play typical until Liz speaks a line in Japanese; here, a subtitle with a difficult-to-comprehend context appears at the bottom of the panel. The Japanese roughly translates to what you'd expect for the setup. This subtitle is the key content of this strip; the author wrote it as an intentional parody of the linked trope. As for the third panel, Jon states that he'd never understand, not Japanese as a straight playing would have him state, but Hong Kong fansub; Garfield's line implies he also has no clue as to what Liz was getting at, unlike played-straight takes where Garfield would properly translate.
The author's notes themselves tend to explain most of the rest for themselves.
The author writes[edit | edit source]
The Translation Train Wreck...The result of attempting to translate between languages when one has nowhere close to full understanding of at least one—maybe even both—languages involved. If one does not know how a language works, it may prove difficult to discern the correct meaning of things in the opposite language. Things may get worse if the source language is not the work's original language, essentially a translation of a translation where the original meaning may have already been lost due to the quality of the original translation job. The less effort one puts into a translation, the poorer quality the final result will be. The end result is a low-quality work that is at best barely comprehensible, more often than not utter nonsense even worse than if somebody just made blind guesses at what a word means. This used to be the norm for machine translations, but with improving technology, even a machine translation may nowadays prove more accurate than a low-effort manual effort.
Hong Kong fansubs came to be known from such low-quality fan-made efforts out of Hong Kong, mainly with Japanese anime. These were often done on the cheap, using a Chinese translation of varying quality as their source and thus no access to the actual original source material, and putting little effort into properly translating things into English.
This strip, and panel two in particular, is a parody of such poor translation works. The source line in Japanese makes no mention of brothers, pigs, elephants, or especially strawberries. Also, if Doc Boy were to ever get wind of this, he'd suddenly appreciate being called Doc Boy...
Original strip: 2017-11-17
Transcript[edit | edit source]
Liz: Jon?
Jon: Yes?
Liz: あなたは大根
Subtitle: Your brother's a pig, the elephant's a strawberry
(Liz leaves)
Jon: I will never understand Hong Kong fansub
Garfield: Get in line, buddy
