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No. 5590: Linguistics with Liz: Hong Kong Fansub

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Linguistics with Liz: Hong Kong Fansub

First | Previous | 2024-09-07 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=5590

Strip by: shiningpikablu252

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

The author writes:

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.