A small Stranger Things comment

[sholio]

So we're watching Stranger Things season 3 ... mild spoilers as of 3x03 under the cut.

It's a little thing but it is driving me absolutely bonkers.

THERE ARE NO ARTICLES IN RUSSIAN. >_____>

... I mean, I don’t actually speak Russian. But I'm fairly sure about that. If you don’t speak Russian and you were translating it word for word from a book, you would not get “The silver cat”. Also, while I obviously can’t say for sure due to being a non-speaker, I am pretty darn sure that you wouldn’t get a word-for-word translation into grammatical English because languages do not work that way!

I also find it somewhat plausibility-straining that you could understand the words someone was saying on a tape, in a language you don’t speak, well enough to find them in a book, but I’m willing to handwave that because, well, TV -- the same way I can handwave CPR that looks nothing like CPR and so forth. The articles thing, though! There’s just no way that you could get that translation from literally ANYTHING they were saying! At least I don’t think so.

We’ve only watched to 3x03, so no spoilers in comments beyond episode 3, please!

Comments

[ratcreature]

Yeah, no articles in Russian. At least not plain ones, it does have demonstrative ones, like "this cat" and "that cat" but not "a cat" or "the cat". Word order is very flexible in Russian because it is so highly inflected, and different word order provides different emphasis and such but not different meaning like "dog bites man" vs "man bites dog", so you probably could arrange the sentences to run parallel to English ones (better than say German, which despite being closer to English is very particular about where to put the verbs), but it would break down quickly for anything but the simplest sentences, because other aspects of grammar are so different.

Like auxillary verbs, or all the tenses in English where the verb is in two parts, also obviously you get a lot of prepositions in English, where in Russian you have a different case and don't need any, like "he eats with a spoon", in Russian not just is there no "a" but also no "with" because "spoon" will be in the instrumental case so it's just "он ест ложкой".

The transcription would have a better chance than doing it with English, because Russian spelling is fairly regular, provided you know Cyrillic, but you would need a really good ear, because Russian has a lot of consonants English (or German) doesn't have and after almost three years of learning I for example still have a hard time hearing the differences between some of them (*glares at ш vs щ*). Also the soft/hard distinction Russian makes isn't that easy to hear if your language doesn't do this, and you need to distinguish that to spell correctly. Also there are some regular exceptions where grammatical endings are spelled differently than they sound, which aren't hard (not like French or such) but you need to know that there's a rule for that. Also just like in German at the end of words consonants are pronounced differently, like a d at the end of a word sounds like a t, a b like a p, a g like a k and such (very nice for German speakers, you automatically have the right instinct for once), but of course you still write the other one. It is easy if you know the pattern, but without knowing anything about Russian you would be trip over that. Also Russian weakens unstressed vowels, so to know whether something is spelled with the vowel you hear or you hear a weakened different vowel isn't something you can tell easily.

But unlike in English it's quite feasible to look up an unknown word you hear, by just trying two or at most three guesses with spelling. However, actually recognizing the correct word boundaries when listening to native speakers who do not slow down to accommodate you is very hard even for learners, and takes a lot of listening practice.

[sholio]

Thank you for the info! This is pretty much what I thought - I did know that about the spelling being more regular than English (... most languages are >__>) but yeah, about word boundaries, one of the hardest things for me even with a language I do know a little of is recognizing word boundaries and sounds that are different from English and therefore hard for an English-trained ear to hear. And with different grammatical features, verb tenses, etc ... it's hard to look up words you don't know in a language you aren't fluent in, let alone one you don't know AT ALL, because it's hard to be sure what parts of the word are changing due to tense or inflection, and what the base word is ...

But it was the article thing that was really driving me bonkers, because I didn't think there was any way they could possibly be getting that from the words they were hearing, unless they just guessed.

(Would it really have killed them to get a Russian speaker to proof their text?!)

[ratcreature]

This weird inability to get a quick language check, for languages that are super common no less, is indeed very baffling. It's not like Russian is an obscure language.

[sovay]

If you don’t speak Russian and you were translating it word for word from a book, you would not get “The silver cat”.

Somewhere on Tumblr is a very cogent post about how TV and movies would have you believe that on-the-fly translations sound as rhetorically polished and thematically meaningful as professionally published ones and OP just lives for the day where someone on an archaeological quest has it regretfully explained to them that since context has been weathered away with the centuries, this plot-crucial tablet is either a warning of dreadful retribution from the gods or a complaint about dishonest sheep-trading, possibly both.

[sholio]

YES. I have seen that post! I really love it. I wish some TV writers would read it. I'd love to see more (or any) TV/movie translation scenes go down like that.

[scioscribe]

The translation is very "Languages do not work that way! Good night!"

I'm only through episode three now too, but I'm enjoying it (outside of trying to escape my body during certain Mike and Hopper scenes--guys, stop), and I adored the Steve and Dustin reunion and the Max and Eleven mall spree.

[sholio]

Oh man, the Hopper and Mike plot ... all I have to say about that is STAAAAAAHP. (I will have more to say about Hopper when you've watched more.) But yes, the Steve & Dustin and Max & Eleven interactions are pure gold!