2007-05-23

Translation work

I've begun pimping my bilingual self out on YouTube with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjbOEAg2ZsM

Within an hour it had 2 honours, now it's up to 6 including #2 top rated in French today, the first one being another copy of the same video without the subtitles. The reason for the success is the fame of the original video I subtitled, which is by CapnOAwesome, who has like 5000 subscribers. He faved my version and put it in his video log, so it's going to get quite a bit of attention. The feedback so far has been great.

Might start doing this a lot, it's fun and easy and gets me some attention :p

Oh and apologies for the horrendous name-dropping, but this guy's feature video is of him preaching the Word of the Flying Spaghetti Monster after all, so he gets my vote just from that ^^

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Nice work! I couldn't find any error in your translation, apart from a small detail: in French, you have to put a space before (and after) the colon, I think that you forgot one somewhere. Apart from that, there were one or two times were I detected that you cut some things out or reformulated slightly differently what the guy said: for example, when he says something like "You are going to come in our country, you have to respect your laws.", you chose to translate as "Ceux qui viennent...", where "Vous vous apprêtez à venir..." could have worked too.

For what the guy says, I mostly agree, apart from a few things. "We as the Western World invented freedom" is quite debatable (it is of course "according to the few things that we know about the past of other cultures") and not really to the point (furthermore, it opens the door to a cultural relativism argument which the guy does not take the time to refute). Less striking, but in my opinion worse, is his argument stating that "a book responsible for the deaths of millions of people does not deserve respect". Sorry, but a book has never killed anybody: it's about people killing people, no matter which book gave them the order/idea/conviction to do so. If the Coran turned out to be a parody written by a guy to warn his fellows about the dangers of religious extremism (quite implausible historically, but anyway), it would suddenly deserve respect, although being no less the cause of countless deaths, and it would clearly appear that it's not the book which has killed, but people, who probably did so lead by others who used the Coran as a authority for their own purposes. Every work deserves some kind of respect, even if it is an incitation to hatred and murder. Remember: "Je ne suis pas de votre avis, mais je défendrai jusqu'à la mort votre droit de l'exprimer." - Voltaire. :-p

Anyway, your editing is nice, no matter what the video says. ;-)