Lately it seems my recognition of written Greek has become sufficient enough to detect some errors in the Greek subtitles when I watch American movies or TV shows. My favorite error occurred during "Desperate Housewives", which they are showing on the pay TV channel we get through our satellite service here. I don't remember exactly what was going on during the scene, but one of the actors said to another "For God's sake!" and the Greek translation amounted to "Forget sex!". To the translator's credit, the expressions do sound the same, but such a translation was SO out of context, you just have to wonder if they are really paying attention to the show or just typing out what they hear.
In shops around Greece you often find things misspelled in Latin characters. Of course, it is hard to blame them, we do have completely different alphabets. My favorites were: doughnuts misspelled donats (which for some reason makes my husband think of gonads, don't ask me why), and the variations on the spelling of cookie, including coocie and, my absolute favorite, kookie. Although I will maintain that we all need a little kookie in our life now and then.
2 comments:
Do you also notice how a lot of English words seem to get a literal phonetic translation into Greek....
The one that really made me laugh was a sign I saw a couple of years ago... it was on someone's door and it said: ΟΦΦΙΣ (which literally would read OFFIS if they'd written in latin charactors). Why they did that I don't know, it's not as if we don't have the word in Greek for office without stealing the English one too...
One of my favorite ones was beefteki (restaurant in hanioti)
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