even worse than I realized.

[kaigou]

Subtitles.

Jess, jess music! WTF, over.

3/4 of way through episode, characters arrive at music hall. Poster behind them of tall black man playing a saxophone. ahah. Jazz music.

Poker waltz, however, had me utterly stumped.

Until three episodes later, it's mentioned again, but this time with context of waiting for the 9 and 3/4 train or whatever it is.

Poker Waltz = Hogwarts.

Comments

[whatistigerbalm]

This sounds as good as those abysmal Lord of the Rings subs.

[kaigou]

Worse, because most of the time it's not even funny. It's just... bad. I can't figure out the person's native language, to be honest. Whomever did the translation doesn't know pinyin, so I'm guessing the knowing of Mandarin was learned by ear, not by formal education -- but the English spelling is so bad, so incredibly bad, that I'm boggled. Most ESL folks are so-so on grammar (which can trip you up because grammar is unquestionably hard), but do pretty well on spelling (which simply requires memorization). But then to come across such a complete lack of pop-culture knowledge, and I admit I'm stumped. Wouldn't Hogwarts be one of the biggest pop-culture icons of the last decade, at least among the western worlds?

I think at this point, I'm mostly watching the subtitles out of a sense of definite trainwreck. Somehow it's just icing that the most recent episode had the line, "I love IceFish" at the very bottom of the screen throughout the episode, looking like it was left over from a previous subtitle-timing job and never removed. A whole passel of WTF, seriously.

[billie]

http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html :D

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

This. Must. Be. Shared.

[kaigou]

Oh, hells, I remember seeing that -- though admittedly, english-to-chinese-to-english does actually sound not unlike what Yoda would say, anyway. *snerk*