language & communication – Page 41 – don't confuse the narrator

titular particular de Público

Después de su fallo con las estadístcas, de nuevo parece que el corrector de textos del periódico Público tiene un mal día:

El Banco de España tiene un procotolo de emergencia — Titular de Público, 5 octubre 2008

reflections on inflections

A Spanish friend was telling me about an email he’d received from his ex.

What I heard – Dijo que intente perdonar lo que pasó – was a lot different from what he actually said – Dijo que intenta perdonar…

I (mis)understood that she was asking him to try to forgive her, and thereby apparently taking responsibility for what happened, whereas in fact she was saying she was trying to forgive him, but laying the blame squarely at his door.
Continue reading “reflections on inflections”

dubbing down

Following on from the subject of subtitles, which I talked about in Words on a screen, must surely come the topic of dubbing.

Here in Spain, almost everything on TV is dubbed. One or two channels used to use “dual” where, if you had a stereo TV, you could listen to the original on one channel and to the Spanish version on the other. This was fun – with a stereo TV and headphones I could watch in English while my partner watched in Spanish – Continue reading “dubbing down”

words on a screen

Last week, Kristin Scott-Thomas appeared in a short video on the BBC website talking about her new film, I’ve Loved You So Long.

The film is in French, and the subject of subtitles was discussed:

Interviewer: …audiences in the English-speaking world have in the past tended to shun films with subtitles.
Kristin: Apparently this is changing: I’ve heard that people are less and less resistant to this simply because we’ve all got so used to text messages, visual messages everywhere, Continue reading “words on a screen”