Je parle not enough
I almost always watch DVDs with French subtitles on. It helps a lot with colloquial phrases that I have not otherwise found a way to learn. I read French much, much better than I can understand spoken French, though. I can manage sometimes, especially if it’s educated, Parisian French, but even that’s about 60-70%. A film like Chrysalis is something that is extremely annoying because I can almost understand it without English subtitles. But — and this baffles me — having a French film playing with English subtitles seemingly does nothing to help me learn. So this reminds me of … R2-D2.
The premise for the character of R2-D2 is of a robot that can understand spoken English perfectly but cannot generate it. And the language in which he speaks to C3-PO seems woefully insufficient to communicate the complexity of the thoughts that are supposedly being transmitted, unless there is some weird tonal stuff going on that, like Mandarin, is completely inaudible to me. (That was a joke.) Even in the 1970s, I expect that tech-minded people would have been sophisticated enough to understand that they had this backwards. But even that is comparing just a speech recognition program to a TTS. The idea that a little robot can understand spoken language in an NLP way, with perfect comprehension, but no one could be bothered to give him a better synthesizer? It’s like Noonian Soong getting everything perfect in an android except for skin tone.
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4 Responses to “Je parle not enough”
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November 16th, 2009 at 08h07
Also, it’s very amusing that, in what I’m watching right now, “douche” (in English) had to be translated into a different word because it would make no sense in French.
November 16th, 2009 at 09h02
It’s like Noonian Soong getting everything perfect in an android except for skin tone.
And the ability to use contractions. The skin thing I’m willing to write off as Soong having a fetish, but my word processor can convert pairs of words into contractions right now! Today! If it were just written into the character as a minor quirk, I might be willing to accept it, but the plot of more than one episode hinged on Data not being able to say “it’s” (note the correct use of the apostrophe).
November 23rd, 2009 at 02h54
but the plot of more than one episode hinged on Data not being able to say “it’s”
You missed the best Data contraction detail, though. I think it’s Datalore in which Data’s more-advanced-but-evil twin brother Lore (yes, the utter apogee of hard sci-fi was Next Generation) is pretending to be Data for some nefarious purposes. And the conclusion is in a shuttle bay, where Data-or-Lore comes back to consciousness and reassures his crewmates by saying “It’s me.”
What. The. Fuck?! “It’s me?!”? This is to convince people that he is the incapable-of-contractions less-casual brother?! Come on! Lore could say “It’s me.” Data would have to say “It is I.”
Maybe we can get a “Garfield is dead”-type theory going. Maybe every subsequent Data appearance in the Trek universe was actually Lore. Hell, maybe the entire Trek universe happened inside Tommy Westphall’s head. Sounds good enough to be a Voyager script, at any rate.
Seriously, read that Tommy Westphall Wikipedia article. I have never seen a greater overlap between “people with too much time on their hands”, “people who don’t understand the concept of a joke”, and “people who desperately need to get laid”. Outside of, not coincidentally, Star Trek conventions.
November 23rd, 2009 at 02h58
Outside of, not coincidentally, Star Trek conventions.
Or … um … mcgees.org (?)