Unlike many cinematic exports,
the Disney canon of films distinguishes itself with an impressive dedication to
dubbing.
Through an in-house service called
Disney Character Voices International, not just dialogue but songs, too, are
skillfully re-recorded, echoing the voice acting, rhythm, and rhyme scheme of the original work to
an uncanny degree (while still leaving plenty of room for
lyrical reinvention).
The breadth of the effort is surprising, as well -- everything from
Arabic to
Icelandic to
Zulu gets its own dub, and their latest project,
The Princess and the Frog, debuted in
more than forty tongues.
Luckily for polyglots everywhere, the exhaustiveness of Disney's translations is thoroughly documented online in
multilanguage mixes and
one-line comparisons, linguistic kaleidoscopes that cast new light on old standards.
Highlights:
"One Jump Ahead," "Prince Ali," and
"A Whole New World" (
Aladdin) -
"Circle of Life," "Hakuna Matata," and
"Luau!" (
The Lion King) -
"Under the Sea" and
"Poor Unfortunate Souls" (
The Little Mermaid) -
"Belle" and
"Be Our Guest" (
Beauty and the Beast) -
"Just Around the Riverbend" (
Pocahontas) -
"One Song" and
"Heigh-Ho" (
Snow White) -
"Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" (
Cinderella) -
Medley (
Pinocchio) -
"When She Loved Me" (
Toy Story 2) -
Intro (
Monsters, Inc.)
posted by Rhaomi
on Nov 12, 2010 -
31 comments
"
Voice of San Diego reporter Adrian Florido set out to find a family,
he writes, "whose experience could illustrate
the day-to-day challenge for Burmese refugees" in San Diego, since "more than 200 Burmese families have arrived [in that city] since 2006." In the process, Florido met a 24-year-old man named Har Sin" who was unable to hear, speak, read, write or use sign language, and wound up writing a two-part story about him:
In a New Land, Hoping to Hear and
Breaking Free of a Life Without Language.
The story is available as a downloadable pdf: A Silent Journey Series. / Via The Kicker, the daily blog of the Columbia Journalism Review [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 13, 2010 -
5 comments
Telephoneme: Even if your Alphabet Conspiracy succeeds and you destroy the books, machines have no minds of their own. They are easily confused by different voices and different accents. It is the brain of man that tells them what to do.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Aug 20, 2010 -
10 comments
The Language of Food is a blog with only four entries, but each one is an excellent, well-researched essay on, yes, food and language:
ketchup,
entrée,
dessert, and
ceviche. The author, Dan Jurafsky, teaches a parallel course at Stanford, the syllabus for which you can peruse
here.
via (mefi's own) honestengine.blogspot.com
posted by Rumple
on Aug 14, 2010 -
10 comments
I Write Like... Check what famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of famous writers.
posted by swift
on Jul 14, 2010 -
376 comments
The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For example, Britain = Great Land of the Tattooed, New Jersey = New Island of Spears, and Chicago = Stink Onion. There's now an
iPhone app. However, at least one linguistic historian
takes issue with some of their methodology. Mefi's own languagehat
responds.
posted by desjardins
on Jun 17, 2010 -
67 comments
How a misunderstanding about Chinese characters has led many astray. The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages... Among the most egregious of the radical errors in this statement is the use of the exotic term “Ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters. Linguists and writing theorists avoid “ideogram” as a descriptive referent for hanzi (Mandarin) / kanji (Japanese) / hanja (Korean) because only an exceedingly small proportion of them actually convey ideas directly through their shapes... [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on May 6, 2010 -
83 comments
Dell Hymes, a giant of sociolinguistic theory, has died. "He didn't have much patience for wasting your time in academic endeavors that wouldn't have a direct relevance for the world and for righting some of the inequalities in the world," [Dr. Nancy] Hornberger said. Or as Dr. Hymes himself put it, describing his approach to anthropology: "I am always interested in combating elitism and narrowness. . . . The justification for the existence of anthropology is to find out about the world, not produce third-rate philosophers."
[more inside]
posted by fourcheesemac
on Nov 20, 2009 -
13 comments
Verner's Law. Ari Hoptman (
his website) explains early Germanic sound laws to his young friend Frankie, who has tossed aside his copy of Braune’s Gothic grammar in disgust. If you want to know what makes historical linguists tick, this is a great way to find out. Warning: links to seven-minute YouTube with two sequels; disclaimer: I myself have a copy of Braune’s
Gotische Grammatik within arm’s reach and I have spent time reading the
Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, so I may be especially susceptible to jokes about William Jones, the Brothers Grimm, and Danish linguists.
[more inside]
posted by languagehat
on Oct 9, 2009 -
16 comments
Since 1980, the
Celtic Media Festival has brought together people who broadcast, and now Webcast, in Celtic languages. Videoblog Gwagenn.TV provides a
report (with autoplaying video) from the 2009 festival whose clips and interviews are spoken and subtitled variously in Breton, French, English, Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish, Catalan, and Basque, not all of which are actually Celtic.
[more inside]
posted by joeclark
on Sep 15, 2009 -
5 comments
Amabil amico, Con grand satisfaction mi ha lect tei letter de le mundolingue. Arika Okrent, author of the new book
In The Land of Invented Languages, lists
500 constructed languages, from the well-known (Esperanto, Volapuk, Loglan) to the utterly obscure (Neulatein, Rosentalographia, Mundolingue.) MetaFilter's own languagehat
reviews the book. Okrent
writes about Klingonophones in Slate. Alternatively, you might choose to
learn not to speak Esperanto. Previously on MetaFilter,
all you wanted to know about Loglan/Lojban but were too syntactically ambiguous to ask.
posted by escabeche
on Jul 7, 2009 -
30 comments
As the Jim Crow overt style of maintaining white supremacy was replaced with “now you see it, now you don’t” practices that were subtle, apparently non-racial, and institutionalized, an ideology fitting to this era emerged... -
The Linguistics of Color-Blind Racism.
posted by lunit
on Mar 9, 2009 -
191 comments
Why would an evolutionary biologist study words? It turns out there is an
astonishing parallel between the evolution of words in a lexicon and the evolution of genes in an organism. The word
two, for example, has been around much longer than most, and will likely be with us for millennia, whereas the comparatively rare and recent word
dirty has undergone many mutations, and will probably be extinct in a few hundred years. Professor
Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK, tells us why on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's program
As It Happens. Pull slider to 16:00 to start the
seven minute interview.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium
on Mar 7, 2009 -
49 comments
The Gawain Project is an ongoing translation of the late 14th century anonymous poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (originally written in Middle English) into Modern English, for the amusement of Arthurians and anyone who likes a good story.
[via mefi projects]
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 13, 2009 -
18 comments
The Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies is your one-stop shop for pre-Columbian Central America awesomeness. There are so, so many wondrous things on that site, I don't quite know where to begin. I suppose John Pohl's
scholarly introduction is a natural place to start. But maybe you just don't have time to read anything and just want to dive into pretty, pretty pictures. Perhaps the most user-friendly databases are Justin Kerr's photographs
Maya Vases (e.g.
1,
2,
3) and
Pre-Columbian Portfolio (e.g.
1,
2a,
2b,
3). From there you can delve into the collection of Linda Schele's
photographs (e.g.
1,
2) and
drawings (e.g.
1,
2,
3). There are more image databases but let me direct you to the collection of
old Maya, Aztec and Mixtec books which are simply stunning (e.g.
1,
2,
3,
4 [last link pdf]). You can read more about
Mayan and
Mixtec codices and download high resolution versions of the entire books. There are also Maya
dictionaries,
glyph guides,
linguistic maps and a
who's who. There is also classic
Mayan and
Aztec poetry in translation. I'm telling you, that's not even half of what this amazing site has to offer.
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 29, 2008 -
19 comments
