Penumbra Overture - other Languages

[Skaruts]

One thing I noticed about having plenty of contact with english language is that ppl will tend to learn it better and it may be useful for them in the future.
I live in Portugal and almost everything here is subtitled, so the english or french or german is kept there and we will always hear how it sounds and will always learn a bit here and there. I have many friends who don't know english, but they still have some basic understanding that they have grasped from music or films because of this.

However, if your talk english, or basically any other language, to a spanish person, there's a great chance he will will say "perdoname... no english". This happens because spanish ppl, just like some other countries (brasil too I think) have everything in their own language, no subtitles, they actually change the voices to be spoken as they understand them. If you happen to find a person who knows english you may notice his accent is very poor, because of the little contact he has with that language. Often happens when I hear Brasilian ppl speaking english I notice this, they speak english as if they were speaking portuguese, thus making it sound a bit absurd at times.

I think it's a good thing to get used to either subtitles, or to learn other languages and practice them. And I also think that things usually sound better in the original language to begin with...

Idioms, or common expressions, are another story. They can only be translated by who has good training of a certain language. By training I mean a lot of contact with foreign ppl that may have provided the translator with some knowledge of common expressions, and the translator can identify them with the equivalents for his language. And still, American expressions may differ from British expressions, this is why I think having contact with them is most valuable for that. I happen to have had the luck of working in a hotel and spoken english so much with ppl from so many diferent countries, I think I learned a lot more and it was fun in that way.

Often I see translations not very coherent about this... Only on TV, because there it's really professionals doing it.