It's So Fluffy! What Does "Fluffy" Mean If You Don't Speak English?

The other day I came across something sort of weird... the word "fluffy" isn't very universal. Sure, a lot of languages have similar words, but none are exactly the same. I currently live in Spain, and I've found that my Spanish-speaking friends who speak English understand it, while those who don't can't find a useful translation that really encompasses everything the English word means.

So what does it mean? If you look "fluffy" up in a dictionary, the first definition you might get is: "of, resembling, or covered with fluff".

You must admit, that's pretty useless if you don't know what "fluff" is.

Apparently, "fluff" is "soft fibres from fabrics such as wool or cotton which accumulate in small light clumps".

In English, clouds can be fluffy, clothing can be fluffy, and above all, soft toys can be fluffy. If you've ever seen the film Despicable Me (in English), you'll have seen, without a doubt, the best example of "fluffy" in use.

In the film, a young girl named Agnes sees a plush unicorn toy at a funfair and exclaims "It's so fluffy I'm gonna die!", a perfectly natural reaction to such an incredible and "fluffy" prize. Take a look at the following clip:

As you can see, you can check out this scene out in a multitude of languages. If you go straight to European Spanish, which started the whole debate, you'll see she uses the adjective blandito (soft), while the Mexican Spanish version uses hermoso (beautiful). Here's the European Spanish version for your viewing pleasure:

I'm not criticising the dubbing here, but just pointing out that maybe "fluffy" doesn't really exist or work well in Spanish. However, let's have a look at how they dealt with it in France...

The French version says C'est trop génial!, which is more or less "It's brilliant!", which completely ignores the plush and fluffy nature of the soft toy. However, it doesn't make the scene any less cute!

These aren't the only two examples. The Italian version uses morbido (soft) and the Portuguese version uses fofo (cute).

However, I don't think it's just a Romance language issue! For Danish, they chose to use nuttet (cute).

From the versions available, I reckon German comes the closest with the term flauschig, which apparently means "fleecy" (though I'm not a German expert). To me, that seems quite adequate when it comes to describing the unicorn, don't you think?

Finally, there's the Swedish version, for which I have no idea. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Here it is:

Apparently the word is fluffsi, or something like that. Is this accurate or a loanword?

When it comes to the word "fluffy", is it uniquely English or just a lacuna between English and Romance languages? Do you have a better translation in your own language? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below, especially Swedish speakers, since your dubbing has me bamboozled!

How Crunchyroll Gets Subtitling Right

Last year I wrote a post about the poor quality of subtitling on Netflix and am sorry to say that the same problems and frustrations continue to bug me. I've watched entire shows riddled with subtitles whose content is just nonsense.

It should read "And I even got that award off those feminists"

Netflix's subtitles for the British sitcom The IT Crowd were so awful that I can only imagine that they may have been automatically generated, not checked over, and subsequently just thrown onto the bottom of the screen.

YouTube should also get a special mention for subtitling quality. However, even though a lot of YouTube videos use automatically generated subtitles, the platform is kind enough to tell you they are and you don't have to pay a subscription for it like you do with Netflix.

However, the purpose of today's post isn't to name and shame bad subtitling (even though I just did), it's to praise Crunchyroll, a streaming service for anime, whose subtitles look like they were lovingly created and carefully implemented into shows.

If you don't watch anime, then you're probably not familiar with the platform Since all its shows are from Japan with Japanese audio, with the exception of a few dubs, a lot of subtitling goes on and they do it so well.

It's important to remember that Japanese uses a different writing system to English. One of my complaints with Netflix was that the Japanese text in scenes is often left untranslated. On Crunchyroll, not only are the subtitles placed over the Japanese text, but they also use same colouring as the original Japanese text, which makes everything clearer and makes the shows so much more enjoyable.

Crunchyroll's subtitling is exemplary of how to do it. Netflix should definitely take a page out of their book when it comes to subtitling all their programmes.

The Problems with Dubbing and Subtitling on Netflix

If you like TV shows and movies, Netflix is pretty great. The streaming service is one of the quickest ways to lose hours upon hours of your free time to popular media, and I'm cool with that. Netflix's algorithms always seem to suggest shows I end up liking, but there is one thing I don't like - its dubbing and subtitling.

Origami, another of Japan's fine artistic exports.

In the past, we've discussed dubbing versus subtitling at length (I tend to prefer subtitling over dubbing where possible). However, when watching anime (Japanese animation) I tend to take it on a series-by-series basis.

If the subtitles are good, I will happily watch an entire series with the original Japanese dialogue. However, when anime subtitles are bad, they are really bad! The internet is full of great examples of this.

Before I get into this rant, I need to clarify a couple of terms. For the purposes of this post, I'm taking "closed captioning" (CC) to refer to user-activated text that is generally used for those that are hard of hearing and "subtitling" to refer to a translation of foreign language dialogue that is not likely to be understood by the viewer. A quick way to distinguish whether you're watching CC or subtitling would be to see whether there are descriptions of sounds that wouldn't be considered dialogue, such as "[Phone rings]".

Aside from the bad grammar, unnatural syntax, or odd vocabulary choices present in bad anime subtitles, Netflix has a great way of making subtitles completely redundant. Aside from their low linguistic quality, I firmly believe there's also a technical issue at play here.

When I watch anime series on Netflix, I usually have two options for audio and two options for subtitles. The audio is available in either Japanese or English, while the subtitles are only available in English and can be "off" or "on". This is what causes problems.

The subtitles, just like the dubbing, are a translation of the original dialogue in Japanese. However, they are clearly not done simultaneously, nor do they appear to have any relation to each other.

On the one hand, the dubbing tends to have altered the original dialogue to make it fit better with the timing of the characters' speech, as well as make the lines more natural and easier to deliver by voice actors.

On the other hand, the subtitles tend to more strictly follow the meaning and structure of the dialogue. The massive difference between the dubbing and subtitling means that I find it almost impossible to have both dubbing and subtitling active at the same time.

Since you can either have all of the subtitles or none of the subtitles, Japanese text that appears in subtitles, such as explanations of time passing or where a scene takes place, are left untranslated. This is when I really get annoyed. I have to pause, turn the subtitles on, and rewind back to the start of the scene, just for the subtitles to load and tell me something like "One week later".

It should be noted that Netflix has also received criticism from deaf communities for the low quality of its CC. As much as I love the fact that it allows me to binge on watching massive robots and ninjas fight each other, it really needs to work harder on its foreign materials.

What do you think of Netflix's subtitling? Love it or loathe it? Are there better streaming services for subtitling? Or worse? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Using Broadcast Media to Learn a Language

Last Friday, we began a series of posts on how to use various forms of media to learn a language, starting with a look at print media. Today we're back with a look at how broadcast media can help you achieve your linguistic aims, specifically radio, music, television, and film.

Radio towers in Nishapur, Iran

Radio

Thanks to the internet, you don't need to be in-country or living in a border region in order to listen to the radio in the foreign language you want to learn. The obvious advantage of the radio over printed media is that you can actually hear how the language sounds, which always helps with aural comprehension. It also helps improve your own speaking skills.

Music

The great thing about music is that you can always have it on in the background. Hearing songs and learning the lyrics are a fun way to learn a foreign language. In fact, the first thing I ever learnt in Spanish was the lyrics to David Bisbal's "Ave Maria" in order to beat some Spanish friends at the "SingStar" video game. Admittedly, lyrics can often be obscure, but it can still help with your vocabulary and pronunciation.

TV

Watching TV is great for your listening skills. Like radio, it allows you to hear how the language sounds. If you have a cable or satellite TV package, you may even get a few channels in the language you're trying to learn. Whether you watch the news, a series, or even a show you've watched in your own language dubbed or subtitled in the language you're trying to learn, you'll undoubtedly learn something new.

The Colonial Theatre in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, actually
features on the U.S. Register of Historic Places!

Film

If you live in a big enough city, you should be lucky enough to have an alternative cinema or somewhere you can watch foreign-language films. Of course, don't go see a version of a foreign-language film dubbed into your own language or you won't learn anything! Subtitled films are great because you can always follow the story in your own language or, if you're advanced enough, ignore them and focus on the foreign-language audio.

If you don't have an alternative cinema or just prefer watching films from the comfort of your own home, consider buying foreign-language films to watch at home. That way you can always just turn the subtitles on and off as you see fit!

We'll be back on Wednesday with a look at how digital media can help you learn a language.

When Actors Dub Themselves

Around Christmas I always seem to watch a lot of films. To be honest, I'm not much of a film fan. My friends and family are lucky if they can convince me to go to the cinema twice in a year since I used to work in one and generally detest the experience. However, I don't mind staying in and watching a film.

One of the films I decided to watch this holiday season was Guardians of the Galaxy, the Marvel comedy released this summer that featured a rag-tag bunch of space villains who through a series of (un)fortunate events end up being far more important to the safety of the galaxy than they would like to be. While I won't say the film is a cinematic masterpiece, I certainly enjoyed it and had a good giggle while doing so. As usual, after the film I researched the actors, directors, and additional information about the film online and came across the following clip, which I knew I had to watch.

Aside from the seemingly odd "je s'appelle Groot" that the French dub opted for, the main thing that struck me about this video was that Vin Diesel voiced the character (who says nothing more than "I am Groot" throughout the film) in a number of languages.

This reminded me of Danny DeVito in The Lorax back in 2012. While you could argue that DeVito hardly mastered the languages he provided the dubbing for, you should still commend him for having the confidence to do it.

Even though the featurette claims this is the first time an actor has provided the dubs for all the languages in which a film was released, I do know that Antonio Banderas provided the English, Spanish (Castilian and Latin American versions), Italian, and Catalan voices for the unrelentingly-adorable Puss in Boots character from the Shrek and eponymous franchises.

So what about live-action films? After a bit more research, I discovered that Christoph Waltz provided dubbing for both the French and German versions of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, as well as the fact that it is common practice for actors whose first language isn't English to voice themselves in their native tongue.

While Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings is thought to be a polyglot, Viggo Mortensen, who played him in the movies, also speaks multiple languages. The Danish American actor speaks English, Danish, and Spanish and has provided voices for dubs in all three languages as well as featuring in a number of Spanish-language films.

Thanks to the language skills attained in her French-speaking prep school, Jodie Foster, a native English speaker, has lent her voice to many of her own films for the French dubbing. Helena Bonham Carter, who also speaks French fluently, has acted in French-speaking roles as well as providing her own dubbing.

Penelope Cruz went one better than the dubbers when she played the same character in both the Spanish-language film Abre los ojos as well as its American remake Vanilla Sky. I'm not sure whether or not she provided the corresponding English and Spanish dubbing for each version, though...

The "vanilla sky" in Vanilla Sky was
reminiscent of a Monet painting.

Do you know of any other actors who dub themselves into foreign languages? What do you think of those who do? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

How Key Is Localisation For The Next-Gen Consoles?

The internet, social media, and seemingly the world appear to be ablaze with talk of the newest consoles. The Wii U has been on the market since last Christmas, and though February brought the PS4 announcement, fans weren't shown any noteworthy glimpses of the console until Sony's presentation at the start of E3 in Los Angeles this week.

Microsoft had already shown off the hardware for the new Xbox One, which is scheduled for release in November. The issue of digital rights management (DRM) and second-hand games had already been the main talking point between the PS4 and Xbox One, with Sony poking fun at their rivals with a "how-to" video on trading games.

Ignoring a typical fanboy argument, we'd like to look at how important localisation and translation will be as these two consoles square up against each other towards the end of the year. Be warned, if you have a fear of statistics the next few paragraphs have a lot of them!

We've seen this battle before...

Sony's current offering, the PS3, has sold over 13.5 million units in the US, 3 million in the UK and around 1.5 million in Canada. Japan accounts for over 6 million units, which, given that Sony is a Japanese company and has a good fanbase in Japan, is hardly surprising.

In total, the PS3 has sold around 77 million units as of January 2013, and at least 40 million of these surely must have gone to locations that are not English-speaking. This would make a majority of the unit sales neither English nor, more importantly, Japanese.

As for the Xbox 360, 25.4 million units were shifted in the US, beating the PS3, same goes for the UK with 8 million units, and 1 million were sold in Australia and New Zealand. The American company Microsoft certainly has it better when it comes to English-speaking territories.

With only around 1.5 million units sold in Japan and only 13.7 million sold across the whole of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, could it be said that Microsoft is relying too much on English-speaking markets? With 77.2 million units sold in total according to latest accounts, which is slightly better than the PS3, Xbox is in the lead. However, it should be noted that the Xbox 360 was released almost a year before the PS3.

With such a high number of units supposedly requiring localised content, it would be silly to assume that consoles can sell themselves solely on the hardware, the games and software are crucial to their success.

This is particularly relevant in Sony's case.

It's fair to say that the success hinges on more than just translation. Few gamers would be happy with subtitles when a story could be dubbed. This is perhaps the only time when we advocate the use of dubbing over good ol' subtitling.

We're by no means saying that either of these companies has forgotten about the importance of localisation. Rather, we're suggesting that given the weight of international markets, whoever gets their international marketing strategies and software localisation correct will probably be crowning themselves the King of Consoles by this time next year.

Film Club: Les Choristes

Following a suggestion from one of our Twitter followers we watched Les Choristes (The Chorus for you monolinguals out there!) and, needless to say, loved it.

There's a reason we're fond of French cinema. We rarely watch a French film that doesn't have an exceptional retelling of human trials and tribulations. On top of that, it's in French. We think (as native English speakers) that the French language sounds significantly nicer than English. Phonetically it's a more pleasing language and what a film to show it off!

"Difficult" boys deserve nothing but coal.

Without throwing out any real spoilers, the film centres around a school for "difficult" boys. "Difficult" meaning generally naughty. The protagonist is their teacher who eventually arranges to form a choral group with the students in his class.

Phonaesthetically speaking, the language works well with singing and the film passes through the classic no-frills approach of storytelling often found in most of our favourite French films. It mixes the good with the bad and comes out with a nice emotional range and a good pace that makes it very easy to watch.

We'd advise anyone who speaks French to definitely watch it. Given the subject matter, it's very universal so we reckon it'd be a good shout even with subtitles for those who don't speak French. Hopefully there are no dubbed versions out there because as we previously mentioned in our dubbing or subtitling post, subtitles are the way to go, especially in a film with audio as important as this one.

Have you seen Les Choristes? What did you think of it? Tell us below in the comments.

Dubbing Or Subtitling?

Say you want to watch a film in a foreign language. If you speak the language then you don't have a problem. If you don't, then what is the best way to make sure that the film doesn't lose anything when its viewers don't speak the language?

There are three options to ensure that the viewer can understand the film. The first is to learn the language (we previously gave you 10 reasons to do this), but most people can't do this for just one film. Our second option is to replace the audio from the dialogue with rerecorded dialogue in the target language, known as dubbing. The third option is to have all dialogue translated and show the transcript at the same time as the original audio, known as subtitling. We're going to ignore the first option to focus on the latter two: dubbing and subtitling.

Dubbing

What are the drawbacks of dubbing? Older kung fu films are famous for their bad dubbing. Is it really bad dubbing, though? Given the vast differences between English and Mandarin Chinese it's always going to be difficult for sentences to sound natural and take the same length of time to execute in either language. This means that characters will either appear to be talking when they're not or viewers will hear characters talking even though their mouths aren't moving.

The work of the original cast loses something as well. We're hardly experts on drama but we're fairly certain that an actor's performance includes both their dialogue and their movements. If you mix dialogue from one actor with the movements of another there will always be something lost.

Maybe the largest issue we have with dubbing is the language. When a film is dubbed there will be little to no evidence of the original language. We'd like to think occasionally scriptwriters think of phonaesthetics (the inherent beauty of certain words and phrases) when they write a scene. This also disappears when a film is dubbed.

Subtitling

One of the most common reasons we hear for not watching a foreign film is that people are generally annoyed by subtitles. Reading and watching a film are two different things, and certain people believe that the two should never meet.

Subtitling forces the viewer to read throughout the whole film and a lot of people hate this. Subtitles have to take up part of the screen and if there is not space above or below the film, as in letterbox formats, the subtitles have to take up space amongst the visuals of a film. This either will cover certain visual aspects of the film or make the viewer look away from a certain area of the screen.

A map of world film translation standards.
Dark blue is dubbing for children only, otherwise subtitling.
Purple is dubbing in all cases except non-children's films. Red is all dubbing. 

Neither solution is ideal and where dubbing can be preferential in certain films, such as animated films where the movements of a character's mouth are not as distinct as that of a real human, we believe that subtitling wins out overall. Subtitling, though distracting from the visuals, leaves the foreign language to be heard and as we love languages, is preferential to us.

The foreign language skills in countries where subtitling is favoured over dubbing seem to far surpass that of countries where the opposite is true. If subtitling can help people become familiar with a foreign language and learn then it will always be our preferred method.

Toy Story 3's Dubbing Dilemma

If you speak English, you've probably only seen dubbing in kung fu or anime films. Dubbing is the process of rerecording the original dialogue for a film or television show, usually into a different language for new audiences. It's more common than you'd think... we've just found out that Bob the Builder (the English children's show) is dubbed for American audiences. Apparently television executives believe that American children are incapable of understanding British accents. No wonder so many great British programmes are remade with American actors... from childhood, they're never given the chance to hear any accent but their own!

So imagine you're responsible for dubbing a film. What happens if a character in the film is already speaking the language you're dubbing into?

A good example of this dilemma is Toy Story 3. There's a large part of the film in which protagonist Buzz Lightyear is reset into "Spanish Mode". He speaks Spanish and acts typically Hispanic, complete with flamenco movements reminiscent of warm summer evenings spent drinking copious amounts of sangria.

Buzz Lightyear was dancing like this in the
film, if you don't know what flamenco is.

If you're dubbing the film into Spanish, what to do? In the South American dubs of the film, they gave Buzz a Castilian Spanish accent, which is typical in Spain. If you're South American, hearing someone speak with this accent would conjure up the Spanish stereotype, complete with flamenco, bullfighting and whatever other stereotypes you want to convey.

But what if you're a Spaniard? Hearing your own accent probably wouldn't make you think of tapas, bullfights and the rest. So what area is the most "Spanish" part of Spain? The decision was made to go with Andalucia, the southernmost region of Spain. Most things people consider to be typically Spanish are Andalusian. It's home to bullfight enthusiasts, free tapas with every drink, and of course, the Sevillana. The dance, not the girls of Sevilla... Seville to you monoglots! For shame!

We couldn't resist adding a photo of one of our
favourite tapas, croquetas!

Still, as is often the case with dubbing, bits of the film are lost in translation. While it was a clever fix to have Buzz speak in an Andalusian accent in the Spanish version, the scene simply doesn't have the same humour to it as the original version. We're not sure what more Pixar could have done though... had they chosen to switch Buzz to a completely different language (French, perhaps?) they'd have needed to redo the animation so that he did typically French things, like surrender! You can see clearly in this example that language, as varied and all-encompassing as it can seem, does have its limitations at times.