headdesking forever

[ratcreature]

I've already ranted several times here how computer translation is not your friend if you want to litter your English story with German words (even disregarding the characterization issues or the likelihood of random language switches occurring in the first place). That includes swear words, because believe it or not, swearing works differently in different languages. For example you can't just translate "fuck" and use it like in English for a swear word. Argh.

Well, the story wasn't very good otherwise either, so I don't regret the back button use, but seriously. And now I have the urge to write an introduction to swearing in German to explain, but that probably would only encourage people to avoid using betas, and make things even worse.

Comments

[marcelo]

Joining the chorus: an introduction to swearing in German would be awesome to read regardless of any potential usefulness to writing.

[ratcreature]

I posted, though it ended up a bit rambling and disorganised. You could do one for Spanish. :D

[marcelo]

Awesome!

:P The thing about Spanish is that's very regionalized, particularly in terms of swearing and such. There's almost no overlap between Spain, say, Argentina, and there's even a huge difference within Latin America.

The first time I traveled to Venezuela, I remember being picked up by some people at the airport, and during the trip to the city I swear I understood and could have transcribed each individual word but I had no idea of what the heck they were saying.

[ratcreature]

I vaguely remember my Spanish book warning me in vocabulary lists that some words that are the normal and common word in Spain, were some kind of super offensive taboo words in areas of Latin America. There were little warning triangles with exclamation points and everything. The only example I still remember was "coger" for "take" like in taking the bus or picking things up, so that appeared rather early (I never got far with Spanish). My text book vocabulary list had a warning sign next to that, but didn't even explain what it meant in the regions where you had to avoid it, which I found completely ridiculous, so I had to look up that apparently in some regions it means "to fuck". I found these pitfalls rather inconvenient, I admit. I mean, who expect that? Offending someone by asking after a bus line?

In German more often than not I can't understand people at all if they speak their regional dialects, but thankfully dialect speakers learn Standard German in school and through tv and books and such, and can then switch to German with just a regional accent, so communication works. And there are regionalisms in insults and such, but the standard ones are shared.