Foreign language dialogue

Stoo

Well-known member
Archaeos said:
Should Archaeos and Stoo accidentally encounter each other soon, bear in mind, a sound file of this on, say, Stoo's smartphone could help Archaeos decipher your quest quickly... :whip: :cool:
Good idea!(y) Stoo will record the bits with his phone for Herr Archaeos.

(Crazy thing is, Stoo's girlfriend can speak German so she'd be able to translate but the loveable liebschen is so sick & tired of his Indy obsession, he doesn't dare ask.:eek: Getting Archaeos to do it is much more fun, anyway!;))
 

Archaeos

Member
Okay, so we WON'T talk about Indy then :eek: :D :p (y) but about the finer linguistic points of German language enactements in Hollywood movies of the early 1980s*– especially to what extent these are realistic and accurate in their depiction to the historic epoch the enactment is placed, e.g. the 1930s. That might be brainy-enough sounding not to come across as sheer Indy fan obsessiveness... besides, my Dscherman gets rustier by the years...
 

Stoo

Well-known member
Right. She doesn't care much for old films :( but I think the ice can be broken by mentioning, "Das Boot", which she considers to be very well made. (Yeah, that production ain't Hollywood but it has a strong connection to "Raiders". Hello, submarine!;))

Finer points would be fun to discuss amongst ourselves, even though they'd be hardly worth repeating here at this forum. The Raven public at large still, automatically & ignorantly, calls any WW2 German soldier a "Nazi".:rolleyes:

---
The deleted "Raiders" clips are now on my mobile phone so all is set in that regard (for Freitag or Samstag)!;)
 

Archaeos

Member
I can talk about vintage fashion, Karl Lagerfeld or fast German cars, or the best yoga retreats in Arabia, if required. Don't worry. :cool:
 

Stoo

Well-known member
Archaeos said:
I can talk about vintage fashion, Karl Lagerfeld or fast German cars, or the best yoga retreats in Arabia, if required. Don't worry. :cool:
Mentioning Karl Lagerfeld & German cars (BMWs) would be a very good start but the best way to win immediate respect would be achieved by talking about Italian food or Italy in general. (She is Italian.;)) Nevermind that for now, though.

Speaking of food: Much of the German dialogue in these deleted "Raiders" scenes deal with eating & food! The word, 'essen', is mentioned more than once.
 
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Archaeos

Member
ListenLiveLong said:
I wonder what the soldiers right outside of the map room are saying. You know, the ones near Sallah.

If you mean the scene starting at Raiders' time mark 49:32, then the dialogue is...

Tan uniform soldier: "He da! Was machst Du da?"
(Hey there! What are you doing?")​
Khaki uniform soldier mumbles

Tan uniform soldier (casual pointing): "Was soll das mit dem Seil da?"
("What's with the rope there?", meaning to say "What are you up to with this rope there?")​
Khaki uniform soldier mumbles

Tan uniform soldier (insisted pointing): "Mit dem Seil da!?"
("With that rope there!?")​
Khaki uniform soldier mumbles

Tan uniform soldier: [unclear commanding sentence]. "Komm'! Runter! Runter! Komm'!"
("Come! Down there! Down there! Come!")​
Khaki uniform soldier mumbles

Tan uniform soldier: "Ja komm', bißchen schneller, Mann! Aber jetzt komm' mal schon!"
("Yes, come, a bit more quickly, man! C'mon down already!")​

Tan uniform soldier is definitely a native German speaking actor.

But khaki uniform soldier's German is incomprehensive to me. To my ears, he's just verbally snapping at Salah, in sounds that are supposed to come close to Germanic cliché mumblings. I would speculate that this extra is not a German speaker at all. Maybe someone else can make sense of what this guy is uttering?
 

Tank Driver

Member
I want to thank some of you guys that translated some of the German dialog on Raiders and Crusade.:D

I'm embarking on learning German and use this specific post for some guidance on some of the words. Definitely not an easy language to learn... at least for me!

One piece I would like to know, is a German dialog piece in Raiders. The certain scene is when Indy is sulking after the *supposed* death of Marion at the marketplace. The German Gestapo agent says something to allude to the effect of a rendezvous w/ Belloq at the cantina.

What was said here?
 

dprog

Active member
So, at the beginning of Temple of Doom, Indy jumps on the table to catch the antidote, he fails to grab it and punches Lao Che's son after that Indy says something Chinese to Lao Che which then he replies something.

What do they actually say ?
 

Archaeos

Member
It's so garbled... it's indeed not resonating as Mandarin. But Cantonese... in this Shanghai setting... making Lao Che a villain with roots in the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces of the Pearl River delta..? Let me check when back home...
 

JediJones

Active member
The Rex Chen fellow replied to my comment and now he says Lao Che's dialogue there is just gibberish that sounds like Chinese. Seems strange that Lucasfilm would invent Huttese and Ewokese in 1983 and then not even bother to use real Chinese in 1984.
 

JediJones

Active member
I found some great stuff on Temple of Doom.


Well, I am not quite sure about the background chants (something in Sanskrit language) but Mola Ram (Amrish Puri) prays to Kali Maa* (considered as goddess of power) in the "Temple of Doom's heart removal scene" as follows:
  • Boy (to be sacrificed)
    "Agar koi hai toh mujhe bachao"  = "If somebody's there, then save me !"
    "Koi mujhe, koi mujhe bachao"  = "somebody, somebody save me !"
    (*starts chanting..*)
    "Om namah shivay"       = "I devote myself to Shiv*" (Hindu god of destruction)
  • Mola Ram
    "bali chadhogay"    = "(you) will be sacrificed"
    "bali mangti kali maa"  = "mother kali wants offering/sacrifice"
    "mukti degi kalli maa"  = "mother kali will give salvation"
    "kali maa"       = "Mother kali"
    "kali maa shakti de"  = "Mother kali give (me) power"
    "bali chadhau tere aage"= " (I) offer sacrifice before you"
    "swikar karo"      = "(please) accept"
    (*removes heart*....boy screams, girl screams)
    "ab iski jaan meri muthi main hai" = "now his life is in my hands" (shows Myogenic contraction of heart to crowd)
    "bali chadhado"    = "do the sacrifice" (sacrifice him)
    (*boy dies chanting..*)
*Kali is an incarnation of Parvati, who is the wife of Shiv.
source: knows Hindi.

And some more interpretations from IMDB:


Mola Ram's chantings of "Maaro maaro sooar ko, chamdi nocho pee lo khoon" literally translated from Hindi is "Kill, Kill the pig, flay his skin, drink his blood". This is similar to the chant from William Golding's "Lord of the Flies".

During the sacrifice, Mola Ram chants in Hindi, imploring "Kali Ma Shakti de," asking for the "Spiritual power of Mother Kali."

During the human sacrifice sequence, the sacrificial victim repeatedly and rapidly chants the Shiva Mantra: "Om Namah Shivaya."

"Aum Namah Shivaya" ("adoration to Lord Shiva"). It is chanted to help protect one's soul during times of peril

Young Maharaja's name is Zalim Singh, as mentioned by Chattar Lal. The word "Zalim" means "cruel" in subcontinental languages.

All of the people in the Indian village speak Sinhala/Sinhalese, one of the languages of Sri Lanka, as opposed to Hindi, the Indian language. The villagers are all Sri Lankans.

The village shaman refers to the Sankara stone as "Shiva linga". In traditional Hinduism, the linga is a tall, cylindrical stone representative of a phallus, often set inside a circle representing the yoni, or female organ. Together, the two symbols stand for the dualistic sexual energy of the god Shiva.


Harrison says, "You're insulting them, and you're embarrassing me." He also says something to the group of Indians in another language.

My question is: What does Harrison say to the Indians in the foreign language?

And to answer your question Indy says "Thank You, Thank you so much" (Isthoothyi, Bohoma Isthoothyi")

.....

Now here is a YouTuber that tried to translate the Chinese Anything Goes song. Sounds like he tried to do this without working off the English song's lyrics. He made some other comments:

Kate Capshaw was singing standard Chinese (so-called Mandarin), not Shanghainese, Cantonese or Manchu language.

I wrote the Chinese lyrics (which was indeed based on Cole Porter's work) and "translate" them into English myself. The problem is that I was really not sure what was she singing.

Again, perhaps I should clarify that I wrote BOTH Chinese and English lyrics used in this video. I translated the English version based on my Chinese version. Congrats for the effort? You have no idea.

I did post an older version of this video years before with Chinese lyrics only. Later I found out that people Google Translated (yeah just imagine how bad it was) and post it on reddit. That’s mainly why I decided to include a re-translated version – as faithful as possible – to show the “difference”.

The film did has many dialogues in standard Chinese and Cantonese, and Cantonese is a language mostly spoken by people from south-eastern China, including Hong Kong.

Lao Che's son Chen clearly speak standard Chinese when he tried to shoot Indy.

 

Archaeos

Member
The Rex Chen fellow replied to my comment and now he says Lao Che's dialogue there is just gibberish that sounds like Chinese. Seems strange that Lucasfilm would invent Huttese and Ewokese in 1983 and then not even bother to use real Chinese in 1984.

I had this cross-checked just in case Lucas’ had an ingenious moment by using an obscure regional dialect that would point to a hidden back story of the Black Dragon Triad. But alas I must agree that Lao Che's angry mumblings at 0:32 and especially at 0:36 and 0:45 come across as just some pseudo-Chinese/Japanese/East-Asian-sounding mock lingo. Nowadays, this would probably not fly well with audiences and be marked as "racial stereotyping" at worst, "ethnic clichés" at best. Oddly enough, the late Roy Chiao was born in Shanghai and is a native speaker, so I am still hoping my hearing is at fault, I can be proven wrong, and Lao Che has actual meaningful dialogue in this scene.

I could imagine the "lines" at 0:36 and 0:45 are probably originating from some late ADR in post where they needed some additional voice filler for the soundscape, and decided to go for some "mock Chinese". It's akin to silly German or French inserts where some extra just randomly shouts "Yaya, Jawohl, Du du, Mann, Autobahn", and it's supposed to mean something akin to poesy by Friedrich Schiller. Just think of cinematic masterpieces like French Kiss (1995) with Kevin Kline as garlic-smelling French stereotype whose every second sentence of heavily accented "Frenchy-English" contains the words "oh la la", or EuroTrip (2004) with Michelle Trachtenberg loosing her top in every act featuring a song called "Du" by David Hasselhoff as a Peter Maffay cover. 🤠

Kao Kan's utterances from 1:39 while firing his Thompson M1928 at Indy hiding behind the Tam-Tam is Mandarin for "I will kill you" or "I will eliminate you". Ric Young is also a native speaker, born into a British-Chinese family in Malaysia during British Imperial occupation. The latter's native dialogue in "Noble House", where he stars as Tsu-Yan alongside Pierce Brosnan's character of Ian Dunross, Tai-pan of Hong Kong trading house Struan's, is proof.

As for your valid point about Huttese and Ewokese: let's remind ourselves of 1983 ( :cool: ) and the fact that back then, despite the "subtitles", Huttese, let alone Ewokese were not structured languages à la Tolkien, with full vocabulary, grammar, and an explanatory Wookiepedia entry longer than "War and Peace". They were just random gibberish noises no one gave second thoughts about. So creating mock-Chinese fillers and non-sensical alien sounds seem quite plausible for the inner workings at Skywalker Ranch during those years. It's really only since the 1990s and Marc Okrand's determination to make Klingon a thing that fake movie languages evolved into linguistic subjects with a surprisingly large number of PhD candidates studying Shakespeare in its Klingon original during their Harvard summer break at Middlebury Language School.🤯
 
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