I’ll Take “Sex Clowns” for $500, Alex

I’m working on the subtitles for different languages on our DVD for “Xtremely Xtreme.” So far we’ve got English closed-captioning, Japanese, and Vietnamese, and North American Spanish is on the way.

I have no way of knowing how accurate the translations are… except on the Japanese one, where I walked through the entire script line by line with the translator, my friend Kazue.

Some of the lines were especially tricky- for example, at one point a character says:

JENNIFER
It wasn’t exactly rocket science.

Obviously you can’t directly translate that. We used a lot of slang in the script… the Japanese version says something like “Even a monkey could have done it.”

I think to make this easier next time, I need to write a transcript explicitly for the translators, with all the slang stripped out.

BRIAN: the clown in the japanese version says

CLOWN
so I was saying before, maybe we could try a different hole, huh?

SHAC: that works i spose
BRIAN: it’s funny
SHAC: if by hole.. japanese wud take it sexually
SHAC: kaz thinks so?
BRIAN: oh yes
BRIAN: I mean consider the context
SHAC: well.. we are somewhat… de-sensitized?
SHAC: like.. now whenever i see a clown
SHAC: im gonna think of matt and anal sex
BRIAN: we should tell bret about that
BRIAN: maybe he would start crying
SHAC: is bret clourophobic?
BRIAN: he’s the one who told wall about the clown sex thing
BRIAN: he was like traumatized
SHAC: i dont know if i got that spelling right
BRIAN: it was pretty damn funny
BRIAN: at one point I heard about his upcoming wedding
BRIAN: and I asked ray “dude, we should show up as sex clowns.”
BRIAN: and she said “he would kill you.”
BRIAN: I’m like “yeah it would be hysterical”
BRIAN: she says “no, I mean he would actually kill you.”
BRIAN: “like he would run amok and try to strangle you.”
SHAC: ahh.. coulrophobia
SHAC: i think
SHAC: bah screw it
BRIAN: trivia
SHAC: if asked on jeopardy i wud be able to say it well enuf to get the $500
BRIAN: remember to phrase it in the form of a question

Dan Ladd

Dan Ladd rules- he’s an artist whose medium is growing woody plants into shapes. For example, pleating trees into sculptures, or growing gourds into hard moulds (sometimes of other sculptures) over a growing season.
Web link of note: Dan Ladd
(At http://www.danladd.com/)