News You Can Bruise for 2005 June 7

There are a bunch of buildings full of biotech companies by where I work, and today I saw a big on-building logo that said "LifeMasters". I feared for the worst, but it turns out that LifeMasters is just some health care thing for people with chronic conditions. I've never feared for the worst and then been so disappointed.

I should have mentioned earlier that my seeing Kiki's Delivery Service earlier with Riana was actually the second time I saw it; I'd also seen it the day before with Sumana. Also we had watched Elf, which Sumana really likes but which I wasn't crazy about.

Anyway, when I watched it with Sumana we watched it in Japanese with subtitles, just because that's how we saw Spirited Away in the theater and we liked the voice work for that movie. About halfway through the second viewing, the disc started acting up and we tried various things to fix it, including switching the audio track to English. And gaah! but the English track was a mess.

There was already a perfectly servicable and (as far as I could tell) pretty faithful English translation, which was used as the subtitles for the Japanese audio track. But in the dubbed version, this translation had been jettisoned in favor of what was clearly a much looser and greatly inferior translation, complete with entirely new lines of dialogue that didn't even work. It was like someone's bad fan fiction had been dubbed onto the movie. So I guess I am going to have to be a subtitle snob, if that's what they do when they dub movies. I never really compared the subtitled versions of a particular movie to the dubbed before, because I assumed they used the same translation for each. Does this always happen?

I restumbled upon the term I first encountered in a restaurant a month ago. It's "concasse". Once again the peculiar genius of the French is evident: "concasse" means "chopped-up tomatoes". Ah, but if la tomate, she is but lightly mashed, zen she is "a la dabruque". So simple, non?