StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Here's a snippet from a story of mine I'm fixing up:

"Captain! The woman’s waking up!"
Huh? “What was that?”
"Captain! The woman’s waking up!"
“We’ve been through this. On this ship, we speak English.”
“I can speak in your native tongue?”
“My native tongue is English! Speak the old language… you might as well speak Swahili!”
“I can learn Swahili?”
“NO! On this ship, we speak English! And that’s an order!”
“…go stick your bloody orders up your arse…”

Now, the underlined and bolded parts are actually supposed to be in different languages, each one different (so three different non-english languages), and they're spoken as a native speaker--not language-school correct but native speaker correct.
For example, in language-school correct English you may say "John and I are going to the shops this afternoon."
Here, however, a native speaker would say "Me and Johnno are goin' t' the shops the sarvo."

So can anyone help me out? The marked lines in non-english native speech.

It would help if we you would please clarify what exactly you want.

oh and please to realize that even if a person reverts to speaking their native language, they might not revert to the thickest slang imagineble

for example

"Captain! The woman’s waking up!"

in finnish would be (as you requested)

Herra Kapteeni! Nainen on heräämässä!

which is (mostly) gramatically correct, but fits the situation as when addressing a superior officer you use a certain tone and style.


as for

“…go stick your bloody orders up your arse…”

it would probably be

"voisin sanoo mihin tunget käskys" (literally "I could tell where to shove your orders")
or "voit käskäynes painua helvettiin" (literally "you can go to hell with your orders")

as the exact line is almost never used in finnish and it sounds wierd saying it out load in finnish.

Here, however, a native speaker would say "Me and Johnno are goin' t' the shops the sarvo."

Man, Australian English is so fucking weird.

So, to clarify, are you asking for people to provide translations of those specific phrases into other languages for you? Just ... like, random other languages?

"Captain! The woman’s waking up!"

chuán zhǎng, nà gè nǚ rén qǐ lái le. Which would look like 船长,那个女人起来了.

That being said, it sounds a little bit strange to me with my limited Chinese. I would wager instead of saying "that woman" most Chinese speakers would most probably say "she", so instead of nà gè nǚ rén, they would say tā.

I have no idea how to translate the other parts into Chinese. I wouldn't know where to start because I don't think there is an equivalent idiom, and it would not have the same "punch" if I just tried translating it word for word.

Edit, while its romanised like as how I written above, an English speaker would intuitively pronounce it differently. For example Zh in Zhang is pronounced like a "J" sound in English, and nǚ sort of sounds like ni or the word knee, and qi has the Q like a "Ch" sound. Other words do read like how an English reader would intuitively read it. The reason is, while a lot of European languages use the latin alphabet, they are not always pronounced the same as in English, like how the letter "J" has a "Y" sound in some European languages, eg German, Danish etc.

Ziggy Stardust wrote:

Here, however, a native speaker would say "Me and Johnno are goin' t' the shops the sarvo."

Man, Australian English is so fucking weird.

I must admit, as an Australian I have never seen the word "sarvo" as meaning the afternoon. We do however colloquially us terms like "arvo" for afternoon, and "abbreviations" like Johnno (for Johnny) or Shazza (Sharon), Bazza (Barry), Maccas (McDonalds) etc.

mr friendly guy wrote:I must admit, as an Australian I have never seen the word "sarvo" as meaning the afternoon. We do however colloquially us terms like "arvo" for afternoon, and "abbreviations" like Johnno (for Johnny) or Shazza (Sharon), Bazza (Barry), Maccas (McDonalds) etc.

I think that bit of the translation 'the sarvo' is how 'this arvo' would sound when spoken with a thick Australian accent.

mr friendly guy wrote:I must admit, as an Australian I have never seen the word "sarvo" as meaning the afternoon. We do however colloquially us terms like "arvo" for afternoon, and "abbreviations" like Johnno (for Johnny) or Shazza (Sharon), Bazza (Barry), Maccas (McDonalds) etc.

You should come come by my part of the world. I regularly say "'sarvo" as a shortened form of "this afternoon."

For the "Captain the woman is waking up!" in Hungarian "Kapitány, a nő felébrett!"

"Captain! The woman’s waking up!"
"Käpt'n, die Frau wacht auf!" (Colloquially, we often abbreviate "Kapitän" to something that sounds pretty much like the english version)

“…go stick your bloody orders up your arse...”
"Du kannst dir deine verdammten Befehle sonstwohin stecken..." Literally "stick your bloody orders... somewhere..." The detailled version isn't commonly used in German.

Ziggy Stardust wrote:

Here, however, a native speaker would say "Me and Johnno are goin' t' the shops the sarvo."

Man, Australian English is so fucking weird.

So, to clarify, are you asking for people to provide translations of those specific phrases into other languages for you? Just ... like, random other languages?

Yep, just three random languages; not word-for-word translations, but the actual way those sentiments would be conveyed, in the authentic slang and idiom.
It would be a bonus if they could be written properly in a .txt file, without losing anything, but not essential.
As for the discipline level/social relationship between the two of them, it's the captain and a crew-member of a four-man crew of a privately owned (owner-operator) merchant trading (space)ship. So while there is a bit of a superior/subordinate relationship, it's pretty relaxed.


Friendly, I'm a trifle concerned about your uncertainty. If we have any native speakers of Chinese (I assume it's Mandarin), I'd be grateful for a check over what he's got.

'Sarvo' is an interesting word. It's most likely 'this arvo', just shifting in the way it's said, and in fact if a speaker is making a point of speaking more slowly and clearly, more often than not they'll say 'this arvo', BUT it could be that 'sarvo' is all that remains of 'this arvo', and the 'the' before it is a kind of objectifying of it. The church, the car, the sarvo.
I don't know. I'm not a linguist.

Anyway, we got a Finnish, a Hungarian, and a possibly dodgy Chinese. My thanks to all, and if anyone else would like to contribute, please do.
Edit: And Austrian. Cool!

just to add to what I said "Herra Kapteeni" is rather formal and in a more informal setting you can drop "herra" or even drop "herra" and shorten "kapteeni" into "kapu" though that would be really informal.

also I don't know how it works with english speaker but with us finns we tend to speak closer to written version when speaking with someone who isn't a native speaker.

Using Cyrillics is sure going to blow up some people's heads:

First: "Капитан! Она приходит в себя!"
Second: "Свои приказы в жопу себе засунь..." (If muttering - if speaking directly to the captain, replace ... with exclamation).

This is quite rude and feels like routine sailor talk. You're welcome"

"Kapteeni! Nainen on heräämässä!"
Huh? “What was that?”
"Kapitány, a nő felébrett!"
"In English?"
"Капитан! Она приходит в себя!"
“English! We’ve been through this! On this ship, we speak English!”
“I can speak in your native tongue?”
“My native tongue is English! Speak the old language… you might as well speak Swahili!”
“I can learn Swahili?”
“NO! On this ship, we speak English! And that’s an order!”
"Du kannst dir deine verdammten Befehle sonstwohin stecken..."

And there we go. Thank you very much, everybody.
Now the re-write's done, I'm out of excuses to avoid sending the story to be critiqued. Maybe I should go all through it again first, you know, to check for spelling, grammar, tense...

Lord Revan wrote:also I don't know how it works with english speaker but with us finns we tend to speak closer to written version when speaking with someone who isn't a native speaker.

True, but Zarrin at this point suffers a character flaw where he doesn't quite get that not everyone has the same mastery of languages as he does. They're human languages, the captain's human, therefore...