posted February 20, 1999 06:31 PM            

He said: "Dann lass mal deine Doetten sehen!" (As you realize, I have the german version of the game). That sentence is not easy to translate, because "Doetten" is not a proper german word. But according to the fact that the apes speak in a sort of a northern german dialect, I would translate it into "Now let us see your tits!"

That is a surprising meaning, if we remember that Garrett is a male one and therefore has no breast, obviously. Well... I am a female thief and shurely didnt want to show them apes any parts of my body. (Except my hand with the blackjack in it, course; or some bad gestures.)

Maybe thats why I had those problems with the monkeys the last time I met them?

posted February 20, 1999 09:59 PM         

Personally I like the angloamerican monkey boys, i love listening to them talk just before I blatter them with the blackjack. I think the preyingmantis or the blue thing rates as scariest guys. They just look evil enough for me to forget they dont have IQs any higher than a normal guard.

posted February 21, 1999 02:09 AM            

We're laughing with you, boojum

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quote:

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Tea in the Sahara, with you..

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posted February 22, 1999 07:37 PM            

The file is named "ab1a3na5.wav" and is extracted into the path "ape1\german\".
He says really: "Na, lass mal deine Doetten sehen!" The meaning of that is uncertain, as I explained earlier. Same as the words "Pisslacke", "Dummbatsch" or "Pillefuesse", is "Doetten" not a proper german word.

My congratulations to everyone, who did the translation work! It is funny to listen to all of them, equal if human guard, hammerite or ape.

I am only sad that I dont have the original version, because I cant quote the original sentences. And because I would spent many whole days with comparing the versions, to find out who of the Garretts fits the one in my mind. #)

posted February 23, 1999 04:56 PM            

On the other hand, when I listen to the .wav file, it certainly sounds a lot more like your sentence than my sentence. I have a suspicion that the people making the audio recordings may have been having a joke...

posted February 23, 1999 09:13 PM            

The translation was done by Eva Hoogh. The name sounds familiar to me. I'm not sure, but I think she is quite a distinguished translator. All in all she did a good job, despite some minor flaws ("two centimeters above the floor..").
Translating is one of the hardest jobs, pretty much like web design. The job has to be finished in no time, nobody is prepared to pay you adequately, and in the end everybody thinks they could have done better themselves (especially with English). Granted, with web design it's usually the four-year-old daughter who could have done better.
So let's not JoeBob her!

I think "Zeigst mir endlich..." were the translators words, just to give the recording people a basis to work on. If I was to speak a part like that, I would choose different words as well, according to my own dialect, so that it sounds more natural. And the audio recording people did an amazing job.

Now here's where I have to be a spoilsport: I don't think that it's 'Dötten'. Much as I like Lytha's hypothesis that 'Dötten' is a corruption of 'Titten', I think what the apeman really says is 'Döppen'.
Warning: now it gets technical! Feel free to skip this part.
If it was 'Döppen', we should hear a voiceless bilabial stop consonant. But we don't. If it was 'Dötten', we should be able to hear a voiceless apico-alveolar stop, but we don't hear that either. What we do hear is in fact a glottal stop!. Or, to be more precise, we hear a glottalized stop consonant. That means that the quality of the glottal stop is influenced by the consonant it substitutes.
Now, if you glottalize a 't', the tongue moves into a position as if you wanted to pronounce this consonant, but then you produce a stop of airflow with your glottis (and then release it). But if you wanted to glottalize a 'p' accordingly, your mouth would have to prepare for the pronunciation (because 'p' is produced with your lips). If you would close your lips and then produce the glottal stop, your cheeks would puff out, so you keep your mouth open a little to allow the air to flow out.
The same is true for the glottalized 't', but here the released air flows over the tongue and is thereby influenced by the consonant it substitutes.
In the case of 'p' the released air also flows over the tongue, which influences the sound of the glottal stop, but not towards a 'p', because the tongue is not involved in the production of 'p'. It is still in the position of the last consonant, 'd'.
Now 'd' is the voiced variant of 't' and therefore another apico-alveolar stop.
So, to sum things up, the glottalized 'p' is influenced by the preceeding 'd' and therefore sounds only marginally different from a glottalized 't'.

Resume here:
I think that 'deine Döppen' is a corruption of 'dein Kopp' the Low German equivalent of 'dein Kopf' (your head). Firstly, this is the meaning intended by LGS, and secondly, it is not just one wrong word, but a wrong word and the wrong number, which provides the intended effect of a pidgin.

Please feel free to dispute my hypothesis. I'm only trying to match what I hear with what was intended by the designers.

-Kyloe, language FREAK

PS: redEye, there is a demo version of Thief in German. Check out www.zdnet.de for the download. I have searched www.zdnet.fr for a French version, but they only link to an LGS site.

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Those who ha' w' Garrett bled

posted February 23, 1999 10:13 PM            

We really did give them a hard job, between the Trickster-pidgin, the Hammerite fake-old-English, and Constantine's rituals. I have a great respect for anyone who can translate things that rhyme into other things that rhyme.

Also, the French are the best whistlers.

posted February 24, 1999 07:09 AM            

-Kyloe, English language FREAK

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Those who ha' w' Garrett bled

posted February 24, 1999 10:28 AM            

The trickster-pidgen is spoken by the ape/rat beasts (the original "Showsie your face!", "We sees the sneaksie manflesh!" and stuff like that), by Constantine/Viktoria in the post-Cathedral cutscene, and in the Tricksterish quotes at the beginnings of several missions. If the translation comes across as "somewhat garbled and childish" then it's doing the right thing.

posted February 24, 1999 02:27 PM            

I remembered the word "Dotz" as a childish word for "Kopf", that is head. That word would fit the northern german dialect the apes are using. "Dopp" or "Kopp", as Kyloe suggested, would be rather a western german slang (rheinländisch, I d guess).

The word "Dotz" would have the diminutive form "Dötzchen", and that can easily be spoken similar as "Dötten". Equal if it is "Kopp" or "Dotz", its fine that there is another meaning than tits.

posted February 25, 1999 03:22 PM            

I've never heard the word Dotz, but I remember my mother saying Deez ['de:ts]. I like the idea that Köppen/Döppen is a diminutive. That would explain the umlaut and the suffix.
For those of you who don't know what an umlaut is, notice the dots above the 'o'. The idea is that the suffix '-en' alone would not be enough to distinguish between Kopp and Koppen in casual speech. The umlaut, however, alters the quality of the vowel, so that there is a change in the stressed syllable. This is such a clear pointer, that the suffix is no longer required. It is still there in German, but in modern English it is deleted. Compare foot/feet and tooth/teeth, etc. (umlaut is used in the construction of plurals, too).

As to dein/deine, let's not forget that the apes are supposed to speak a pidgin, i.e. a language they don't really know. If Döppen was a plural, the pronoun should carry a female suffix. But if it was a diminutive, its gender would be neutral. So using deine would be wrong. Choosing the wrong grammatical gender is typical for somebody who has only a limited knowledge of a language. It happens to me all the time in French.

It is rather easy to construct words with more than 30 characters, if you limit yourself to nouns. Just add several morphemes together to create nonsense compounds. There's the infamous Donaudampfschiffahrtskapitäns... (Danube-steam-boat-ing-captain's...)

Greek (modern or ancient) is a rather distant cousin of German, compared with English, which is like a brother, and Dutch, which is like a twin. The relationship is hardly transparent.

As to consonants: there is a canonical form of syllables, which says that one syllable can consist of one vowel with up to three consonants preceeding and following it. So the most complex syllable would be Strumpf (stocking) or Pflanz ('z' is pronounced 'ts'). As you can see from the latter example, consonant clusters are often reduced in modern English (plant). But strong has three consonants before the vowel, too. Can anybody come up with a canonical syllable in English?

-Oliver Kyloe, who gets easily carried away talking about language