Watch Your Language Blog

Don't "throw mama from the tambien."

It's that time of the year; final submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film have poured in from a record number of sixty three countries, after much controversy in some cases. Of course, I'm interested in films in languages I'm familiar with, but this is also an opportunity to explore other languages I've always wanted to learn. (Too bad South Africa didn't submit a film this year; I've been fascinated with Xhosa lately.)

Needless to say, films are a great way to familiarize yourself with a foreign language. Last year's Oscar winner Das Leben der Anderen definitely renewed my interest in German, and I'll never underestimate how much vocabulary I absorbed while watching films in Arabic and Urdu. Urdu especially: it's quite easy for Hindi speakers to hold a basic level of proficiency in Urdu, but Urdu vocabulary is so vastly different that it could easily make any Hindi speaker feel out of place. (I'm not even going to go into how incomprehensible regional dialects of Urdu can get for Hindi speakers.)

Subtitles make it much easier to understand foreign language films, but to really push language and translation skills further, we could possibly use same-language subtitles. Interestingly enough, in some parts of Asia, subtitles have adopted an aesthetic of font and color experimentation. However, if same-language subtitles seem like too much effort, even listening to a foreign language can help focus on the nuances of pronunciation, and increase comprehension in general.

Just, please don't be like Michael Scott from The Office, and translate Y tu mamá también as "throw mama from the tambien." (ELHAM)


October 23, 2007