His argument about digital watches did not age well.
My kids have known how to understand a digital clock since they were toddlers, but even now, in elementary school, they require entire lesson units in school on telling time from a clock face.
Beyond that, he argues that pie charts tell us more about the relationship between things than tables of numbers, and a clock face is "the world's most perfect pie chart." But a clock face is not really a pie chart. It does not indicate distribution among categories, as a pie chart does. The arms are not delimiters; they merely indicate position.
> His argument about digital watches did not age well.
Didn't it? I think it remains true. Time is a continuum, not discrete; analogue watches demonstrate that, while digital ones do not.
And yes, schools have to teach one how to use a clock, but at the end of the process one actually has enhanced one's understanding of time. Much like using a slide rule teaches one far more about numbers and maths than using a calculator.
Even if you're right that analog watches are better tools that's not what Adams was saying. "We all know, really, that [analog clock face] is a lot more instantly meaningful to us than 15:39" which is just wrong. Plenty of people, myself included, get more instant meaning from a digital readout.
> Plenty of people, myself included, get more instant meaning from a digital readout.
More from outside knowledge than from the digital readout itself. There's no way to tell from a digital readout there are 60 minutes in an hour or seconds in a minute, or that there's a 12-hour period that means something (and no hints to guess.) There's no evidence that the time represented on a digital readout changes at a constant rate or is sequential and doesn't jump around or go faster sometimes and slower others. Everything on an analog clockface is just there.
If you found an alien digital clock written in alien language, it would take you forever to figure out anything about it; it would take a while to figure out anything useful even if you knew it was a clock. If you found an alien analog clock, it would be immediately obvious what it was and what it was doing, and you could use it to help you understand the alien digital clock.
edit: also, when your alien digital watch did the equivalent of jumping from 12 to 1, it would throw everything off, especially if there were a different symbol for 1 second or 1 minute that there was for 1 hour. An analog clock visually explains the transition between 12 and 1.
I think all this stuff is obvious, I'm confused about the argument being made that it's not. There's just less information on a digital readout. I feel like I'm trying to explain that movies have more information than movie scripts, but Kolmogorov would say to compress them both and compare the filesizes.
> If you found an alien digital clock written in alien language, it would take you forever to figure out anything about it; it would take a while to figure out anything useful even if you knew it was a clock. If you found an alien analog clock, it would be immediately obvious what it was and what it was doing, and you could use it to help you understand the alien digital clock.
I disagree with this. This seems to assume that an alien analog clock would look/function more like our analog clocks than an alien digital clock would look/function like our digital clocks. I'm not sure there's any reason to make that assumption.
The only assumption is that analog means a gauge of some sort with a pointer or pointers moving between symbols, rather than a series of symbols that change for digital. I wouldn't have any problem with assuming a circular gauge (because we calculate periodic things using circle math), but it's not necessary.
That's kind of a big assumption, IMO. Why does it need symbols? Perhaps a hypothetical alien species has an analog clock that keeps track of times with shades of color. Or audio tones. Or it uses a gauge, but the gauge vibrates and the vibrations mean something.
Combine that with the fact that their time system might not be based on a fairly regular rotation of the planet. Perhaps they value some other less regular measurement more. Or perhaps their planet does not have regular rotation. How might a time system evolve and be portrayed in those cases? How can you be sure that an analog display would be easier to interpret than a digital one?
Similar to how a 12-hour analogue clock does not necessarily imply that we actually have 24 hours in our days, an alien analog clock could potentially be vastly different than the same alien's digital clock.
> I'm not sure there's any reason to make that assumption.
analog clocks are modeled around the idea that the time is circular because that's the natural cycle of day and night (same concept of the meridian, plus dark hours, when there is no shadow).
I imagine that any alien civilization that lives on a planet that rotates around its star and has a light/dark cycle would measure time in a similar fashion.
> analog clocks are modeled around the idea that the time is circular because that's the natural cycle of day and night
This is not supported by evidence. For one, it would make a 24 hour dial make more sense than a 12 hour one. For two, many early non-discrete clocks took the form of parallax observation or liquid flows and were not inherently circular.
hourglasses and other similar devices are for keeping discrete times, not continuous times like in
"it cooks in half of that"
but they are circular inherently, when the top half falls to the bottom, we flip them and the cycle restarts.
analog clocks started as 24 hours historically [1]. the division of days in 24 equal segments was well know since ancient history, we still use base 60 to measure time because that's what babylonians used when they invented time keeping and started counting days in a year (360 of them, in base 60)
If you limit the set of "analog clocks" to 24-hour dials, then yes, you have proven a tautology. If you look at the overall history of time device user interfaces then circular displays don't seem like such a slam dunk. I'll point you to Al Muradi of 1200's Spain again who often uses little doors or other time indicators.
there are bizarre incantations of everything throughout history
Almuradi clock is still a *solar* clock hence it only works when the light rays hit it, so like a meridian, it can't show the full 24 hours rotation. in fact it's an half circle, because the earth rotates around the sun, the only approximation you can get is circular, of course there are meridians that do not display hours on an arc of circumference, but that's simply a design choice.
But at that time the fact that a day was of 24 hours was a long well known fact.
the point is that if your planet rotates around a star, the first thing beings living there would notice are the repeating patterns generated by light rays. Which are most probably shadows creating something like a circle (or an oval)
>Almuradi clock is still a solar clock hence it only works when the light rays hit it
No, Almuradi's works are powered by water and moved by gears. At least one used light to illuminate particular numbers, but the optical aperture was moved by gears.
>Which are most probably shadows creating something like a circle (or an oval)
During the course of the day the shadows make a half circle at best. Over the course of a year the end point at the same time of day makes an uneven figure eight, known as the analemma. At no point is there a circle or an ellipse.
Passive solar timekeeping has its limitations and the next phase of development was the water clock.
These simple water clocks, which were of the outflow type, were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. There were twelve separate columns with consistently spaced markings on the inside to measure the passage of "hours" as the water level reached them. The columns were for each of the twelve months to allow for the variations of the seasonal hours. These clocks were used by priests to determine the time at night so that the temple rites and sacrifices could be performed at the correct hour. [0]
If anything the circular three hand clock is a pragmatic method of indictors based on the method of power control. Looking at the Antikytheria mechanism for example, the back side shows a deep understanding of how the different cycles of time measures interact.
Going back to the original topic of "an alien digital clock written in alien language," to the degree that we could comprehend on what basis they kept time a time communication rooted in a sidereal period cannot be a given since the aliens might come from a tidally locked planet or one like Mercury which "rotates on its axis exactly three times for every two revolutions it makes around the Sun."[2] Even if they just used the Unix epoch time would look linear and relative; not circular.
Iirc historically the day was first split into 12 parts with sundials, and only later was the night also split into 12 parts. Maybe thats where the 2x12 comes from. I guess another benefit is that it's simply less cluttered with 12 divisions.
I don't think you're getting how important the word instant is in this context. An analog clock might be better for decoding an unfamiliar time system. It might be better for teaching children how we count time. It might implicitly contain more information. It might be better in a thousand ways. None of that matters.
For whatever reason I get a faster and more accurate sense of what time it is from a digital watch. I am not alone in this. Therefor the assertion that an analog readout is more instantly meaningful for everyone is wrong.
When I am at the train station I can have an immediate idea of what time is it just looking at the analog clocks around (they are digital displays mimicking analog clocks) even if I can't read the numbers from afar.
Digital clocks are harder for me because I have to parse the information: is that a 6, 8, 9, or zero?
It doesn't make much difference in the end, bit having to actually read the number forces me to be precise and I can't rely on intuition.
The more I age, the more my vision deteriorate, the more I find analog clocks easier to read.
Oh absolutely. Your experience is in line with what Douglas Adams was originally saying. Plenty of people get a better sense of time from analog displays.
I'm not saying digital works better for everyone. I'm not even saying digital works better for most. It could easily be the case that I'm in the 1% of weirdos who have an easier time with digital. My only point is that it isn't universal either way. Adams said digital watches are silly because everyone gets a better sense of time from analog. It is a funny joke. But he is wrong about the facts.
I think "faster" and "more accurate" are getting inappropriately conflated in this discussion.
It is faster to visually parse two hands of an analog watch than it is to parse four digits of a digital watch. But the price you pay for this is accuracy, and if you wanted to parse the analog watch face as accurately as digital, it'd take you more time than just reading the digits.
> Therefor the assertion that an analog readout is more instantly meaningful for everyone is wrong.
Maybe I'm confused about the assertion. The sentence "A picture with a bird in it" is more quickly recognized by very fluent English speakers than an actual picture of a bird. But it conveys far less information to a far narrower audience.
The problem with the original statement is the phrase "more instantly meaningful". It might be correct if it said "more meaningful", but I doubt it's more `instantly` meaningful for someone who can read numbers quickly.
I don't think there's anything more inherently meaningful about a digital vs analog readout, or vice-versa. They're both highly abstract representations of time, it really just depends on what you're used to.
That said, every single event on my calendar, and every single communication about time I have with other people is expressed as a written (or spoken) number, not as a position on a clock face. That makes digital clocks far more useful for me personally; it saves me the extra step of having to mentally convert to digital time before being able to reason about how the time on my watch relates to other events or significant times throughout my day.
To those who prefer analogue watches I have to ask; how does that process work for you? Do you find it easier to mentally convert written times to a visualization of a position on a watch, and then do whatever mental reasoning you need to do in that space? Or are you doing the same thing I would be doing if I had an analog watch; converting it to digital and then reasoning from there? If the latter, why does skipping that extra conversion step by using a digital watch feel worse from your perspective?
Digital easier to read, but I personally think analog is easier to “feel”. I get a much more visceral sense of urgency when the minute hand approaches an anticipated position. And same goes for when the hour hand crawls downward to signal the end of the work day. Seeing it physically close the distance to the 6 o’clock position gives me a much better feel for how much of the day I have left than “3:24”. It really is like a pie chart in that sense.
At this point in my life I am definitely much more used to reading a digital clock so I don’t think you can attribute this to familiarity.
Communications with others are expressed as a written or spoken number. But then calculations with that number (eg. "how long do I have?") have to be done with arithmetic. It's fairly rare that I wear a watch, but when I do, such as at a conference or similar, I prefer an analogue face. In this kind of case I prefer to visualise the time on the clock face. Then I can "see" the time remaining without doing arithmetic.
> If the latter, why does skipping that extra conversion step by using a digital watch feel worse from your perspective?
I'm quite capable of doing it either way, but my preference is to do the single required conversion to "analogue" so that repeated comparisons are visual and do not require repeated arithmetic. I also find it easier to remember a time visually, whereas single-digit errors in remembering a digital time can result in a greater error.
An analog clock is abstract in that it doesn’t show all the details of a globe with oceans and mountains and valleys and trees and lizards rotating and circling a distant light source with massive gravitation that appears to be arcing across the sky.
But it is a reasonable low resolution drawing of it, with some squiggly lines for reference, and arrows pointing in the approximate direction of the light source.
Having witnessed kids learning time: they will happily give "15:39" as an answer. But if you ask them when it'll be 4 o'clock, they literally have no idea - not even of yhe direction (forward or back).
I think this is Adams' point: digital watches pretend to give you information but only give you data. That's a reason to consider them silly: they make you work (translating their data to something with meaning) while pretending to do the work for you.
Note: analogue watches also require interpretation. But they support coarse- as well as fine-grained interpretation: is it before or after a whole hour? Closer to half than to whole? Or to a quarter? 10 past or to? Etc.
That's not a fair comparison because you're comparing 24 hour time with 12 hour time.
Granted, a digital clock won't tell you there are 60 minutes in an hour, but teaching analog time involves much more than that. For starters, you have to explain that for minutes, the numbers are in increments of 5.
I find the translation I have to do from 15:39 to 3:39 pm to have much more friction than reading a digital or analog clock in the first place, both of which I can do with equal ease.
The problem of course is that I'm not used to 24-hour times, so I don't equate 15 with any particular time of day. Similar to how I have to translate C to F to make sense of C temperatures.
Now, a 24-hour analog clock with an embedded digital temperature read-out in C, that would really hurt.
Counter example: I grew up using 12-hour time and still do to this day, with plenty of analog clocks all around, and yet I find it much easier and faster to convert between 24-hour and 12-hour time (just remove the leading 1 and subtract 2, if the hour is more than 12) than to parse an analog clock (identify which hand is which, convert the minutes to get an approximation, even more work if it's a stylized clock that might use roman numerals or not have any labels at all).
I didn't pick 15:39 that's the quote from Douglas Adams. He pretty clearly went with a hard to read digital time to emphasize the point that he (and according to him everyone else) can more readily get useful information from an analog readout. My own watch is a digital 12 hour display and that is more useful to me.
They may capture your concept of time, but I agree with the parent. I always have to translate "5 minutes before the hour" to "3:55" in my head before I really understand what was said.
In this age of digital displays, what people don’t realize is that 3:55 is “just a little bit” before the hour — which is immediately obvious on a circular display.
I don't think that analogue watches demonstrate the continuous nature of time. They tick. That's discretizing time. Sure you can omit the seconds hand or even make it run smoothly, and some do, but that's not reflective of the nature of the timepiece. You could just as well make a digital clock that fades out the unit seconds digit as the new one fades in. Or show digits until a blurby hundredth of a second, which some do.
That’s why the continuous motion ones are so sought after and pricy. The mechanical continuous motion watches are really marvelous feats of engineering
It's still continuous, as even when fully ticking, it still goes from point a to b passing through all the in between points... well, up to planck length at least...
Ticking just makes the motion jerky/abrupt, not discontinuous/discreet...
Ooh, alright, you win this one, but only on a technicality. I won't mention the fact that liquid crystals are also in a constant state of motion while under power ;-)
>Time is a continuum, not discrete; analogue watches demonstrate that, while digital ones do not
While obviously true, we often treat time as discrete to an appropriate level of precision. Timekeeping in sports is essentially all digital these days for example. And generally speaking (at least for some contexts), 10am really does mean 10am, not 10ish.
I actually normally use an analog display on my Apple Watch but I think it's mostly to have something different as pretty much all the other clocks I use, including the watch I usually wear, are digital.
The issue is 10AM has real meaning but you’re only actually at 10AM for an instant mostly you want to know how long until something happens.
Think of a meeting at 10AM with an analog clock you can get an intuitive feel for how long you have to finish what your working on. With a digital clock it’s easy to do the calculation but that distracts from the task at hand.
It’s most noticeable with a seconds. Many analog clocks include a second hand because it’s actually useful, while few digital clocks do so.
I find it much easier to judge how urgent it is to finish given the information that it's 9:54 than by looking at an analog clock. I wore an analog watch from age ~5-20 out of stubbornness and never got to the point where it conveyed useful information to me without actively stopping to think.
I think much like reading is abstracted to a point where the "shape" of the words conveys the meaning (and you can muddle up the inner letters without much loss of information), when you use digital clocks enough the subconscious meaning of the shape of the numbers is what you see. I don't have to do a manual conversion to understand from the 16:54 on my phone screen that I have 5 minutes until 5pm - I just "know" that from a single glance.
Ultimately both digital and analog clocks are abstractions which convey meaning to whatever our internal sense of time is. I suspect the internal concept of time is quite different for everyone (hence why my mum is always late for everything...)
I can't say I've ever taken the second hand into account when looking at an analogue clock to check the time, nor do I usually find myself reading the minute hand more precisely than 5 minute intervals. I've certainly watched it slowly approach 12 when waiting to get out of class or something like that, but I could just as easily watch a number count up toward 60.
It’s a useful skill. Anyway, you don’t actually need a second hand to get sub minute precision as a minute hand should be continually sweeping through the range.
Which is why people in the thread are talking about the feel of time. You can get an intuitive feel of how much you need to speed up etc.
I was aware I had poor eyesight, but I'm kind of amazed to hear that there's anyone who can clearly see the position of a minute hand between two tick marks on a clock from any reasonable distance.
How many analogue clocks do you have which you trust to be that accurate? One huge advantage of a digital clock (on a phone, anyway) is that it's NTP synced with an atomic clock - so it's highly accurate and will remain that way.
I know that when I'm running for a train, I rely on my phone more than my analogue wristwatch - because the analogue clock is rarely perfectly accurate, and that matters.
If you are talking about 12-hour analogue watches, no. They wrap the continuous time into some non-intuitive measure that needs an external context to determine the actual time of day. They rather demonstrate that time needs to be as precise and accurate as needed; the continuity of time doesn't always matter.
I think this is more of a "different people's minds work differently" thing than an age thing. Some people who grew up in the digital age still find analog clock faces more useful. Here's a short youtube video exploring that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZArBfxaPzD8 . I think Adam's mistake was assuming the preference for analog was universal which was probably wrong even when he first wrote the joke.
I think the argument could be made for a clock face being a pie chart if you think of it the way the host of that video does. The categories are "time left in the hour/day" and "time passed in the hour/day".
All that said I was really happy to finally understand what Adams was trying to say with that joke witch, as a person who finds digital readouts more useful, never landed for me before.
The author’s point was that technology was making people stupider. They’re being told what to believe and their data source is isolated from reality so not only are they easily fooled by those who control the sources of information, they lose the ability to process data on their own, and they do it to themselves for reasons as banal as fashion.
I'm 37 and have a hard time parsing clock faces, I remember having a hard time with it in kindergarten and they basicaly wrote it of as me being a little prick and refusing to do it right
I was very surprised that anyone at all would find digital displays harder to read than an old-style clock face. Learned something new just now. I'm 37 too.
I am just apparently very bad at estimating which hand is the longer one (if there's not a huge amount of difference). Once I figured that out... reading the time is not a problem.
Same for me. My house had loads of analog clocks when I was growing up, I had one for a watch for over a decade, but still it was always a little bit harder to figure out than digital for me.
> in elementary school, they require entire lesson units in school on telling time from a clock face.
I'm not sure our age difference, but as a millennial I'm pretty sure we did when I was in elementary school as well. I don't remember which grade though, I didn't learn about how to read those watches from my parents. Digital clocks became so common that I never cared for it. Same with cursive, because of computers making cursive really pointless, I don't know how to write in it outside of my own signature.
Numbers on a digital face can be read by anyone who knows numbers.
Just yesterday my toddler told me it was 6 oclock because the big hand was pointing at the six.
Trying to explain to a three year old that the small hand was for the hour, and the big hand pointed at a number which you multiply by 5 to get the minutes was beyond him.
Funny how we got downgraded into "smart watches" that barely hold a charge for a day and are good at everything other than telling the bloody time. Having an always on display is an actual feature nowadays lol
People said the same about smart phones compared to Nokia candy bar phones with battery lives that lasted a week.
In exchange for charging my cellular watch every night, I get a device on my wrist that can make phone calls, stream music, store 16GB worth of music, has GPS for when I run, monitors my heart rate, gives me notifications and let’s me send messages.
If I went into coma in 2009 and the most advanced piece of technology that I knew at the time was the iPhone 3GS or the then current laptops and woke up in 2022, I would be much more impressed with the Apple Watch than any other piece of technology.
I still use my Pebble Time; I can't understand why you'd buy a watch with a battery that lasts less than a week.
(I've had people tell me that you just put an apple watch on the charger overnight. Then why does it have a sleep tracker app that requires the watch to be on your wrist?)
There are smart watches that will go for weeks on a charge. They automatically set time based on the cell phone network and GPS so are always accurate to within 1 second.
> Funny how we got downgraded into "smart watches"
We didn't get downgraded. The "dumb watch" product category is still alive and kicking. Whether it's the more moderate priced quartz segment, or the less moderately priced mechanical segment it's not even slightly dying. What we've gained is choice.
And I say this as someone who would never buy a smartwatch because it would need charging. I have a perfectly decent Citizen analog watch that has worked perfectly every day since I bought it five years ago (not even needing a battery change because it's solar powered). I occasionally consider splashing out on a mechanical watch, but even a 3 year servicing interval would be tedious.
I would never wear a watch that had to be charged every day. My Amazfit Bip (stupid name, I know) is good for about 6 weeks if I don't use the GPS and heart monitor, and 2 weeks if I do.
Sure it does - for example the portion of the hour in front of the minute hand's sweep is "in the future" whereas the portion of the hour behind the minute hand's sweep is "in the past" and the portion of the hour under the minute hand is "now".
Three categories, and the distribution of the current hour's minutes between them
It's really two overlapping pie charts, each hand forming a side of a slice with an imaginary line from the center to the top forming the other side. We read them together, but to work as pie charts they have to be read separately.
You can't get much useful information from the hands' relationship to each other without knowing their relationship to the imaginary up line. If I say, "The hour and minute hands are 30° apart", what does that tell you about the distribution of time into past and future?
The hour hand shows distribution of hours between most recent 12 and next 12 into past and future. The minute hand is an entirely separate chart showing the distribution of minutes in the current hour into past and future.
Trying to read a clock from the frame of a pie chart is kind of confusing though, given this overlap. I don't think I would call it a good pie chart, much less the most perfect one.
Imagine Douglas Adams thinking that within a single generation, digital clocks would render the majority of smart, technical people adult people to not only be unable to read a clock but also unable to grasp the idea of fractions, ratios, time elapsed or remaining, or the concrete nature of the way days occur in the physical world.
Are you sure this is not just the amount of exposure to each type of clock?
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that children who understand how to read only digital clocks are quite capable of answering what the time is (just read the numbers right off), but have trouble telling how many hours there are from 10am to 3pm.
Related, I made a little toy[0] that lets you explore what analog clocks would like with an arbitrary number of hours in the day (since 12/24 is of course arbitrary too).
I've been staying at that click for a solid ten minutes, but I can't figure out why minutes and seconds start on top, but hours on the bottom. Any idea why that particular choice was made?
Adding additional info to my sibling comments. Since the bottom is designed to show night, it would be cool to grab a geolocation and draw the bottom based on sunrise/sunset times.
the 24 hour clocks I've seen usually are set up like this so daytime is the top half and night time the bottom - as though the tip of the hour hand was the sun
This is very nice as it addresses the zero-index nature of time by going 0-23 instead of 1-24. Time would be much more comprehensible if all clock were marked that way.
Ok, it is interesting that the top of 12h clocks in those countries is often a 12 instead of a zero [0]. Maybe the tension of a cardinal zero in an ordinal world (i.e. 1900 is the 20th century) lead the Swiss Railway to de-number the 12h clock [1].
> Are you sure this is not just the amount of exposure to each type of clock?
I have a large analog clock in our living room that I look at every other day or so. I still find that I instantly understood the digital watch, but with the analog watch example I had to actually stop and look carefully at it for a second.
If I had a analog wrist watch I used every day I'm sure I'd be equally good with both. But I really think it takes more time to get used to the analog version. At least in modern society when we have numbers all around us all the time anyway. I'm sure someone who's not literate would feel very differently.
Digital time is inherently superior. Analog time requires the extra cognitive step of translating to the numbers being represented. Digital time skips that process and shows you the numbers directly.
This thread has devolved into what sounds like a bunch of web devs that think that makes them experts on perception and psychophysics.
But on this point there isn’t anything inherently more abstract about Arabic numerals as a representation of numbers than the angles of the hands on a clock face (ie a short hand to the right is 3 and upright is 12, etc is a pretty efficient way to convey a number). As for what can be read quicker probably has overwhelmingly a lot to do what was learned in youth. Similar to stenographic shorthand this can probably be acquired but there just isn’t much incentive to do so.
There isn’t necessarily any extra “cognitive step” in the pattern recognition of a clock face vs that of a numeral.
I don’t know much about research on this particular area but there is some in the related area of written language.
Teaching kids about analog clocks isn't just about telling time. It's teaching them about how gauges work.
If they can understand how the hour hand goes around, they can understand how a fuel gauge goes from Full to Empty. They can tell how a battery gauge on their iPad means they're running out of power.
Neither numerals nor configurations of clock hands are numbers and both require a translation step. For what it's worth, time isn't a number either and you translate from a number to a time.
You make a good argument about people growing up with digital clocks not understanding a clock face.
Maybe if you fill in the area covered you could more easily see it’s relation to pie charts.
A clock face is actually 3 pie charts on top of each other, indicating the ratio between hours, minutes, and seconds left in a sequence.
It might not be intuitive that it only covers half of the hours in a day (12) but then covers all minutes in an hour (60) and seconds in a minute (also 60).
By looking at the long hand (minutes) you can see the fraction of an hour that has elapsed if you color in the area between the “12” at the top, and for example, the “6” at the bottom. That would be half an hour. Or if the hand was in the “3” it would be a quarter hour, and you and see at a glance that a good majority of the hour is still remaining.
Seconds work the same way, with the skinny hand. For minutes and seconds you can just ignore the big numbers (or multiply then by 5 because 12 * 5 is 60).
But because the hours only cover half a day the ratio covers only half of that day, but you can still use the clock to decipher how much time has elapsed (or is left) between midday and midnight.
Having grown up with digital clocks, and only sweated through the difficult lessons of learning to read a clock face and not used them practically, even at school, you may not have realized this ratio (staring at the clock waiting for class to finish does not obviously indicate this property because classes are not evenly divided into hours)
Analogue displays are quicker to read, but less precise. Which is better depends.
On analogue clocks, it doesn't usually matter if I think it's 8:32 when it's really 8:34 unless I'm running for the train. However, I often make the terrible mistake of reading the wrong hour entirely. For that reason (and that I'm frequently running for trains) I do generally prefer digital clocks.
For a rev meter on a car on the other hand, all I care about is if it's getting too far to the bottom or too close to the red. Whether it's 3218RPM vs 3389RPM is entirely irrelevant. So for that, analogue is far better.
For flying, I quite like that electronic flight instrument panels have both analogue and digital displays.
In the cockpit, airspeed and altitude used to be presented on a dial like a watch (one hand in the case of airspeed, two hands or even three in the case of altitude).
In modern cockpits with screens, they could be presented like that, or just as numbers, but they are presented as infinite bands that move up and down. One sees the number on it, but also perceives movement (and how fast it moves) "out of the corner of an eye". Maybe it combines the advantages of both.
Yea I am not sure I get his argument much at all either. While I love my analog watches and wallclocks I also have digital ones. If anything I think the argument should be that the AM PM system is just ridiculous - why do we use it? I am an american but always switch all clocks to 24 hour time (if digital) and while I am completely used to analog clocks being on the standard 12 hour cycle it always also seemed crazy to me that we do not just all use 24 hour analog watchfaces.
seriously, I am a GenXer who grew up with mostly digital clocks and I still have to stop and think to get a time out of a clock dial.
But then again as Adams said elsewhere, Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so. That one still rings true, especially if you're a freelancer like me who never needs to get up and go to an office at 9AM.
If I just want a sense of progress of time, especially within an hour, an analog clock works just fine for me. It obviously is more work if I want an exact to the minute time for logging something, and then it must be converted.
On the other hand, analogue might probably slightly easier if I just want to get an to the nearest 15 minutes approximation of the time. If reading from an analogue clock, I'll probably say it is 3:30, but would say it is 3:27 if reading from the digital clock, as reading it exact is faster than rounding it. I have had people seem bemused by my telling them the precise time like that, but like, I'm not going to make more work for myself to make the time less precise to better match tradition.
But unlike some other people I know, I don't have much difficulty understanding the progress of time with a digital clock either. 13:54, and the equivalent clock face both give me equally good impression of how much time is left until until 14:00, and I feel no need to translate either into the other for that purpose.
‘Disused lavatory’ has been changed to ‘unused lavatory’ and I’m not sure why.
As an American it baffles me that an American editor would change the word disused but not the word lavatory.
One other thing. I’d rather have characters say ‘What do you mean?’ than ‘Whadd’ya mean?’
Again baffling. Whadd'ya mean is an accent, not a word choice. Changing it in text is as ridiculous as writing 50 as "fifdy" when it's an American character's dialogue.
When I was younger I thought it was a smart move to be deceiptive and fool people above my paygrade to make them feel important and or smart, to allow them their foolishness.
It is bad to do that as you just justify their behaviour, and allow them to keep behaving as such by giving them what they expect and want.
Maybe my attitude could land me some enemies and prevent me opportunities, but I decided not to continue that vicious cycle.
We need to surround ourselves with people we respect and respects us equally, somewhere were feedback is possible.
Not only for the better of our minds but also for the better of the things we produce.
Well I suppose they are called an Editor for a reason. They change the wording to reflect how they picture the character and might think that "What do you mean" is too formal, even in England we are more likey to say "What d'ya mean".
I guess the main thing was that Douglas Adams had the chance to review it and gave helpful feedback.
From my experience in the media industry some producers/higher ups like making arbitrary changes to a work/show/whatever just so they can say they had an impact, or to say that they made that change at the end, most of the time it ends up making the final product worst.
There is a joke among audio engineers that they need to have a button specifically for this - I forget the exact name used ( I have heard several) but essentially it is a button that does nothing. The Exec or higher up asks for a very small tweak and the engineer obliges (by pressing the button) and then plays it back again. Nothing has changed but the Exec feels satisfied.
This reminds me of stories about directors intentionally putting ridiculously over-the-top violent or sexual scenes in their already quite violent or sexual movies for the rating board to focus on, and getting a PG-13 rating (instead of an R or NC-17) by removing it.
The Black Keys talked about this on Joe Rogan's podcast. Pat Carney, the drummer, calls it "the guy with a degree from Pepperdine who wants to tweak the high hat."
I've been annoyed at this but some of the changes are based on focus groups and other data suggesting that it will appeal to a larger portion of the local public when changed.
1. Digimon Season 1 English Dub is far superior to the Japanese original. Many people choose Cowboy Bebop as the "Better in English" anime, but... Digimon S1 is night-and-day. Stronger script with better jokes/puns, cooler attack names (English "Pepper Breath" vs the Japanese "Baby Flame"), everything is straight up better in English.
2. Cowboy Bebop is probably the better known example in anime community.
3. Final Fantasy VII -- Perhaps it is more obvious that "Cloud" and "Earth" would have a doomed romantic relationship if we stuck to the original Japanese. But "Earth" was chosen as a name for the Japanese audience because English sounds exotic. To return that feeling of "exoticness", they transliterated it into "Aeris", and suddenly we return back to the original exotic feeling name.
4. Power Rangers -- Okay, I don't know how to think of this one. Power Rangers took the original Japanese stuff and changed it so much, it no longer looked anything like the original Super Sentai.
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Saban Entertainment knew how to do dubs / Americanizations. (Digimon S1, Power Rangers, Samurai Pizza Cats, Dragonball Z '96).
Just because other companies failed where Saban succeeded doesn't mean that "Americanization" is bad. Its that "bad Americanization" is bad.
エアリス (earisu) is not how Japanese speakers would pronounce "Earth". That would be アース (aasu), which sounds quite different. And you may be aware, but "Aeris" is not the preferred rendering today, which is "Aerith".
Don't have an opinion on your examples in general, just wanted to correct a misconception.
I’ve read that for Samurai Pizza Cats, they didn’t have the original scripts, and so made up the dialogue based on the animation. If that’s true, it was brilliant!
The Yellow Ranger was a man in the original Japanese, but a woman in the American version.
Power Rangers is probably the weirdest East/West thing to ever happen, yet still work out. The amount of "translation" that occurred is nearly nil, it was pretty much a wholesale reinvention of the entire plot.
There's an interesting meta phenomenon here I think. A lot of the language in this letter by Douglas Adams implies that it's Americans that are the problem. Whether or not he actually believes that is, I think, beside the point. What seems more likely is that the profit chasing publishers have created the problem by placing too much emphasis on the results of surveys and focus groups. In other words, Americans aren't really that stupid, it's just that big business executives think they are. And then they run their business accordingly in such a way that makes the whole world think Americans are stupid. Which is annoying because I'm an American and I know I'm not stupid. And I also feel weirdly inclined to give the average American the benefit of the doubt here. Sometimes, giving people a choice creates a dilemma out of thin air. They might choose one thing even if they would have been just as happy with the other.
Update: Actually, upon reading Adams's letter again more carefully, I'm seeing that he's probably making this very point! So I'll just leave my original comment as a more general one about where I think the issue originates.
Science-fiction and fantasy UK book covers were better too, which is another example of the same weird parochialism of the U.S. publishing industry as it was.
My probably unpopular opinion is that it's a reflection of a more general, largely un-self-aware New York City parochialism, which was where most of the big publishing firms were based, at least until the last decade or so.
The book cover thing is really insane, too. It's gotten a little better over the last decade, but the early 2000s period was crazy (source: moved from UK to USA at that time).
It's interesting that your pet theory is New York City parochialism. Mine is gerontocracy: the (mostly New York based) publishers of SF & Fantasy have been run by the same aristocracy for ~70 years. And those folks cut their teeth on serialized pulp fiction, comic books, and magazines, which culminated in a certain art style that (imo) peaked in the 1980s.
The Americanized one is much cooler to me. I would have gone for that as a kid.
The Japanese one is washed out and the art kinda looks amateur and crayola. I assumed that was the one you were complaining about because it minimizes the demon-looking Blanka and just looks boring.
Kinda like how my mom (US) wouldn't buy me Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans because the large green orc on the cover looked like a demon, and you just couldn't be doing that in the 90s with all the stories of children worshipping Satan coming out on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
This whole thread seems to be in agreement, but I don't personally know anyone who didn't think the UK covers we're absolutely terrible.
Especially the first book. My impression when I first saw it was. It looks like it was done by a talented middle schooler for a community center assignment. Something to pin on a wall with a blue ribbon.
Granted I was in elementary at the time
I think you all in this thread (and I) are under appreciating how much of that opinion is just pure nostalgia.
Eh, it's something people sort of laugh about now, but in 1998 it was probably the right choice to change it to sorcerer. It made it much clearer to children (and adults, to be honest), that it was a book about magic. And 1998 was still a time when many families didn't have internet access, so you were more likely to run into it at the bookstore or library, so the title needed to be more descriptive.
Yeah, but it sold just fine with the original title in all other markets. If I were from the US I'd be offended that the publishers decided to dumb it down. That's literally an insult to the society.
Cover and book jacket art was better for all books, because what happened is that (especially in the US) instead of letting art directors have creative freedom, they started focus grouping it relentlessly. This, unsurprisingly, creates bland art.
> Science-fiction and fantasy UK book covers were better too
Same with video games back in the day. The Japanese versions had much cooler box art than the Western ones. But they were often abandoned because they used a style that wasn't as popular in the West.
Adams was brilliant, of course, but to me part of the appeal of Hitchhiker's was its deep Britishness. Absurdity is funnier against a backdrop of English inhibition. Monty Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks" is only funny because it's so English. Spinal Tap took on fake English accents because it's funnier that way. Comedy is about contrasts you see.
Americanising is building a language an accent bubble around the US.
I am a non native speaker with an accent and I am often surprised to see that some US citizens have a very hard time with my accent while non native speakers have no problem understanding me. I suspect it is due to some US citizen not being used to dealing with a variety of sounds and inflexions.
I saw a current events comedy show filmed live in the UK (The Last Leg), and they filmed two intros because the Australian network which bought the rights to rebroadcast couldn't afford the rights for the theme music. It was bizarre.
I've always been annoyed they replaced "Philosopher's Stone" with "Sorcerer's Stone" in the title of the Harry Potter novel, for American consumption. It feels kinda of insulting, frankly.
I recently and randomly picked up a Japanese book, 1Q84. I was enjoying it quite a bit, when I started thinking about the cultural references it contained - it has numerous references to Western classical music and Sean Connery. It worried me that they might have actually replaced Japanese music and actors with western "equivalents". But of course, there has been a great deal of cultural cross pollination, so it is no more unusual for a Japanese person to be aware of Sean Connery or The Brothers Grimm than it is for me. I didn't want to spoil the book by reading reviews before I read the book itself, but I skimmed enough to gather the Sean Connery part, at least, seems to be original source material.
Part of the attraction in reading a book like that is the fact that it is a Japanese book. It feels demeaning to have take that away because they worry the foreigness of it will be disturbing or unwelcomed by American readers.
I think the attitude that Japanese popular culture should ideally be completely rewritten for overseas release (a la Godzilla) is still common within Japan itself, but thankfully US publishers and film distributors have mostly realized audiences don't want that. It's still enough of an issue that you're right to be cautious, though 1Q84 is a big enough title that the translation would be heavily scrutinized. A lot of Western culture has become so permeated into Japan that it's common to see: the Brothers Grimm are so popular with Japanese SF authors that I think some Western sticklers for originality would despair at how often those stories are referenced and adapted.
Murakami it's a special case: It's a Japanese feeling itself like an "alien" because he writes novels about being a mix between Japan's tradition and lots of Western influences.
The Japanese don't care much for Roland Emmerich's 1997 Godzilla. Because the rights to the character are owned by Toei, that character occasionally appears as a joke in Japanese Godzilla films as "Zilla" (because he is pathetic and not a god).
The current Western Godzilla from 2024 on fared better with Japanese audiences, but they consider him too fat or something.
Yes, and also I was thinking more of how executives think about it rather than audiences. Sometimes the reason for popular Japanese films not making it to the West (or not making it until many years later) is because the Japanese rightsholders are holding out for funding to make an alternative cut for overseas audiences and get a wider theatrical release.
It loses a lot of connotation, too. Philosopher's implies abstract, referring to the stone's elusive, impossible nature: having never been discovered, only theorized.
In a story where everyone is a sorcerer, it dumbs that down a lot. It could be one of their kidney stones for all it matters.
The American version is more accurate and arguably better - I like to think the title was changed for our heightened intelligence and not the opposite.
The myth of the Philosopher's Stone is not widely known outside the UK. Without correct context the title is dead boring and doesn't sound like it has anything to do with magic.
Imagine picking up a book called "John Smith and the Architect's Compass" and having someone tell you the title makes sense because there is a legend about an ancient cult who guards a a device that can locate the holy grail.
It's pretty widely known at least in Western Europe. I knew it from primary school history class in the Netherlands (long before the first Harry Potter book was published). Similar for German and French colleagues.
Not sure why the title should be changed to sound like it has something to do with magic. For people who are aware of the legend, the original title would mostly bring up associations with alchemy.
the myth is explained in the book. the only difference between 'philosopher's stone' and 'sorcerer's stone' is that the former provides a connection to a real myth.
Philosopher is an overloaded term. For someone who doesn't know the myth the definition is squarely non-magical. For someone browsing a bookstore the magical meaning is missing. It just sounds dry and boring. That doesn't help the book get sold.
At the time she was an unknown author with a single kids book. I think changing the title to make the theme more obvious was justifiable. Changing the term throughout the book was unnecessary.
Personally, I grew up with the Philosopher's Stone and always wondered why she chose that name. It was only years later when I learned it was a legend outside the books did it make sense. The book does explain the meaning in the context of the novel, but not the wider cultural significance. That dampens the impact (just like how the Crystal Skull is not nearly as impactful as the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones).
Aside from the fact that there can be nothing more 'accurate' in fiction than the Author's own words ... the 'Philosopher's Stone' has mythological reference that 'Sorcerer's Stone' obviously doesn't.
And using American words for 'the toilet' that the characters may not have used themselves, is not 'more accurate'.
And it mostly has little to do with intelligence.
As a reminder to everyone - America is a very big place, with a lot of different people, often with different roots, migration status etc..
It's feasible kids from New England would adapt to the English version without any fuss, but beyond that, a lot of this vernacular would just be 'very foreign'. We're talking about kids with limited vocabulary to start with, not the guy with an 'English Accent' in the documentary.
They didn't just change the title from Philosopher's Stone. It was lightly edited throughout to nix Briticisms. You'd think they were translating it from the Ancient Greek edition and wanted to smooth over the culture gap. (A real translation, by the way!)
All the more amusingly (or insultingly?) the Canadian release was the UK edition. Canadian English is much, much closer to American than British in its spoken form, so most of the worries about Briticisms would apply to Canadian children. Somehow we managed to read it, despite the strange and foreign speech and ideas.
Canadian English is closer to American English, but Canadians (at least up until recently) 'get' Britishisms, or at least, the tone if not all of the specific vocabulary, to a great extent.
Edit: excluding Quebec where cultural references are completely different.
As an American that grew up reading Brian Jacques and Terry Pratchett, I don't think there's any difficulty in understanding Britishisms, even at a very young age. Even unbowdlerized Shakespeare isn't very difficult, it's mostly phonetically similar and the speech patterns are still present.
Your personal experience is likely not representative of 'America'.
America is a vast, vast place with very large numbers of people who have no cultural connection to 'English' culture. I mean - because America is an English colony, everyone does to some extent, but it's much deeper in some places (and groups) than others. Even those with continental European background, the further S. and E. you go, the less the resonance. And of course people with European backgrounds ... that's only part of America. Huge swaths of kids speak a language other than English at home, there's going to be no direct resonance with an 'Alternative English' (i.e. beyond American) in those cases.
Also, most children do not have any resonance with anything but their immediate culture - it takes a lot to get kinds beyond what's on TV, and/or what's in their immediate family environment.
I have utterly no idea why my OP is being downvoted. Usually, going against the grain on something will get you downvoted, or saying something silly but I can't fathom either this case.
I have no cultural or genetic connection to England or western Europe outside of growing up in an English speaking country. Might have helped that I wasn't allowed to watch TV as a child though!
According to Pullman that one wasn't really about an attempt at cultural adaptation, the title had been in flux and the US publisher had taken an early name for the upcoming series, "The Golden Compasses", and run with it before he settled on Northern Lights.
Not only did the American editors change the title, but the device in question – the alethiometer, which is not a compass – is made of brass not gold in the original text. The US editors basically changed it to gold to fit their created title.
1Q84's author, Haruki Murakami, is a notable fan of both jazz and (Western) classical music. And Connery is well known in Japan, at least partly because his Bond classic You Only Live Twice was set there.
Haruki Murakami is particular that way. Western culture references are the reason he gets "exported" so much. But that cultural cross pollination isn't as ubiquitous as one would think.
I wonder if the western cultural references are part of the attraction to Japanese readers, the same way I am attracted to reading a book with a Japanese setting.
He used to be an English-to-Japanese translator, so his books tend to read like they were translated from English. That might be another reason they're so popular outside the country.
In fact they're so popular that everyone seems to have the idea he's going to get a Nobel Prize someday, but I don't see why they'd give a prize to a novelist who only writes "women are so mysterious, truly men will never understand them" novels like him.
I remember learning about the title change, and the reason, and thinking “I know what a philosophers stone is…” because I’d come across it in my nerdy reading somewhere. I didn’t think American children would have had a problem with it. I’m kind of offended that publishers, television and movie producers, record executives, etc keep pulling this kind of garbage. We aren’t stupid, and I’m willing to bet that more often than not people are willing rise to the intelligence of a work rather than shy away from it.
> It worried me that they might have actually replaced Japanese music and actors with western "equivalents".
There's a weird inverse to this in the manga/anime Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Many of the characters and their special abilities are named after well known American bands and songs (e.g. Steely Dan, Killer Queen, Crazy Diamond). But when localized, many have been censored due to potential rights issues. So Killer Queen becomes Deadly Queen, which is kind of sad since the references make me appreciate the cultural cross pollination you mentioned.
Murakami's work is chock full of western media references. It's like his _thing_. At first I found it lazy and pretentious à la Sorkin, but with some distance I see it is generally pretty well done, so credit where credit is due I suppose. He also writes in a much more western style than most Japanese literary greats, so it works on that level as well.
If you want more _Japanese_ Japanese literature, try Kawabata or Akutagawa. Though understanding the various cultural references is going to be a whole endeavor if you're not already familiar.
Agree. I remember very fondly an English translation of Gunter Grass' "Dog Years" for how German the novel felt. A great translation gives the reader the original's feel and impression. Too many editions/translations pander to the lowest factor and try to keep the even the dumbest reader comfortable!
Wait, it's disrespectful to the reader if they change the wording so that it's a pun in both languages? Isn't that like... the best possible translation?
One of the things I like so much about the movie Rounders is that it respects its audience enough to drop unexplained references throughout without elaborate explanation (in a way you hardly ever see in mass media). Many about poker, but many other little gems, too.
Consider the line, "Like Papa Wallenda said, 'Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting." If you don't get the reference, you aren't missing much, but for those who do it's such a delightful little moment in the film, made better by its lack of supporting explanation. Thank god they didn't add clunky exposition to inform the viewer about the Wallendas.
Another favorite: when Michael is walking back into KGB's place, the place where he previously lost all his money, he says: "I feel like Buckner walking back into Shea." Who is Bucker, what is Shea, and what does it have to do with KGB? The film takes the chance you'll get it.
There are lots and lots of poker terms and references, too, most introduced without elaborate fanfare on the theory that a smart audience will pick them up as they go, but it's these random lines -- "In the legal sense, can fuckin' Steinbrenner move the Yankees?" -- that have always stuck with me.
I used to grow up watching Danger Mouse, one of the most British cartoon shows. I still have fond memories of it and the dialog holds up well, acquiring nuance that went over my head as a kid, that I can appreciate as an adult. I learned about London landmarks -- Baker Street, Willesden Green, the Tower of London -- through this show, and even things like what a pillarbox is. Britishisms like that were always namechecked, and everything seems to have been made with a sense of British pride.
Danger Mouse got a "modern" reboot in 2015, and by comparison it's awful. It's more colorful and garish, the dialogue is more rapid fire and less funny, and though it sometimes features new landmarks like the Gherkin, it has less of a British identity. Later on I found out that the producers copped to making a more American style cartoon, which is what the market seems to want.
The irony of this is that by 1992 large numbers of Americans had already listened to the radio series, read the novels, watched the BBC show, etc., with all of their UK references and language in place. Why would anyone have thought the US audience wouldn't accept it? THey already had.
Digital easier to read, but I personally think analog is easier to “feel”. I get a much larger sense of urgency when the minute hand approaches an anticipated position. And same goes for when the hour hand crawls downward to signal the end of the work day. Seeing it physically close the distance to the 6 o’clock position gives me a much better feel for how much of the day I have left than “3:24”. It really is like a pie chart in that sense.
For the past decade I've worn a series of watches that combine analog hands and a digital display, which I find to be the best compromise between anticipating the passage of time and getting a quick, accurate reading. Casio makes some pretty good combo watches, and there are a range of smartwatch faces that combine the analog movement with the digital readout.
Edit: I noticed you (and the article) mentioned pie charts, and one of my favorite smart watch faces is "Old Fogies Can't See Worth S**" by m3tropolis[0]. It's a literal pie chart showing % of the hour elapsed vs. remaining, with the hour number in the middle. I find it extremely easy to understand, but tend to use other faces when I need to know exact minutes.
There's a deeply frustrating infantilisation when something is localized in the same language. My kids and I love Bluey, an Australian show, but apparently the producers had to refuse to have it redone with US and UK accents to stop it happening.
Never understood what the problem with having David Attenborough instead of Sigourney Weaver narrate Planet Earth was either.
Bluey runs on repeat in our (American) house and I'm sure I've seen each episode a half-dozen times now. I find the Australian accents and cultural references to be a charming and fundamental part of the show. The wildlife, the fauna, the building designs—it all screams "Australian" at you, so hearing a bunch of American accents in that setting would be jarring and out-of-place.
The Aussie themes have even led to some history lessons in our house: a handful of episodes reference Australian soldiers (including Bluey's grandpa) which led to my kids asking what wars Australia fought in. Queue the (very) gentle introductions to WW1 and WW2, and the Pacific War specifically.
I know a lot of American children and families that have similar associations with Wallace and Gromit. I think even for relatively young children, the fact that something is "international" can make it more entertaining and interesting.
Bluey is a fantastic show, and the fact that it's unapologetically Australian is part of what's so fun about it. I think it's just the choice of nervous higher-ups to localize things like this, and not actually what people want. Like Douglas Adams says, people can survive hearing references they don't understand. And they might even learn something about another culture.
My kids (ages 6 and 3) LOVE Bluey. We are American and (sadly) English-only speakers. The fact that the show is full of Australian accents has not impacted their ability to understand or enjoy the show in any way at all.
The exposure to places that are not-America is good for them!
I didn't even realize it but when Bluey, Bingo, and dad go to watch Chunky Chimp (the kids' movie with a big storm) the characters' accents are American.
"it's just a bunch of singing monkeys I wouldn't read too much in to it"
I mean most of native speakers won't have much trouble understanding Australian accents. It's the ESL people that would have a hard time without having enough exposure.
Bluey is the only show that made my kid want to turn the TV off so he could play whatever game Bluey and her sister were playing himself. We still play Silly Hotel from time to time.
It’s very different tonally (much more serene), but fans of Bluey should check out the BBC kids’ show Sarah & Duck, which is aimed at a similar age range and also contains much for parents to love as well as children. It’s gentle and surreal, and I’d have been happy to watch it on its own merits even if I didn’t have a kid who loved it as well.
The first planet earth wasn't just given different voiceover for American audiences, it was recut. The brass called the Attenborough cut "excruciatingly slow-paced", so once they decided to re-edit, it was probably easier to recast the narration than to try and edit down Attenborough's own speech.
The Attenborough cut is my personal preference too.
Replacing Attenborough as the narrator on a nature documentary is a crime against humanity, and should be treated as such ;-)
What we need to do is feed all of his narrations from the last 60 years into an AI and get it to process them; then we can use this corpus to have all nature documentaries narrated by him forever more.
I am, of course, joking... but would it really be that bad an idea? ;-)
Once wr did this it should be part of the UN charter that the Attenborough narration AI is the acceptable use of AI from that point onwarda into eternity.
It blows my mind that Attenborough would ever be replaced as a narrator because he is the best of the best vis-à-vis nature documentaries.
Or to provide an Americanized analogy, you wouldn’t replace Morgan Freeman in a situation where you needed the sage reflections of an old man in voiceover form.
Agree in general that the UK/Attenborough cut is preferable, but the American intro sequence is fantastic and dramatic. Gave me chills the first time I watched it.
I kind of hate the dramatization in newer nature documentaries, rife with cuts of sweeping landscape views set to loud, epic music. I'm probably just getting old, but it feels like they're trying too hard to keep my attention. I don't need blaring horns and pounding timpani to keep me watching.
"..until eventually, they’re shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more."
When my son was little we used to watch "Bob the Builder" together, but apparently the producers didn't feel the same as the Bluey ones or didn't have as much sway. Our local station switched to a dubbed version with American accents and it was just awful and pointless. So now they say "soccer" instead of "football", so what? It lost most of its charm.
I think it was mostly because we were used to the voice actors they had been using. The new ones just didn't fit the characters as well. I'm not sure it was an American vs British thing, I think it was more likely 1) you like what you were introduced to, and 2) they hired less qualified voice actors and re-writers to do the cheap dubbing than they originally did when they cast the show.
The Japanese dub from what I've seen is surprisingly okay, but also kind of wordy, which they make up for by speaking faster than usual. (But they have the guy who does all the anime priests as Rev. Lovejoy.)
Not everybody is a xenophile, some people are nationalist types who get annoyed (rather than aroused) whenever they hear a foreign accent, and may even have trouble understanding them. You're not going to change channels if you hear an American accent, but they very much will if they hear an Australian one.
One out of every six big US movies would be black if it were proportionate to population, but they're not. The reason is because black people will watch white movies, but white people don't watch black movies. It's the people willing to walk away that make the decision.
It's very expensive to redub a series just to change the accent; they're getting a return on that.
> The reason is because black people will watch white movies, but white people don't watch black movies.
What happened to "people just want to be represented in movies"? Simply put, since there are more whites than blacks in the U.S., then every film-maker has an incentive to represent them more to reach a broader audience.
This is absolutely not because "white people are more bigoted", which is laughable when you consider that they are surely, in proportion, the most xenophile people on the planet.
I don't understand the argument that you're making. Black people expect not to be represented in movies, and so seeing someone like themselves is not essential to appreciate them (although a token certainly helps.) White people are alienated from movies they don't see themselves in. Therefore movies made for white people will not lose black audiences, but movies made for black people will lose white audiences.
You seem to be supporting that opinion, but angrily.
Discovered Bluey and use it as a treat/distraction when needed with my 10-month-old. I legitimately enjoy watching it and love the subtle jokes made for parents. A big part of the charm is the Australianisms.
We don't need more Americanized stuff. If anything it should be the reverse: USA needs more international content, accents, etc.
As an Aussie I think of Bluey as one our proudest exports.
But some episodes I wonder if overseas audiences get the same tensions. IE Curry Quest, walk for a curry swap but have to deal with a magpie.
Do people really understand how "out to get you" magpies can be in Spring? As a kid, they can be vicious bastards.. when I realised they were dealing with one I was anxious over how it was going to go.
In my experience, some people in the US/Canada struggle to understand a British accent and this might be one reason to dub it into another accent.
My brother tried to order an apple pie fritter in Canada and the woman didn't understand what he was asking for. When he proncounced it fridder, she did :-) I understood both ways perfectly well but hey!
I had this too when I was in the US. A waitress didn't understand "bottle of water" so I had to point to it, to which she replied "Oh you mean a boddle of warder"
That’s unfortunate… variations in American accents can differ as much or more than that, so it’s a little surprising she struggled. I hope you don’t judge all Americans by that experience :)
From my experience, even people used to variation still struggle when it is the wrong kind of variation. It's a bit difficult to explain but I have seen it happening regularly, including once when I tried to say something about Vancouver and it took a writing down to get it across. The other person was used to one southern American accent, Estuary English and European Globish at least.
Not understanding an accent is purely due to lack of exposure - so if that's the reason producers choose to dub everything then it's a self perpetuating cycle of ignorance.
I think there’s something about British narration of nature docs that makes them more relaxing and engaging for American audiences. Especially those who grew up in an era of Discovery Channel and PBS where the narration was usually British, or South African, or Australian, or in the Commonwealth-tinged flavor of English of that location. Perhaps it’s nostalgia.
I agree and I think part of it is nostalgia for a time when educational channels actually broadcast informative content, not semi-scripted, over edited, over dramatized reality tv. Did anyone else notice the slow boil of channels like History, Discovery, Animal Planet? Just irresponsible to coast on their reputation and start showing nothing but junk TV 24/7 to people who thought they were learning.
I think it started with Pawn Stars and went downhill from there. MBAs saw $$$ and had no qualms about dumbing down their national audience and trashing the reputations of the channels in the process. American TV is unwatchable IMO.
I used to watch Discovery’s “Wild Discovery” animal series every night. Then they spun out Animal Planet, which was cool. Then they started putting filler programming on AP. Now it’s all gone Honey Boo Boo TLC with scripted reality shows that are animal-adjacent. Have to catch reruns of Blue Planet and Planet Earth on BBCAmerica if I want to unwind with a nature doc in the evening
It really is painful to watch. It's been so long since I watched anything that wasn't a streaming service that when I see old fashioned TV with commercials and horrible editing it drives me up a wall.
I remember when my complaint about the History Channel was that it was WWII all the time. It was still massively better than today; at least I learned about the Battle of the Bulge over and over and over.
I didn’t have cable growing up, but by the time I was in college History channel had already given up on history and was just running “Ancient Aliens” and its ilk along with reality TV. As far as I know, there is nowhere to find good documentary content on a regular basis (whether by streaming or legacy media). PBS gets close, but even their Nova and Nature programs have degraded in quality.
For me at least, for no real reason and perhaps because of British narration of documentaries, the British accent "by default" sounds more learned.
Now I'm sure there's variations of British accents, but the ones we were exposed to as children seemed to coincide with "scientific" or other educational content.
It's fascinating to see the number of Bluey fans. My kids love it too. Making it American would just ruin it.
I grew up reading Paddington books, and about 90% of what I know about British money came from those books. Re-interpreting it to American dollars would have ruined the immersion into the story, IMO. I was very glad when the Paddington movies were unapologetically British.
I guess David Attenborough probably isn't so well-known in the US? It's apparently much harder to get people to show up for something without a big name attached.
Edit:
> Actress and conservationist Sigourney Weaver was brought in to replace David Attenborough as narrator, as it was thought her familiarity to American audiences would attract more viewers.[0]
David Attenborough is by far the most famous nature documentarist in the world. No one comes close. I'm not sure what name would be regarded as bigger.
I would put Jacques Cousteau and Felix Rodríguez de la Fuente in the same league. If we take in mind the risks that they suffered to film nature I would say that they score higher in the epic factor.
I'm not denying that Attenborough is a category in himself and a wonderful narrator of course.
Freeman and Sigourney are in a different category. Both are excellent actors and narrators in films directed by another people. Freeman is "the" voice in the anglosphere, but Rodriguez de la Fuente was "the" voice in the latinosphere. Everybody was trying to imitate their style and accent decades after their death. He was the leader in a wolf pack when nobody was doing that, and don't hesitate to escalate a clift to take a good shot of a vulture nest. He was not an actor that just arrives to a set, say their lines and go.
Some people's work is of a sort that it doesn't get Americanized so much as alter American culture. I'd put both Adams and Cousteau in that class. How could Cousteau be understood through that accent? How could anyone not pay close attention once the accent was decrypted?
By the end of his life, Jacques Cousteau seemed a caricature of himself. The red cap, the thick accent--the Cousteau aesthetic was so overripe that director Wes Anderson used it as the template for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
If Americans don’t know his name, they know his voice. And we would know it better if we could get more BBC nature content licensed for display in the US.
I don't care one direction or the other, but for example Doctor Who is just fine without having to be redone and loved by people in America regardless of the accents. Is there a reason you'd love to see it redone outside of just having the show have more exposure in America? I can understand the sentiment.
Speaking of Doctor Who, David Tennant is the same role in the American remake of Broadchurch and he has the worst American accent I've ever heard. It's set in California and he sounds like he's from everywhere else at the same time.
That's kind of odd, they should just let him have his accent, it's not like anybody is going to question why anybody from another country would ever live in America... I've not seen Broadchurch though so I don't know how out of character it would be.
Fun fact which is strangely on point for this thread: Dave Mccormack, the voice of Dad on Bluey, was previously known for his band Custard. One of their most popular songs was "I feel like Ringo". Ringo Starr was famously the narrator of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Somewhat famously, Mad Max was dubbed into “American” for distribution in the USA. I have an old DVD that has both soundtracks and it can be fun to switch back and forth.
My personal favorite story in this genre is that the set-top box that my employer-at-the-time imported into the US called the schedule "TV Guide."
PM: "TV Guide" is a Registered Trademark. You can't call it that!
Non-US-folks: "Uhm, TV guide is just, ehhm, what it says"
PM: "We'll be sued! We'll be wiped out"
Non-US-folks: "Uhm, OK, so what about 'TV Listings'"
PM: "Oh, yeah, that will be OK"
How any of this makes any difference still eludes me, but yeah...
For some reason, in Ireland and possibly the UK, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were instead called The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. 'Ninja' may have been too violent
Incidentally, I was recently very surprised to discover, via my young nephew, that the Turtles are still very much a thing. Who'd have thought of the Ninja Turtles as a piece of 90s culture that would endure?
To my recollection they were called Ninja in UK to start with but renamed.
The mythology for the rename was that kids copied them and hurt themselves, but that seems an unlikely reason as changing the name wouldn't change kids copying from them??
>So digital watches were mere technological toys rather than significant improvements on anything that went before. I don’t happen to think that’s true of cellular comms technology.
I think it's funny how for a brief moment there the digital watches joke became a thing again when everyone started pushing smart watches.
Funny enough, I kind of agree with adams that displaying a pictorial representation of time is better than it's numeric value, but honestly I find the classic representation too easy to trip up on.
>Incidentally, I noticed a few years ago, when we still had £1 notes, that the Queen looked very severe on £1 notes, less severe on five pound notes, and so on, all the way up to £50 notes. If you had a £50 the queen smiled at you very broadly
oh my god it's kinda there! Go to 1992, What the hell?!?!
Edit: Oh I see. In 1992 they were rotating in new notes for 5 pound and above, but the series D pound notes were still in circulation, in those the queen was more demure, and in the new notes she's much happier.
The '-ize' prefix is official International English - OED English. No partisanship (for example) necessary (in fact, '-ize' in OED is a Graecism, not, say, an Americanism).
Trying anyway to link the idea to the context: there is no need to translate a Local Language work into an International Language transposition - no need already per se. But especially, it is most normal for works of arts to written using specific localisms, well in a deliberate concept from the author - it is normally the duty of a translator to try and convey those choices, which makes it below absurd to suppose to instead nullify those features in a standardized relative of the same language.
By the way: no pedantry involved (unless you mean the "educating" value of information passed here where "intellectual curiosity" is the criterion for exchange). The purpose and implicit messages in your original post were unclear (many readings were possible).
I actually hosted Shaun Usher at Google [1]. We had an experiment, not sure if it was successful but it seemed like a good idea at the time, where Googlers read some of the letters.
He courted his wife entirely by letters on paper. This was not pre-Internet days, either; it was around 2000.
My children would concur: they prefer digital time I think because that's what computers generally give. Also they prefer to have subtitles on but that's by the by.
I enjoyed Douglas Adam's letter though I can't help thinking it was meant for publication.
I liked the movie, but Adams wasn't around to prevent the filmmakers from Americanising it, casting Ford Prefect and Trillian with American actors. If I remember correctly, Trillian is supposed to be Arabic in the book.
I was amused by the praise at the end. The Monty Python team must have had a time machine because they managed to parody Nadine Dorries tweeting exactly the same thing as Boris Johnson decades before it actually happened lol
"The movie is pretty much all climax. The Autobots® and Decepticons® must not have read the warning label on their Viagra. At last we see what a four-hour erection looks like."
It's interesting, I actually do think there is value in regionalizing media to an extent, primarily low-level word change between dialects. For example, changing "Go throw the wellies in the boot of the car parked on the pavement before we get petrol" to "Go throw the rainboots in the trunk of the car parked on the sidewalk before we get gas" for an American audience. Higher-level changes are less justifiable, like the potential of changing landmarks, etc.
That being said, "disused lavatory" is reasonable to change, although "unused lavatory" is entirely the wrong way to do it! That translation both changes the meaning of the phrase and doesn't even get rid of the obvious Britishism. I would have gone for "derelict bathroom" maybe? Maybe "dilapidated"?
> Go throw the wellies in the boot of the car parked on the pavement before we get petrol
When I first read HGTTG in 5th-6th grade, it was exactly this kind of language that drew me to it. It enhanced the humor for me, and it would feel dead to regionalize it, and lose an integral part of the character.
My thoughts exactly. The Britishisms add extra color and absurdity while simultaneously bringing the characters more to life. Besides, archaic and excessively formal language is almost a hallmark of British humor as I interpret it.
My kids have known how to understand a digital clock since they were toddlers, but even now, in elementary school, they require entire lesson units in school on telling time from a clock face.
Beyond that, he argues that pie charts tell us more about the relationship between things than tables of numbers, and a clock face is "the world's most perfect pie chart." But a clock face is not really a pie chart. It does not indicate distribution among categories, as a pie chart does. The arms are not delimiters; they merely indicate position.