I learned that a lot of translation aren’t very good. Probably not because they are not capable, but because i think people like to put their own twist on things, which isn’t always great. In movies and tv shows, the hardest thing to translate is humor. Some jokes only work for the language it was written for. So if you watch a comedy, often you don’t watch jokes that was ment to be in a movie, but the joke that the translator came up with. One example would be Gunter from the simpsons. He’s from Bavaria, he wears the leather pants and everything. He’s also mainly the butt of the joke. So if you watch the german version, Gunter is from Switzerland which doesn’t make sense, but germany is not the butt of the joke, but Switzerland. Sometimes translations are just plain wrong. Like the original said: the water used to reach as much as 30 feet. Which gets translated to 30 meters.

I don’t know if that enriched my life or made it worse, because it makes me dislike dubbed movies or tv shows a lot more. I also never realised that there aren’t that many voice actors, so they obviously voice a lot of characters, wich is normal for cartoons, but in movies or tv shows it’s putting me off to hear the same 3 voices over and over.

For me, first, a lot of stuff becomes accessible, like news, which just get published in the country’s specific language(s) unless they have immediate international repercussions, jokes and memes, which can lose their meanings in translation if they even get translated, musics, which there is a surprising amount of non-English ones for genres I like, publications in social medias, etc.

And on a second point, since I often look for patterns, and in languages that is no different, I slowly become able to interpret neighboring languages to the ones I study. That I can remember, from languages I can somewhat interpret, there’s French, Italian, Latin and the Spanish dialects thanks to Spanish and Portuguese, German, Danish and Swedish thanks to English and Norwegian, and a tiny bit of Chinese thanks to Japanese. That also helps giving to me a kick-start to learning new languages.

And on a third point related to the first, if a given material exists in multiple languages, I have the freedom to choose which I want to consume. =)

For English it opened me unending trove of knowledge and online interactions and capability to access more first hand information. Plus all the books, music and movies. Faster and without shitty translations. For Dutch slightly more tolerance from from the other half of the country. Surprisingly very little in terms of music and medias but given my very narrow tastes it’s likely my fault. For Spanish some fun and free drinks which is already a miracle considering my shitty level. For Japanese I’m starting to enjoy og material (anime and manga) and surprisingly basic tv shows. It’s unfortunately very unlikely that I’ll ever reap similar benefits compared to English.

Somewhat I believe I’m less of an asshole from what I learned by interacting with others which would have been much harder if I hadn’t learned other languages.