"Subtitles" for foreigners speaking English

John J Armstrong wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jan 2016 19:58:05 -0000, "NY" wrote:



I suppose the equivalent would be a programme in the UK where they used
Highland Scots and expected English people to understand.

Scots are expected to understand a plethora of English accents and
seem to cope quite well.


Even Rab C Nesbit speaks in normal English, even if with a very strong
"Glasgae" accent and with a fair number of local words.

Rab C would pronounce it "Glesca".

On the other hand,
if you transcribed Highland Scots and had a person with a standard BBC
accent speak the words, it would still be hard going because it's a dialect
(almost a different language) and not just a strong accent.

What do you mean by "Highland Scots"? Doric - which is a dialect,
spoken in the north east, or Gaelic - which of course is a separate
language?


Everything north of Watford is Highland, don'tcha know?
What, what!

--
a lowland gael

tim..... wrote:


"Martin" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 12 Jan 2016 10:33:58 -0000, "NY" wrote:

"Wolfgang Schwanke" wrote in message
...
"NY" wrote in
news
"Martin" wrote in message

The Dutch subtitle Belgian Flemish speaking Dutch.

How similar are the two? Is it mainly differences in pronunciation or
is there significant difference in grammar or vocabulary? How
different are the languages/dialects/accents?

Dutch and Flemish aren't seperate languages but two varieties of the
same languages, like American vs British English. A Fleming speaking
his version of standard Dutch should be comprehensible by a Dutch Dutch
speaker. Maybe they subtitle dialect speakers only?

Similarly Swiss is subtitled on Austrian and German television. Not
when a Swiss person speaks their version of standard German with an
accent, but when they actually speak dialect (which the Swiss do even
in formal situations such as interviews, school, university). The
difference between spoken Swiss dialect(s) and standard German is
roughly like highland Scots vs. standard English. It's completely
incomprehensible to standard speakers unfamiliar with the dialect,
hence the subtitles.

Would an extreme Scots speaker be subtitled on British television?

There might be a lot of people who would find subtitles very useful in
those
circumstances, but I can imagine Scots finding it offensive that one of
their fellow countrymen was thought to need subtitles.

We always turned the subtitles on when watching Rab C Nesbitt.

I tried that

all I got was a phonetic spelling of what he was saying and I was none the
wiser what it meant


tim

Quite frankly, I found Rab C Nesbit very dangerous.
I nearly died laughing.

Alan

--
Mageia 5 for x86_64, Kernel:4.1.15-desktop-2.mga5
KDE version 4.14.5 on an AMD Phenom II X4 Black edition.