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Mistranslation in The Empty Hearse


joanneta1

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I was once again lost in the magic of the whole concept when I noticed that Mycroft, in his very first Serbian utterance actually says "brother mine" because if he had said "friend" the word he would have used is "druug" rendered in Latin characters, in Cyrillic it would look like "друг". Nitpicking, but I found it really funny when he calls him "brother mine" in two languages, an expression which the dynamic duo of the scriptwriters unashamedly lifted from the Granada series, where Jeremy Brett uses it in both the Greek Interpreter and The Bruce - Partington Plans, without its ever being used by either brother in the stories. Grateful nod to John Hawkesworth!

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Ah -- so Mycroft revealed himself to the audience a good bit sooner in Serbian than in English!  (I assume that Sherlock had spotted him immediately.)

 

Say, I have a question for you.  We were watching an episode of Leverage where the team is in Serbia, and one character gets the attention of a bunch of kids by calling out "Häagen-Dazs!"  My question is -- would Serbian kids actually be familiar with that brand of ice cream?  (It's headquartered in the New York City area, but Wikipedia does say that it "has franchises in ... many other countries around the world.")

 

Secondly, if the brand is available in Serbia, is it well enough known that a bunch of orphans (from a very bad orphanage) would know the name?

 

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Well, it does have a presence in supermarkets rather than franchise cafes. Another problem I have with the specific episode is that being written by the same gentleman who wrote The Great Game and made Sherlock give a grammar lesson to the poor benighted wife-killer in Belarus, it contains two whopping big ones in his explanation to Anderson. He says about the schemes for surviving the fall that "Each of them WERE rigorously worked out and given a code name," when everyone knows "each" takes a verb in the singular, and later on he says : "It was vital that John STAYED just where I put him," and that is the subjunctive mood, which means it takes a bare infinitive, in British English used usually with "should" ( should stay) or in American English with just the bare infinitive "stay". Whichever way you look at it, he was right to observe at the beginning during the shaving scene "you are slipping"! speaking to Mycroft and the writer.

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Thanks for the Häagen-Dazs info, Joanneta.  If the brand is available in Serbian grocery stores, then that Leverage scene is perfectly plausible.

 

Good job spotting that discrepancy!  I agree that Sherlock should either be picky about grammar -- or not.  But we'd never before (or since) seen him being picky, so maybe his constant corrections in that Belarus scene were simply a way to get the wife-stabber so riled up that he'd blurt out what he'd done (and if so, it worked).

 

Also, there's often a big difference between textbook English and real-life English.  Even people who are capable of speaking perfect textbook English will often revert to their native dialect in casual situations.  (Just ask my husband how I talk!)

 

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