I watched the second season of Red Dwarf on DVD yesterday. I noticed, while watching the first season last week, that the signs on board the ship are bilingual: English and Esperanto. In the first episode, Rimmer is trying to learn Esperanto from an instructional video and doing badly at it, but what I find exceptionally hard to believe is that there are no accurate transcriptions of the sentences on the web. One sentence is: Bonvolu direkti min al kvinstela hotelo? Yet, google red dwarf kvinstela hotelo, and what do you get? Bupkes. All the sites have the ‘five-star hotel’ mistranscribed as kvinsela hotelo. Rimmer is clueless to its meaning anyway. He does hazard a guess to the next sentence which he thinks means: ‘I would like to purchase that orange inflatable beach ball, and that small bucket and spade’. (Transcribed as: La mango estis bonega! Dlej korajn gratulojn al la kuiristo.; it should be: La manĝo estis bonega! Plej korajn gratulojn al la kuiristo. ‘The meal was excellent! Many hearty congratulations to the cook.’) You’d think that the intersection of skiffy nerds and auxlang aficionados would be greater than zero, but you’d be wrong.
Posted by jim at October 24, 2004 08:14 AM