Comedian John Oliver roasts Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto's use of the phrase "Ya chole". Photo: screen grab
As we've pointed out, popular TV newscaster/comedian John Oliver is fond of poking fun of goofy political stories, not just from his native Britain, or his adopted home country of the US, but around the world. And recently, he set his sights on the president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto.
Oliver took issue with a video released by Peña Nieto's handlers, responding to criticisms of the government's controversial reforms. The video shows two working class Mexicans talking, and when one complains about the reforms, the other shuts him down: "That's enough of your complaints". The video may have seemed like a good idea for the Mexican government when they uploaded it to the internet, but it quickly became a lightning rod for criticisms. Though it has been removed from official government pages, it has been reloaded to the youtube page of well-known Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui. John Oliver proceeded to rip the video. "We get used to politicians telling us: 'We've heard your voice,'" Oliver said. "But they don't usually follow it with: 'And it's annoying, so shut up.'" He also cataloged some of the responses by average Mexicans, including a GIF image saying "That's enough of your [poop emoji] Enrique Peña Nieto." The GIF later animates what appears to be an explosion emanating from the poop emoji. "When a government tells its people to stop complaining, they should know that shit is eventually going to blow up in your face," Oliver remarked.
But the video was noteworthy for the specific Spanish phrase it used. Instead of the more neutral "ya basta", the video uses the phrase "ya chole" (which later went on to become a popular hashtag on Twitter). This is actually a uniquely Mexican slang term, used particularly in and around Mexico City. In all likelihood, Peña Nieto's video included it to try to identify with average people - a move that backfired.
There's actually a fair amount to be said about the phrase "ya chole". First of all, from a linguistic standpoint, it's kind of an outlier. Whereas the more commonly used "ya basta" is based on the verb "bastar", which literally means "to be enough" or "to suffice", "chole" is not actually based on any verb at all. A Spanish-language entry on Word Reference suggests that it is actually derived from the nickname from the Spanish women's name "Soledad". In fact, there are a good deal of Mexican slang words that begin with the "ch" sound, including "Chilango", a term for residents of Mexico City. These have formed the basis for a song by the well known Mexican band Cafe Tacuba, "Ya Chole Chango Chilango". All in all, an important lesson in Mexican slang, which being featured by a well known comedian has perhaps helped to make a bit less boring. Let's hope Peña Nieto has also learned a lesson about trying to be folksy with slang words: it doesn't work. Canada's newly elected prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Photo: Alex Guibord, Flickr If there were a prize given out for the most famous person named Justin from Canada, it would have to go to Justin Bieber. But this week, another Justin has emerged who might steal that title, if only for a few days: Justin Trudeau, who earlier this week won Canada's election for prime minister.
Trudeau's victory has been attributed to many factors, including a generally liberalizing political climate in Canada, increasing skepticism about Canada's foreign interventions, more willingness to raise taxes in order to pay for social services, as well continuing ties between Trudeau's incumbent opponent Stephen Harper and scandal-ridden Toronto mayor Rob Ford. There may have been a few more unorthodox factors working in his favor too: his hair, his position on marijuana, and increasing fear among Canadians that the conservative Harper government has made it impossible to keep wearing those nifty Canada lapel pins they use to differentiate themselves from Americans abroad. But there was one other thing that helped Trudeau to his victory: his French skills. Canada is in a unique among countries in the Western Hemisphere. It's the only one where a significant portion of its territory is populated by speakers of a language other than the country's primary language - putting it in the same camp as countries like Belgium and Spain. This is a legacy dating from the Seven Year's War, fought in the 1700s, when formerly French Quebec became a British colony. Though Quebec would remain part of Canada even as it gained its independence from Britain in the 1900s, Quebec retained its distinctive identity, and a fierce pride in speaking French. As a result, Canada's government has taken pains to accommodate French speakers in the country. It has adopted a policy of nationwide "official bilingualism". And unlike the US, where presidential candidates who dare to learn French are ridiculed, speaking French is a critical skill for anyone in Canada who wants to throw their hat into the political ring. In fact, as part of the electoral process, candidates for prime minister are expected to take part in a debate held entirely in French. And during this election cycle, the results of the French debate gave Canada's political junkies plenty to pick over. Many concluded that Thomas Mulcair, whose party enjoys stronger support in Quebec than either Trudeau or Harper, went from being a secondary player to the center of attention, fielding more questions and spending more time defending his legacy than the top two. Not surprisingly, Mulcair actually outperforms Trudeau in the French-speaking department. The Montreal Gazette ranked his French as a 10 out of 10, noting that Mulcair is "at ease, he doesn't search for words, it's natural," when he speaks French. The other 10 out of 10 was Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, a party with significant backing in Quebec and virtually no support anywhere else. Duceppe's party is so passionate about French that their website doesn't even appear in English. On the other hand, Trudeau's 8 out of 10 rank does edge out Harper, ranked at 7. While the Gazette notes that Trudeau isn't as natural while speaking French - "he thinks in English," the paper notes - they criticize Harper for being "much slower in French than in English." The paper points out another problem with Harper's French: he has been known to mispronounce "election" as "erection". Ultimately, in an election where candidates have to appeal to voters in Quebec while at the same time winning support in provinces like Alberta, which could easily pass as an Republican red state in the US, maybe an 8 out of 10 is the best score you could ask for. It's just enough French to show the Quebecois you understand them - in this case, literally. But it's not so much so as to inadvertently signal to the rest of the country, which still speaks mostly English, that you might forget about them. It's a delicate balance, that many of the world's linguistically polarized countries face. In others, such as Spain, things aren't going so well, and the country is threatening to split apart along language lines. Fortunately for Canadians, their political leadership relatively adept at holding things together. "Nuclear Energy Is the Energy of a Bright Future": Haunting Photos from Fukushima's Exclusion Zone10/15/2015
"Nuclear Energy is the Energy of a Bright Future". Street sign in Futaba, Fukushima, Japan. All photos in this article by Arkadiusz Podniesinski, www. podniesinski.pl "Nuclear Energy is the Energy of a Bright Future". During the heyday of the Fukushima nuclear power plants, this street sign may have made sense. But after the devastating nuclear accident that rendered the area virtually uninhabitable, the irony of the sign could not be more palpable, or more cruel.
Located on a strip of coastline in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, roughly 150 miles north of Tokyo, the two nuclear power plants once stood as shining pillars of modernity and prosperity amid their more traditional, rural surroundings. The plants were located near the ocean to have access to ample supplies of water for cooling purposes - a common practice for nuclear power plants worldwide. But the plants' costal location would prove to be their achilles heel. In 2011, a devastating earthquake and the tsunami that followed damaged the plants and unleashed destructive and potentially deadly nuclear radiation on many of the nearby towns. In response, the Japanese government created an "exclusionary zone" around many of the cities, restricting locals' access to the cities and in some cases prohibiting it entirely. The exclusionary zone has created a virtual limbo for many of the area's residents. Though many still maintain property rights within the area, they can't make use of their property. And given the alarmingly elevated levels of radiation that remain, many would prefer not to. Last month, Polish photographer Arkadiusz Podniesinski, known for his numerous photo essays of nuclear destruction in the Russian city of Chernobyl, was granted access to the exclusionary zone. He documented his experience in photos and in words, which were picked up by other websites and quickly went viral. We're going to run some of the photos here, the full set is definitely worth checking out. Podniesinski says that, after entering the zone, the first thing he was struck by were the rows and rows of trash bags filled with nuclear contaminated dirt. An aerial photo reveals these sacks filling up farm fields. In general, the area remains very rural; even before the nuclear plants' promise of a bright future was tragically broken back in 2011, many in the area preferred to stick to their agrarian roots. And some continued to stick to those roots even after the exclusionary zone was put in place. On his trip, Podniesinski met with Naoto Matsumura, a local farmer who still sneaks back in to care for cows and ostriches left stranded in the area. Unfortunately, Matsumura's efforts aren't enough; some abandoned cows in the area are becoming sick from the radiation, developing white spots on their coats. The five candidates for the Democratic Primary at the October debate in Nevada. Photo: CNN After two Republican primary debates, and significant difficulty in accommodating the massive Republican field - which ended up with the creation of a separate debate for unpopular candidates rather embarrassingly named the "kid's table" - it was finally time for the Democrats to have their own debate. And thanks to the fact that the debate was broadcast on CNN, we took the liberty of watching it (or at least part of it) on CNN's Spanish language affiliate. What we found out was truly astounding. Okay, not really. But here goes anyway.
1. "Debate" in Spanish is "debate". And "CNN" in Spanish is "CNÑ" Though many native English speakers balk at the idea of learning Spanish, learning to understand debates is surprisingly easy. And by that I mean that learning to understand the word "debate" in Spanish is surprisingly easy - it's spelled exactly the same in Spanish, though pronounced differently: "day-bah-tay". But for some reason, CNN has branded itself in Spanish as "CNÑ". What does that stand for, Cable News Ñetwork"? What is a ñetwork anyway? With the ñ, it would be pronounced "nyetwork" which makes it sound oddly Russian. 2. Bernie Sanders sounds weird dubbed with a Castilian accent For much of the debate, Bernie Sanders was shown as making his speech dubbed with a voice speaking in a Castilian (i.e. Spanish from Spain) accent. For me, it was a kind of weird cognitive dissonance - almost as if one of the candidates for US president had started speaking in a British accent. I joked on Twitter that Bernie en español was urging listeners that "nethethitamos mas regulathiones" (we need more regulations). And when asked about Wall Street, I was half expecting the Spanish dub to blurt out "joder, tío!" - which for US English speakers would be the equivalent of hearing "bloody rubbish, mate!" 3. Interpreting a debate is reallllly hard Sure, the candidates were all under pressure to do their best in the debate. But the Spanish interpreters had an equally difficult job of trying to capture distinctly English-language phraseology and slang in a way Spanish speakers could get. And often, it just wasn't possible, even for the seasoned team of interpreters CNN (or should I say, CNÑ) put together. At one point, it sounded to me like one of them was gasping for breath. 4. Spanish speakers outside the US are shocked that American women don't get maternal leave Later in the debate, Hillary scored a few points by mentioning the fact that, at the federal level, the US is sorely lacking in paid maternity leave for women. This is a fact that's staggering, especially when you look at how maternity leave is handled in Spanish-speaking countries around the world, most of which have more robust maternal leave laws than the US. 5. Latinos haven't made up their minds about the Democratic candidates yet CNÑ's post-debate coverage featured a number of interviews with Spanish-speaking Americans, pretty much all of them Latinos. And the overwhelming consensus among them was that they hadn't made their minds up yet. Though the Democratic party is generally seen as being friendlier to Latinos, Republicans have the advantage in that some of their candidates are actually Latino. However, it remains to be seen whether this actually means they will be better for the general Latino population - Ted Cruz, for instance, is know for his bombastic anti-Mexican statements (and also for trying to ingratiate himself to Republican voters by cooking bacon with a machine gun). The Daily Show's Trevor Noah compares Donald Trump to Muammar Gaddafi. Image: Comedy Central (screen grab) Last week, Trevor Noah took the reins of Comedy Central's longtime centerpiece of late-night programming, the Daily Show. Though he lucked out in getting such a high voltage gig, the fact that his predecessor Jon Stewart had become such a fixture on the show ensured that his first week on the show would be picked over by a massive chunk of the rest of the media with a fine toothed comb.
One of the first things Noah made sure to do on his first night after the cameras started rolling was to set the record straight on an important point about his upcoming tenure in what has become an American institution: the fact that he's not from America. “So now a job Americans rejected is now being done by an immigrant,” he quipped. But after a week on the job - his second show opened with a bit of surprise about the fact his key card for the office still worked - many onlookers were most impressed by his Thursday show, where he drew on experiences from his native Africa. Noah took aim at Donald Trump, a frequent target of political comedians this year. But he gave his material a distinctive twist. Instead of following the well-worn path other comedians had taken when roasting Trump - the bombast, the hair, or even his slightly awkward time spent singing a cover of the theme from Green Acres - Noah took a different route: he compared Trump to Africa's vast collection of dictators. Trump's take on immigrants ("light xenophobia with just a dash of diplomacy - which is also the title of Paula Deen's new book!") was compared to that of South Africa's president Jacob Zuma. His oddball stance on vaccines was compared to Gambian president Yahya Jammeh, who claimed he could cure AIDS with bananas. His endless bragging about his wealth was mixed in with an edited clip of Uganda's notorious Idi Amin assuring viewers that "I'm very rich". And to close out the segment, Noah noted that, due to Trump's propensity for filing suit, he had to be careful what he said about the magnate-turned-presidential-candidate. "Just like with an African dictator," he pointed out. Though there was certainly a healthy level of skepticism over the first few days of Noah's tenure, his Thursday show seems to have laid much of that to rest. Certainly, a fair amount of the credit for this must be given to the show's world-class writing staff, many of whom stayed on from the Stewart era, but Noah's delivery held its own. And the subject matter of the Thursday show raises an interesting question: does Noah's foreigner status actually give him an advantage? Even before his Thursday Trump take-down, some were already asking this question. After his first show, the Huffington Post ran a video where a group of media analysts picked over Noah's first show. At one point, one of the analysts floated the idea that having an outside perspective on America's issues could give Noah a leg up. The host, a foreigner himself, disagreed. My take on this is that, for comedy, being a foreigner can be both a disadvantage and an advantage. Usually, it's a disadvantage for a long long time, before after massive amounts of immersion in a foreign culture, it finally becomes an advantage. And the effect increases exponentially if you're in a country that speaks a different language. In my experience, learning how to joke with other people in another language can take years, much longer than it takes even to become fully comfortable in conversation. But after a while, once they've mastered the mannerisms and picked up a respectable amount of pop culture references in a foreign culture, outsiders do have, by their nature, an outside-the-box look at customs and social norms that go completely unquestioned by natives. Foreigners have an innate weirdness to them when they first get to a new country. But with time - and if they're funny to begin with - they may learn to channel that weirdness and strike comedic gold. And though Noah didn't have to deal with the language barrier when sitting down in the Daily Show host's chair, foreign languages may have played a part in his ultimate success during his first week. In an interview done after he was named as host earlier this year, he boasts knowing all of eight (!) languages, including Afrikaans (South Africa's unique Dutch-influenced language) and Zulu. It's doubtful that this has helped his material directly; in order to play well with an American crowd, speaking foreign languages is a distant second to being able to whip out a snappy ref to the Kardashians or - as Noah pulled off expertly on his Thursday show - Paula Deen. But that leaves an interesting question: is Noah's material as funny in Zulu as it is in English? We don't know yet. Perhaps he'll give us a taste of his material in Zulu after he's gotten over the opening week jitters.
The Late Show with Steven Colbert, screengrab via Kotaku
As luck would have it, Pewdiepie, the world's biggest YouTube star, grew up speaking Swedish. Though perhaps it makes sense; the Swedes are so good at so many things - health, education, Ikea furniture... - that it's little surprise they could come up with an online video sensation with nearly double the subscribers of anyone else on Youtube, the world's favorite viral video mill.
Last week, Pewdiepie showed he was also at home in more conventional forms of video transmission as well when he took to Steven Colbert's Late Show to field a few questions. And when the conversation turned to Pewdiepie's native language, Colbert naturally went right to the vocabulary everyone wants to learn first when they learn a language: the bad words, the potty-mouth, curse words, which Americans sometimes call four-letter words but seem to have much more than four letters in Swedish. The show's producers bleeped some of the words out, but one of them made it through was a word that sounded weirdly like "Helvetica". Colbert naturally pounced on the joke opportunity by saying it reminded him of Microsoft Word. Though the list the two personalities compiled was sadly left incomplete, the inimitable Youswear.com has compiled a much more thorough list. You can also watch the clip from the Late Show here: Facebook's Video Autoplay: Annoying, but a Possible Way to Bridge Cultures Across Languages?10/2/2015
Screen grab from "Dance Shadowstory", by Facebook user Hakim Fitdance.
Facebook's feature prompting videos to play automatically on user's news feeds once they pass them has been around for the better part of a year. And last month, the general consensus seemed to turn from apathy to outrage, as the autoplay feature ended up inadvertently broadcasting a clip of a gristly murder of a Virginia newscaster to millions of Facebook users. A Google search for "Facebook video autoplay" mostly reveals entries on how to turn the feature off, many of them dated from late August, right after the killing took place.
But since there are still sizable chunks of the global population who have not yet turned the feature off, it's having an unexpected effect: allowing videos to go viral regardless of their language. A couple days ago, I came across a video of an intricate dance routine that - I have to admit - caught my attention in part because of the autoplay. You can watch the video here:
But what really got my attention was the caption, which reads:
"Bonjour les copains, As you may of noticed, this isn't in English. It's in French. And since French is one of the languages I translate in, allow me to clear this up for you non-francophones: "Hello everyone, Hmm... Maybe in hindsight it's better that this text didn't appear in English, it's kind of tacky, though it just might sound profound if you're a sophomore in high school. But hey, maybe that's exactly why it went viral - people didn't focus on the text. Up until now, the main way videos spread across the internet is by being identified by text searches (identifying speech in audio is still a daunting task for computers). That means that if the text description for a video is written in, say, Swedish, it's only likely to go viral in places that speak Swedish. English may be the only exception; videos with descriptions in English are likely to go viral among non-native English speakers, since there are so many of them. But the same doesn't work in reverse; native English speakers don't generally find out about clips in foreign languages. In fact, a good number of native English speakers make a pretty good living just by mining foreign language viral clips and showing them to other native English speakers who wouldn't find out about them otherwise. I'm looking at you, John Oliver. But take a clip that is appealing visually, and automatically start it playing in front of people who wouldn't otherwise search for text in a foreign language, and you've got instant viral video potential. In the case of this video, it doesn't seem to have caught on yet with English speakers, but it's a hit among Spanish speakers and, oddly enough, people from Turkey, judging from the comments section: Now, I'm an optimist, and I also believe wholeheartedly in the benefits, and also the necessities, of bridging the language barriers that all too often encourage hostilities between people from different parts of the world. Sure, I find the Facebook video autoplay as annoying as anyone else does, but maybe by making videos from around the world go viral, it's doing us all a favor? |
The Pantera Language Studio BlogUpdates on our language services, and any and/or all of our thoughts on funny, weird, or wild language related stories. Come join the fun! Archives
December 2016
Categories
All
|