Grrl Power #1102 – Corruptus interruptus
Edit: Okay, I have to cop to it. I straight up forgot that Sydney’s glasses auto translate and give her subtitles. I have no excuse for that, but my in-world justification on this page is that there’s a half dozen people shouting over each other and the subtitles are racing by too fast for her to keep up with.
This is an odd page, admittedly. To save people from having to type stuff into google translate, the jist of the page is basically:
P2 / “Block the door!” / “Yeah, right behind you!”
P4 / “How can you do this? I attended your daughter’s wedding!” / “And she’s attending school in France! You think I can afford that on my salary?” / And then a bunch of guys yelling stop/hold it/etc.
P5 / “I hope my lazy son in law will finally step up and get a job!”
I’m not sure how well google translate would do with that stuff since it was all output from GT to begin with. It’s not nuanced French. I decided to write it in French, because as I lamented previously, there’s no automatic Wolof translation service I can find, so it came down to French or Arabic, and since they’re all cops and since French is the “official” language of Senegal, I went with that mostly, though some of the smaller speech bubbles are Arabic and Wolof.
I decided to have all the speech on the page be in another language is because that’s what Sydney would experience. There’s no way they’d all be speaking English if they weren’t talking to the famous American superheroes. Sydney knows “I watched a ton of anime and I know a bunch of J-Pop songs by heart” levels of Japanese, like… 50 words in Spanish, a surprising amount of sign language, and weirdly, Morse code. Also a ton of swear words in a lot of languages. But she has no chance in this environment.
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I went a little simpler with the art this time, which is to say I didn’t add like 9 passes of lighting and detail work. I wasn’t trying to chintz out on the time input or anything, I’d been browsing around ArtStation since I like torturing myself with all the amazing art there, and found a few people who do nice clean styles that are more Arcane (the League of Legends Netflix show) than Love, Death and Robots, and by LD&R I mean the ones that are like “Look at how realistic our skin textures are!” and not the ones that are more Pixar-y or just like 2D cell art or whatever.
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I don’t think he was planning to kill the chief. He was suspected, they leaked information to him, “Halo and Anvil”were attacked and when they confronted the guy he took a hostage before they could disarm him.
Or, she could understand every word and STILL not know what is going on.
The guy is taking a hostage and going to kill himself because … his daughter is married to a bum…
That’s the ticket.
So, odd question. If the Guy had shot himself in the head, could the bullet have continued through and killed the Chief too? It looks like a smaller caliber handgun so I’m not sure if it could do double penetration.
I’ve never heard of a similar situation IRL, but it likely wouldn’t be publicized.
You say it looks like a small calibre handgun, but it still looks like probably either a 9mm or .45, so barring metal plates in both their skulls, or the gun being loaded with blanks, yes.
And the metal plates only make a difference if they deflect the bullet’s trajectory. Which could go both ways really, depending on where the bullet ricochets.
I speak French (badly), I lived in France for a few years and I had to do everything in French, because nobody wanted to speak English and you still need to get shit done. I could follow this pretty well! Although admittedly my French is a bit rusty from not using it for most of the last decade, and I mistranslated one small part of it. But I’m pretty sure that’s my fault, not the comic’s!
In panel 4 he’s holding the gun casually at the Chef’s jaw and is leaning over his shoulder but in panel 5 his neck is straight and his shoulders are squared up so he stood up and held the gun to his head instead of huddling close to the chef. Unless the Chef tried to grab the gun he should be safe from the bullet, however he’ll catch a good part of the spray and muzzle blast.
In real life such a situation would be pretty rare. Given that the shot lined up just right it would depend a lot on the cartridge. A hollow point bullet would likely expand and dissipate enough energy that the Chief would have a pretty good chance of survival. If the bullet is solid lead it would depend a lot on how hot the cartridge is loaded and how hard the lead alloy happened to be. This is probably the least likely scenario as most automatics prefer to run a jacketed bullet. The most likely possibility of the Chief catching a second hand bullet would be if the mole had loaded up with full metal jacket military surplus ammo. The gun in question would likely be a 9mm, probably the worlds most common pistol caliber. What gun it is specifically would depend on departmental policy. 9mm and .40 caliber are common in the US but in many parts of the world a .380 or .32 caliber would be reasonable especially for a plain clothes officer. A smaller caliber pistol would offer a greater probability of survival for the Chief.
In Senegal gendarmerie the standard handguns are 9mm PA-MAS 9 mm G1 and Sig-Sauer P220 also in 9mm.
That is a normal lethal sidearm. One of those medical documentaries on tv showed someone shot at least four times in the head by a small calibre point blank and not getting past the skull.
handguns doing double penetration? that there’s NRA porn.
Joke’s on you, I went straight to google translate *before* reading the notes!
I got most of it, except google translate detected “mane alkhuruj!” as Gujarati and apparently means “leave me alone” without the exclamation mark and “Alkhoruj to me!” with it, “taxawal!” was picked up as Kurdish and translated as “neighbourhood”, and “la tafeal hadha!” is apparently Arabic and translates as “no kid this!”, which, well, it’s weird but pretty clearly something more like “I’m not kidding!”
Other than that it’s mostly minor differences in phrasing, like the bit about his son in law feeling a bit more morose; “it looks like my good-for-nothing son-in-law will finally have to find a job”
And Allonz-y would more translate as “Let’s go” than “Right behind you.” After all, the Doctor does not follow, he invites others to run with him!
“Edit: Okay, I have to cop to it. I straight up forgot that Sydney’s glasses auto translate and give her subtitles. I have no excuse for that, but my in-world justification on this page is that there’s a half dozen people shouting over each other and the subtitles are racing by too fast for her to keep up with.”
You can excuse it with the spaceballs having to recharge and translating french needs more energy than flying. Or something.
The space balls are ultra intelligent and refuse to have anything to do with French.
Very likely.
The glasses are not connected to the orbs.
The glasses aren’t powered by the spaceballs, though. They’re a separate toy, more Dabbler-level tech rather than Nth like the spaceballs.
Since it’s in another room and still quite a distance, it might have been far enough away for the glasses to decide NOT to translate. If they translated/provided captions for EVERY conversation, everything would be a jumbled mess when walking through a spaceport. They have rangefinder capabilities (hence expert pistol accuracy), so they might rangefind and stop translations if past a certain distance unless she overrides their settings somehow, probably a menu option.
I could see parameters of the glasses also applying simple “In the room” limitations for translation.
No setting applied for spying into another room.
Glasses may need the equivalent of lip reading for precision translation as well. Sounds in human speech voice to text can be ambiguous.
the glasses were given to her by Cora, they’re galactic civilization level tech but not Nth level like the orbs
Don’t the glasses only translate what she can look at? What, you think everyone in the Grrl-verse has visible subtitles? Although, that would be a rather unique super-power. ‘Quick, get The Translator’!
One of the characters in Anne McCaffrey’s Talent novels has exactly this power. Her Talent instantly copies the language from the mind of anyone she interacts with, so she speaks their language exactly as they would. A weakness of this would be that, if she first encounters a language in written or recorded form, her Talent doesn’t do anything with it.
‘oh no! Egyptian Heiroglyphics! My only weakness!’ ((snickers))
Not if she is a speed reader, as I am.
She might simply have forgotten to look at the captions, or that her glasses translate.
Glasses were made by Cora and have nothing to do with Spaceballs.
Je me plais que j’entend francais un peu.
For what it’s worth, i’d be happy to provide any future french translations if needed ! I have no idea how many of us french folks read this great comic, but if you want accurate translations, Google may not be the best solution if you have french people around. Not that it would actually matter, but i’d feel lucky to help
“He was only a month away from retiring.” half expected that troupe here LOL. Welp, they have their mole, this shows a superhero detective(s) is a MUST in this universe. Just “Sydney” and Anvil’s help has just busted up a major mob in this country, who knows what would happen if hero’s were on a permanent role in law enforcement… Oh wait…
which means of course the men making the money need to either A. bribe/control the people above the supers, or B. have some supers of their own. option C. use a legal (and easier) means to make money (such as selling extended warranties) never seems to occur to them.
As others have said, even if Sydney could read what they were saying, she probably still wouldn’t understand what was going on
Wait wait wait! Hold up!! How young was the daughter when she got married, if she is attending school in a foreign country and not able to work to afford it herself?
A lot of people get married young and are in uni or graduate school.
Also it can be hard to work more than a part-time job while you’re also concerned with attending school.
In 1978 more than half of the graduating class were married right out of high school (some had to marry BEFORE graduation lol) sadly 90% had kids and were divorced, remarried, had more kids, and most of the first batch were adults by time my classmates were 40. Very few (including myself) waited for a good job before starting a family. I was 25 before I got married (by choice).
My mom was in a university when she was in her late thirties (Reschooling). I was in university until my late twenties. A friend is in university now, he is in his late thirties. Another friend was a coffeemachine repairman, then he learned on the job to become a electronics installation technician (mostly for supermarkets, so that is POS, self-check out, pickscanners, advertising screens, network cables, etc.), and now he is doing medical machine maintenance in a hospital and studying hard to learn more.
It is quite common for people to learn stuff as adults.
Yeah, but all were able to pay for themselves?
A combination of company paid, self-paid, and student-loan (NL-style so not predatory, though still suboptimal).
Anyway, some people choose not to pay in advance and/or choose to let their parents pay for it.
” I straight up forgot that Sydney’s glasses auto translate and give her subtitles. I have no excuse for that”
Fear not, WE do!
Syd’s ADHD probably kicked in and she then mentally glossed over the translation in front of her, especially since the action she was watching was more pressing.
Just because you she has the translation, doesn’t mean she got the context.
DaveB
Did you draw the right head for that gun to be pointed at…?
Because it looks like the wrong head, there…
He changed target in panel five
I feel like this is DaveB writing a reason for the Chief here to publicly give Sydney an award while simultaneously denying/ignoring/underplaying/denouncing the assistance of Dabbler and Anvil.
Or maybe they’ll all get awards and get in some trouble back home.
Of maybe none of the above. We shall see…
So… if you want the exact frenche translations :
– oui, allons-y : yes, let’s go !
– arrêt : stop (but no one would say it like that. “Arrête !” Is the conjugated verb. Arrêt means “a stop”
– je ne peux pas croire que vous nous trahiriez ainsi : I can’t believe you would betray us like that !
– j’étais au mariage de votre fille : I was at your daughter’s weeding (I attended your)
– et ma fille va à l’école en France : and my daughter goes to school in France (is attending)
– tu penses que je peux me le permettre avec un salaire de flic : you think I can afford that with/on a cop’s salary ?
– il semblerait que mon gendre bon à rien va enfin devoir trouver un travail – it seems that my good-for-nothing son-in-law will finally have to find a job.
If you need, do not hesitate to ask, I’m a native french speaker.
From Québec, i guess?
Only place where there is “Arrêt” on a stop sign.
…and stop, they say, both there.
I’m not sure they still do.
The Police Chief still reminds me of Fred Williamson
Here’s a pic, grabbed the link from IMDB. He is one of those “hey, it’s that guy!” actors, who’s been in a bunch of stuff across every genre.
https://m.media-amazon.com/image/M/MV5BMTU1MzIzNjk4N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwMjk4NDYz._V1_UX214_CR0,0,214,317_AL_.jpg
Yeah, was mentioned the first time he was shown
glasses.. in low power mode. the glasses lost the ability.. to conserve power..
FRENCH TRANSLATION: French guy here. “Arrêt” should be “Arrête”. “Je ne peux pas croire” is grammatically correct but not idiomatique, replace with “C’est incroyable”.
That’s it, the rest is good!
About Arabic/Wolof/French in Dakar: Everybody in Dakar speaks French, especially in governmental offices. Arabic is listed as a language mostly for religious reasons (Muslim country), but it’s not something you expect to hear as common exclamations.
Or really, arrêt should be “stop”. “Arrête” is what you tell your little brother when he’s pestering you. “Stop” is what you say when you want someone to freeze in place and not make any further move.
Also, going to school in France is really, really not expensive. Even university (which I assume, if she’s married). There’s the question of food and lodging but students have access to price-controlled facilities for both, and there are scholarships for students whose parents are below a certain income level.
The “not expensive” bit may vary. Public university is inexpensive. Or at worst, as expensive as it is where you live (exchange programmes do this sometimes). Specific schools can be very expensive. While the universities aren’t bad, sending your kids to study in France probably isn’t going to aim for just a random university :p
There is probably a difference in what counts as expensive between France and I forget which country this is.
Senegal
i am french and the traduction is good.
So for the Arabic, ‘Quf!’ is the better translation for ‘Stop!’. While the root verb comes from WaQaFa, because of grammar rules involving it being an imperative command it will drop the ‘vowel-letter’ type beginning.
Honestly? Even *with* her subtitles, her dialogue makes sense.
In the show The Good Place, Chidi is from Senegal, and he primarily speaks French. He’s also aware that his name is an Igbo word that translates into “God exists”.
To be fair Chidi also speaks several other languages as well. Although none of those languages are Wolof or Arabic – the other languages he speaks are German, Greek, English, and Latin.
At one point in the show he says “I grew up in Senegal so my native language is French, but I went to American school so I also speak English. And German, and Greek, and Latin, just in case it ever comes back.”
It could also just be that the writers for the show did not put as much thought or research into it as DaveB put into it.
It would also make sense to me that Sydney’s alien translation glasses wouldn’t be equipped with regional languages of a pre-FTL planet. They might have some ability to learn new languages, I have a feeling they can but I don’t remember with certainty; but even then it’ll take some amount of time and exposure to the language. If Earth’s internet barely has automatic translation for Wolof then glasses loaded with the most common languages in this region of the galaxy almost certainly won’t have it installed.
I thought it was wonderful that you used local language, although next time you may want to have a native speaker help with idiom. If you use machine translation then try deepl, it performs reasonably well with French and Italian and you can choose informal speech for more plausible dialogue.
Okay, so I’m totally biaised, being french and all, but I found this both awesome and hilarious. Awesome in that it was surprisingly close, hilarious in that they switched from talking like characters from an 18th century novel to modern slang. I fucking love it, but it makes no freaking sense XD