Re: How are syllable boundaries determined


Paul J Kriha wrote:
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Paul J Kriha wrote:
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Paul J Kriha wrote:
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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A R:nen wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Horace LaBadie wrote:

That's likely due more to the marketing department's realization of the
public's unfamiliarity with submariner's parlance, in which the sub is
commonly "the boat."

In that case, the German public is more familiar with submariner's
parlance than the American and British public, right?

It's more likely that the studio's marketing department has (well,
had, anyway) less power in Germany than in Hollywood.

Note that, unlike most foreign-language films, this one did not have
its title translated for American distribution.

If "U-boat" were familiar any more, it would have been the obvious
choice; "The Boat" would have given no suggestion that it was about a
submarine. (Cf. Hitchcock's *Lifeboat*.)

Nevertheless, the English translation of Das Boot on my book
shelf is called The Boat.

?

What I meant was: some publishers still went ahead
and called the book The Boat.

In fact, the full name of the English language novel
was "Das Boot: The Boat". :-)

Whether the movie was made from a book, or the book is a novelization
of the movie, I never noticed such a book. (And I notice books.)

The book in German came first. The original novel Das Boot
was written in 1973 by Lothar G. Buchheim who served
IIRC as a war correspondent on the U-96 and others.
The story was filmed in Germany in the early eighties.

In the film the captain and the crew all die.

Well,. thanks a lot. There's another movie I'll never bother to see.

Sorry about that.
I thought everybody would have seen it by now.
You can always leave the theater just before the end.
Or get a DVD and skip the end. It's still worth seeing.
However, AFAIAC, the book's better.
And in the book you get your happyend too.

Now that's bizarre! In *Jaws*, the Richard Dreyfuss character dies in
the book, but miraculously escapes in the movie.

In real life and in the book the captain and some of his
crew survived and their last submarine was decommisioned
after the capitulation. He survived mainly due to his extreme
paranoia. He felt that shortly after every radio contact
with High Command the airplanes turned up. He suspected
there were traitors at High Command. Against his orders
he maintained radio silence most of the time and seldomly
reported where he actually was.

The English language book came out in June 1999.

But you say its title is *Das Boot* -- the name the movie was released
under. A movie tie-in, long after the movie was released?

No I said "Das Boot" was the title of the original novel
published in Germany in 1973, a few years before the film
came out. The English translation of the novel was published
much later in 1999, i.e. after the film.
The full title of the English book is four words like this:
"Das Boot: The Boat".

Exactly. Translations _never_ keep their original title! With two
exceptions I can think of -- *Mein Kampf* (which was already notorious
when Manheim's translation came out -- it seems to have been his first
major published work; more than half a century later, his *Neverending
Story* was a great success), and Levi-Strauss's *Tristes Tropiques*.
Not even *La pense'e sauvage*, which is an untranslatable pun -- it's
simply *The Savage Mind*. Not even *The Name of the Rose*, where
language-play is so important.

If the untranslateable German title was not already fixed in the mind,
the book would have to have been something like "U-Boat* (the
contemporaneous calque) or "Sub!*.

.

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