Mädchen Mädchen 2 - Spilt coffee scene: a parallel translation

[UPDATE: I noticed a couple of small errors in the transcription which I've now fixed. Both of them came from the original subtitle file I used.]

Today I have another parallel translation of a short scene from a well-known German movie. This is a pretty big change in genre - from high-brow history drama to Mädchen Mädchen 2 (title for English release: "Girls on Top 2"), a fairly low brow comedy about three young female university students trying to find an apartment they can afford in Munich. Despite the location, it seems like largely standard German, though also reasonably colloquial. And instead of being a fairly clearly spoken monologue, this is a quickfire dialogue. Although some of the sounds are run together/lost in such fast speech (see below), it is simple language discussing a simple topic so you can focus on just getting used to German at top speed :-)

Here's the scene - let's hope the link still works!

My advice is to save the audio from the scene so that after you've watched it a couple of times you can then listen to it to your heart's content to get used to the sounds and speed more. As I mentioned in a previous post you can use the free version of RealPlayer to do this. If you hover your mouse over a video in YouTube it will provide you with the option to download it. If this doesn't work for you (it's stopped working for me recently for some reason) then you can open RealPlayer, click File->Open and paste the URL (the text from your browser's address bar) in there. RealPlayer will open the video and definitely give you the option to download it. After you've downloaded it, the Download Manager will have an option to convert to MP3. Click this and you're done :-)

OK, enough foreplay, here's the parallel translation of the scene:

Mädchen Mädchen 2 - Spilt coffee scene: a parallel translation

I've tried to keep my notes and in-line commentary to a bare minimum - there's a lot more I could have said! I started with a subtitle file I found on the internet but, just as with Der Untergang, there were several discrepancies. I don't know how these arise. Either the subtitles are based on the script and the actors change that a little here and there, or the people doing the transcription just don't have enough time to spend on it (if you look at how much they get paid, you'll see why!). In any case, it gives me some initial work to do before I can do the translation. Where I clearly disagreed with the subtitles, I have just changed the text above. Where I also wasn't sure, I kept the original text from the subtitles. I also tried to stay more phonetically faithful to the original, trying to keep all the nervous stammering at the start, etc. In addition, I try to keep my translations as close to the German as possible to help maintain the mental links better.

I'm still getting used to this very high-speed and more colloquial German myself, so I would really appreciate any comments or suggestions for improvement from you guys. Especially for the line that starts ""Ja, ich hab' nur gehört". I think I can just detect a faint trace of an "er" after "dass" and a "wird" squeezed in between "angegraben" and "die gerade", but that might be my imagination because I want to hear it to make the sentence nice and grammatical. It's altogether possible that this is just a standard kind of error in fast, everyday German. The more I do this sort of work, the more I should be able to explain here on the blog :-)

Finally, my "checkpoint" stuff: Chinese with Ease: currently trying to shadow the audio for lesson 38. The rest of it is done, but the audio seems hard at the moment and it contains a lot of new words. I'm sure it will come together soon if I give it proper attention. In Le Latin I've finished lesson 35 and I'm up to page 168 in "Das Todeskreuz", by which you can tell that I don't read it very often. There's a lot to cram in to a day - I got up at 6 this morning so I could enjoy the beautiful warm water at Bondi Beach before heading to work, but I did manage to read a few pages of "Das Todeskreuz" whilst stuck at traffic lights!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this scene and get some use out of the translation I've provided. Please leave any feedback in the comments below.