On translations and the metric system

[etherealfionna]

I am reading (yet another) Swedish detective novel translated into English at the moment, and I find that I'm thrown by some of the translation.

As you might guess, it's to do with the translation of the units of measurement from metric (I assume, but I'll get back to that) to imperial

Comments

[greyarea]

:)

That reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story of the Telegraph in an article about some female star whose self description was quoted as "I feel like a million dollars (£660,000).

[nwhyte]

I don't know if you've ever read the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer? Full of phrases like "The mountains were seven miles or 11265 metres high".

[anonymous]

It seems that translators do conversions. The only imperial measurement the French audience is used to are the 88mph in "Back to the future" (it wouldn't make sense if a charecter says 140km/h while the DeLorean enters time-space at 88). Most of the time, measurements in American movies are converted in the French translation. For instance, when a character says "8 inches", the subtitles say "20 centimeters"