The full quote in dirty imperial units:
I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those ten seconds or less, I’m free.
– The Fast and the Furious
How was this translated to metric?
As a kid, I thought mile, inch, and ton were all fake units of measurement that didn’t have any actual distance attached. Just used metaphorically.
- An inch is a distance you can measure using your thumb and index finger (from the same hand)
- A mile is a distance you could walk, but would probably rather use a vehicle
- A ton is too much weight to even fathom lifting.
Then there’s cup, ounce, and pint, which I thought were just words for containers that have an approximate size. Yard and foot to a lesser extent. Acre must’ve been a plot of land of indeterminate size.
Getting into cooking, I’m hating that teaspoon and tablespoon are a thing (along with a pinch and a dash). They don’t even seem to line up at all with my tablespoons or teaspoons…I need to own special spoons that are labeled “tablespoon” and “teaspoon”, otherwise the measurements will be wrong!
And given the unit conversions of all this junk, I’m not convinced my former understanding is much worse than reality.
Once upon a time we weren’t as concerned about accuracy as we are now. Woodworkers used to use surprisingly few graduated measuring tools; you’d make a thing called a storey stick which is a small board with notches in it. That notch is the overall height of the cabinet, that one is the overall width…who cares exactly what the number is, as long as it’s always the same distance? I don’t need a desk that’s 43 7/8" wide, I need a desk that fits between those two windows.
Same happens in the kitchen; until the 1950’s the average American housewife didn’t have much in the way of measuring tools, but you could rely on her to have some teacups and some spoons, so that’s what recipes were written for. A given woman would learn from experience that her spoons were a little small so use a slightly heaping spoonful when the recipe calls for 1 teaspoon.
In the modern day a set of measuring cups and spoons are such common kitchen equipment that finding yourself without them is either one of those sweet coming of age stories filed alongside calling mom to ask how you tell when canned soup is done.
Then the Europeans show up, smug in their complete inability to handle it.
I upvoted for the history.
I don’t understand why things haven’t progressed since the 50s though now that we have proper measurements… especially the ones that don’t need fractions! Haha
Well 1, there’s a lot of classic recipes out there written for cups and tablespoons so if you want to keep cooking those you’ll need traditional measuring tools anyway and
2, Recipe calls for 1/4 teaspoon, you get the spoon that says 1/4 tsp on it and scoop once. It’s not ancient egyptian rocket surgery.
fathom
Also a unit of measurement.
LOL! I rest my case
Wait until you learn about Hogsheads its a quarter of a tun which is different from a ton
Oh also agricultural measurements are local and item specific
Wait till you learn that when cooking ‘pinch’ is measured in how many fingers you use, ie: two-finger pinch, three-finger pinch, etc.
I live my life two fifths of a kilometer at a time.
Serious answer, in italian it still uses miles
There is a modern-style (awful-UX) site that gathers phrase translations, via opensubtitles.org and other sources. Examples for German:
Ich lebe sowieso immer nur für die nächste Kurve.
“I always only live for the next curve anyway”ich lebe meinen Leben in Viertelmeilenschritten.
“I live my life in quarter-mile steps.”Ich lebe mein Leben in Halb-Kilometer-Abschnitten
“I live my life in half-kilometer sections.”Żyję szybko i nigdy nie patrzę dalej, niż na pół mili.
“I live fast and never look farther than half a mile.”Przeżywam moje życie w niesamowitym tempie.
“I live my life at an incredible pace.”Moje życie to te krótkie chwile na trasie.
“My life is those short moments on the road.”żyję od wyścigu do wyścigu.
“I live from race to race.”Which ones are official? Dunno, it doesn’t say. The more literal ones are probably subs as opposed to dub CCs.
15 more languages are available but I don’t understand them enough to check an automatic translation. It’s not needed now but you need desktop mode to see the “view in context” button and instead of an account, I use a custom CSS file to unblur the bottom examples.
A lot of those miss the original point though. Drag racing strips are traditionally a quarter mile long. Converting it to kilometers (or changing it to a half mile instead) destroys the drag racing reference.
As a European: What’s a drag race?
Imagine the 100m dash at the Olympics. But for cars.
Just a short straight line. Head to head race, first one to the end wins.it’s tractor pulling without a counterweight and with dinky little cars
Well, in Swedish, we have “mil”, which is 10km, so mr. Toretto would be living his life 2.5km at a time. However, I can only assume he’s a pilot in his alternate Swedish incarnation, since covering that distance in “ten seconds or less” would mean travelling at >900kmph.
It’s a drag racing reference. Drag strips are traditionally a quarter mile long, and there are over 50 supercars that have made it in less than 10 seconds. Considering the fact that the Fast and the Furious series is all about racing and cars, it’s clearly a drag racing reference.
One of the big issues with localization is that it tends to destroy references like this. If you change the distance into another unit (like kilometers) you also destroy the drag racing reference.
I know, we’re also so small that most of it was never localized to Swedish. But in the spirit of the question - funny
Offtopic: The expression “Give someone an inch, and they’ll take it a mile” is 得寸进尺 in Chinese. 寸 is Inch, 尺 is Ruler. So I guess its “Give someone an inch, and they go the distance of a ruler”? Its either 12 inch / 30 cm? Or is it 1 meter / 1 yard (ya know, those big rulers)?
Or maybe we should just say “Give someone an inch, and they’ll steal your ruler?” 😆
But anyways: I think most movies just literally translate the words so they don’t have to do conversions.
