NOW YOU KNOW…

Thanks to a French television magazine from 1974, we know that the proper way to translate “I tawt I taw a puddy tat” into French is “Je clois que j’ai vu un glos matou.” A more-or-less literal retranslation back to English would be “I tink I taw a big tomcat”; Tweety’s juvenile pronunciation is rendered in French by the substitution of L for R in “crois” and “gros.” The translation is not word for word (to do that we might have to invent a French word for “puddy”), but the number of syllables is (depending on your pronunciation) the same as in the original phrase, which means it works perfectly for dubbing.

There are some bits of knowledge that are so essential to one’s participation in civilized life that one wonders how one lived so long without them. You might also need to know that Tweety is “Titi,” and Sylvester is “Sylvestre.”

Comments

  1. Belfry Bat says:

    Indeed it is quite common in informal French (l’Français d’ivrèsse) to slur “que j’~” into “q’j’~”.

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