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?
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?
it’s tractor pulling without a counterweight and with dinky little cars
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.
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.
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.
I think since it was a reference to a drag strip it was translated as a quarter of a mile everywhere else. At least where I live we use metric and we still call it eight mile, quarter mile and half mile when it comes to drag events
The movie I saw in Australia had the quote exactly as is. I’d like to think most of us recognize that a mile is a bit longer than a kilometer and that those distances are common in drag racing, so they’re referred to as is. If we were measuring distance from driving to another city it’s in kilometers and miles aren’t used.
Tape measures have centimeters and inches on them. If I’m using approximations I might use inches and Subway has probably been the main reason Aussies know of inches and a foot.
If I’m doing any scientific measurement like building a cabinet etc, it’s mm and cm.
Lots of people call it the 1320. So just call it the 402. It doesn’t have the same linguistic rhythm but that is just semantics.
I live my life 400 meters at a time. For those 10 metric seconds or less nothing else matters.
I live my life 400 meters at a time. For those 91,926,317,700 ΔtCs or less nothing else matters.
402.335 meters. Just round it down. 400 meters at a time.
