zrs70 From United States of America, joined Dec 2000, 2872 posts, RR: 10 Posted (10 months 3 days 11 hours ago) and read 3168 times:
Perhaps other Asian languages are similar.
I've been timing in in my UA flight SFO-ICN. The English announcements ate always followed by the Korean. The English takes 30 seconds. The Korean takes up to 2 minutes!
tennis69 From Qatar, joined Apr 2007, 379 posts, RR: 0 Reply 1, posted (10 months 1 day 21 hours ago) and read 3016 times:
It's the same for most languages other than English. And for languages like Korean, Chinese, and Japanese it takes alot of characters to say the same thing as English words. Just my opinion.
PHX787 From Japan, joined Mar 2012, 4965 posts, RR: 14 Reply 2, posted (10 months 1 day 21 hours ago) and read 3015 times:
Takes a while to translate, I think. The FAs gotta listen to the captain, write down what they say in English, then translate it.
When I fly to Japan, sometimes I hear them use Chinese on top of the English and Japanese announcements. That was the case last year when I flew to NRT because half the flight was connecting to Beijing.
spacecadet From United States of America, joined Sep 2001, 3251 posts, RR: 14 Reply 3, posted (9 months 4 weeks 1 day 2 hours ago) and read 2814 times:
Quoting tennis69 (Reply 1): And for languages like Korean, Chinese, and Japanese it takes alot of characters to say the same thing as English words. Just my opinion.
Well, no, it actually takes far *fewer* words to say the same thing in these languages.
I don't know about UA, but whenever I fly Japanese carriers, they just say a hell of a lot more in Japanese than they say in English. For example, in English they might say "Welcome aboard ladies and gentlemen, we have a flight time of 12 hours and 30 minutes, please keep your seat belt fastened while seated and enjoy your flight."
In Japanese, the same announcement if you translated it would be something more like "Welcome aboard ladies and gentlemen, this is ANA flight 9 from New York to Tokyo, we have a planned flight time of 12 hours and 30 minutes. We're expecting a bit of turbulence during the flight today, so please keep your seat belt fastened while seated. Our flight attendants will be beginning their drink service soon, followed by the first meal of the flight, so please sit back and enjoy your flight, and thank you for flying ANA."
I don't fly UA to Japan often but I've done it once, and the problem there was just that the American f/a was speaking Japanese very, very slowly. He sounded like Forrest Gump in Japanese. So even though he did say basically the same thing in English and Japanese, it took him longer in Japanese because he was just speaking at about half the speed of a Japanese person.
The thing about Japanese and Korean that a lot of Americans find it hard to get used to is the speed of switching syllables (I'm sure there's a word linguists use for that, but I'm just going to call it "switching syllables"). Their alphabet is actually syllabic and phonetic, so each word is made up of multiple syllables and they get in the habit of saying these very, very quickly. Americans learning these languages usually just speak them like they've got a mouth full of peanut butter all the time. So on US carriers with American f/a's, that's probably the problem. If it's an Asian f/a or captain, they're probably just shortening the English version quite a bit.
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steve6666 From United Kingdom, joined Sep 2003, 356 posts, RR: 0 Reply 4, posted (9 months 4 weeks 6 hours ago) and read 2752 times:
It is the same on BA when the foreign speaking cabin crew translate the Captain's original message, at least on the Brazil/Argentina routings. The Captain rambles on for a while, then the cabin crew come on and say, "Those were the words of our Captain. He said [this, very summarised]."
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PHX787 From Japan, joined Mar 2012, 4965 posts, RR: 14 Reply 5, posted (9 months 3 weeks 3 days 19 hours ago) and read 2574 times:
Quoting spacecadet (Reply 3): I don't fly UA to Japan often but I've done it once, and the problem there was just that the American f/a was speaking Japanese very, very slowly. He sounded like Forrest Gump in Japanese. So even though he did say basically the same thing in English and Japanese, it took him longer in Japanese because he was just speaking at about half the speed of a Japanese person.
Thats weird that they didn't have an ethnically Japanese F/A on the flight. On my DL flight last week half the crew was Japanese.
falkerker From Seychelles, joined Apr 2012, 149 posts, RR: 0 Reply 6, posted (9 months 3 weeks 2 days 14 hours ago) and read 2495 times:
Quoting steve6666 (Reply 4): It is the same on BA when the foreign speaking cabin crew translate the Captain's original message
I would dare say it is the same everywhere when the captain/crew are native in one language and must the translate into another. AV messages are longer in spanish than in english, AF are longer in french than english/spanish and so on. I find it normal for the captain to explain every detail in his/her mother tongue and then the FA will translate a "digested" version.
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