From Farz (1967), a movie that I probably won’t bother to write up. It is a tragic waste of Secret Agent plotting with David as the spymaster! But this subtitle is too good not to share.
Sparse ‡ scarce
32 Comments to “Sparse ‡ scarce”
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Most Hindi movie DVDs I see have horrible subtitles.
Frankly, I find it somewhat surprising that you don’t come up with some of these every other day.-
Well, I could post silly or just plain BAD ones every day…but I especially love the ones like this which are more subtly hilarious.
Close, but no cigar, as it were :D
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I would love to make myself sparse. As it is I’ll have to stick to scarce, though.
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Yes, sparse is not that much of an option for me either. I keep picturing Star Trek’s transporter dissolving people into sparse little specks.
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haha
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indeed ;-)
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Hmm… so the “reduce the little woman to size-zero” craze started in Kareena’s Mom’s time?!
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Good point! She was in this (I am sure you know that) :)
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Like the English ‘get lost’, in Hindi one can say ‘yahan se kam ho jao’. (get lost from here).
‘kam’ when *literally* translated would mean, ‘little’, ‘scarce’, ‘sparse’ etc
kam (pronounced as ‘come’)
Sometimes I think the translators use some translation site on the computer and pick up the best sounding word. I just checked to find out what other words could have been used by this translator, and came up with – low, less, scanty, short, shallow and a host of others :-D
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This made me laugh because it’s a very subtle difference between the two words. I can totally see where it came from, but it’s just one of those things (that I would get wrong in Hindi!) that you know is wrong even if you can’t quite explain why. Most of the words you came up with above would be more in line with sparse than scarce.
Scarce has more of an “elusive” quality—it’s more qualitative than quantitative.
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>Scarce has more of an “elusive” quality—it’s more qualitative than quantitative.
True. In hindi scarce would be ‘kami’.
‘Water was scarce’ = ‘paani ki kami thi’.-
sorry, had to rush away leaving the former post incomplete, and seemingly foolish :-/
…and sparse would also be ‘kam’ in hindi;
“trees were sparse” = ‘ped kum the’.
So while in English there is sparse and scarce, in hindi there is only this word, unless one wants to use ‘few’ = thode.-
psssst. guess my profession :-D
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ummm…linguist? :) Hindi professor? English professor?
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Ha ha ha!! :-D Close.
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I’m guessing…. Cunning linguist ;)
Sorry, but this was just asking to be told…LOL
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Memsaab,
I just started reading all ur reviews. I lov what ur doing. I watch allot of Indian movies. I know u dont like Manoj Kumar, but did u watch Pather Ke Sanam? And if u havent watched Mahel, u should.
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Thanks Cimamaa, that’s nice of you to say :) I love Mahal, watched it a long time ago. I have not seen Patthar Ke Sanam though, will look for it! Mumtaz and Waheeda are worth sitting through Manoj for any day ;-)
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Hey, this is a family blog ;-)
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Translator..interpreter? I look for appropriate/approximate words to translate when I’m watching. But just because I like languages as a hobby and know a few from school and travelling.
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Maybe Jenny Craig can use it as their motto – “Make yourself sparse with Jenny Craig,” instead of “On Jenny Craig, your body gets smaller… “BUT” Your Smile Gets Bigger!” Join today!
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LOL. “Make yourself sparse”…LOL…see, it’s still cracking me up.
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Oh.. there were a couple of good songs in farz. All I remember is that the climax was a total rip off of the climax in Dr. No. As I saw Farz first, I thought it was Dr No that was cheating .. hehe..
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I liked the Happy Birthday To You song. The rest of it is a bad ripoff of every spy film the makers had seen…
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:) I liked ‘Farz’ though. It was so bad.
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It has its moments, but if a film is going to be bad it needs a more charismatic lead pair (like Shammi and Asha, or Dharmendra and anybody, or Feroz by himself)! Jeetendra and Babita just *don’t quite cut it*…
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I am going to use this “insult” from now on: make yourself sparse…:)))
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I’ve already used it!!! (only on Gemma, but still!)…
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I thought the Jeetendra Aruna Irani song – Mast Baharon ka mai Aashiq…. would make this movie worth a watch. They still play it on B4U channel all the time and I think it is fun….
Farz was a huge hit….. WHY????? HOW?????? Wondering….
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I believe this was Jeetu’s make-or-break movie. He was desperate that it become a hit. It did not start off too well – so he spent a lot of money booking cinema halls and buying tickets of the movie to make it a hit. Once word got around that Farz had become a hit people began coming to the halls and it became a super-duper hit.
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I loved the background music—it is very stylish :)
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Now we have thought of the spanish version of this insult, which is even better as it is one word:
¡Difuminate!
just for laugha
MemsaabStory 