I liked Pegi as well. I tend to enjoy those characters that stand out as serious and helpful. And Ema "Straight Joe" was also a cool influence for them both. I am still unsure why Pegi's attitude seemed to have gotten subtly worse near the end. Perhaps he was becoming annoyed with the audacious troubles that Julija had created.
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Слуги, дайте ему бумагу и карандаш.
Servants, give him paper and pencil.
"Servants"? Huh? This reminded me of translating the Swedish word "tjänare" which means "servants" but informally means "hello" when used as an interjection. I wondered if the Russian "Слуги" might also have some informal meaning as an interjection. I have not found anything online and I can not guess what it might be.
Yeah, with this area, both google and deepL gave "servants" and deepL even offered a range of other similar words in its click-for-dictionary service. And considering the game she's playing in the scene, I thought it sounded ok. She was pretending (or, as I am told by those practicing this fine art, "noooo. we call it '
roleplaying.'), and she was also wearing a crown and stationed up high. I figured she would have some servants or attendants or something. Maybe I could had more fun with the scene and wrote, "guards, feed him to the lions!"
I am surprised you didn't mention my choice of "bleuhk", which I transliterated from the Serbian and went with instead of both google and deepL's unified suggestion, "uhg". I decided on this because the word bleuhk sounded great on its own, and the way she said it was cute.
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"Henpecked" is almost an archaic word these days, because our culture and the relationships between men and women have advanced and matured so much that they now routinely see and treat each other as equals and don't even consider joking about power imbalances.
[
Love it. Perhaps this is precisely why I had trouble finding an appropriate equivalent in English; almost unheard of nowadays.]
I think it unlikely that preteens would call a boy "pussy whipped" but that is my immediate alternate translation choice. I can think of even cruder terms, too.
Pussy whipped! Haha, even having heard of this one before, I don't think I would have ever come up with this one on my own. Imagine hearing this from the preteens in class directly in front of their stern teacher. Not saying that it wouldn't have happened in my classes. The other consideration I had for that line was "bitch boy".
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Thank goodness you changed that one! I have not the faintest idea what that idiom means. What you came up with made sense to me.
From what I recall, if I'm even remembering this correctly, a source for idiomatic phrases said this basically means "you can't pull a fast one on me!", and in this case, "you can't fool me
again", but I was as mystified over the word "chaff" as Julija was. I assumed the original translator was using a Russian idiom in place of where a Serbian idiom was being used. "I'll have a bone to pick with you" was another one I considered.
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The children's confusion about telling time on an old-fashioned round clock with hands was highly amusing.
Hahah yeah, then I'm glad that part came out clear enough. I think it required some work to both make it clear what they were saying, and clear that they were confused.
Earlier in the film (28:38 - 28:43) I wondered if I had forgotten how to tell time myself when the clock tower rang TWO when the face clearly displays the time as 1:10 ! Were the filmmakers having a go at us, or did the sound editor foley in the tolling bell even though it did not match the image?
Now I believe you may have stumbled on a goof worth of being entered into the imdb "Goofs" section of this film!! But I had not noticed this more subtle detail.