Saturday, November 29, 2014

Doesn't give a

I'm not sure how I missed this, but I didn't see this episode of John Oliver's show (Last Week Tonight). I did see a clip from it (the climate change debate) and I guess I somehow thought I'd see the whole thing. Anyway, they did a take-off on the commemorative coin Russia issued to celebrate the . Here's their version:

coin with shirtless Putin on a horse with this inscription: Владимиру Путина крым не ебет

And the voiceover said "If you're wondering why there's no map of Crimea, that's because Vladimir Putin doesn't give a f* about Crimea, which is what it says in Russian around the edges of the coin."
But that is not what it says. What is says is Владимиру Путина крым не ебет, which is kind of ... To Vladimir of Putin crimea not give-a-f* . It's hard to replicate the grammatical wrongness here. Putin's name should be in accusative, but Vladimir is in dative instead. It's a basic grammatical mismatch. By the way, Crimea should be capitalized, too.

I don't know where they got their translation - it wasn't from Google, because they can't handle the idiom at all; their translation is painfully literal, with the verb "to give" in it. And possibly it's just a typo - Владимиру instead of Владимира. Still, it's too bad. 'Cause it's actually pretty funny.

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