>>>>One of my party pieces is doing those - moving the lips 90 to the dozen, for c. 10 seconds and just saying, eg "What? You don't say so?"
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>>>Back when dinosaurs ruled the world and before cable, I had the night shift with our dog business and we had a Spanish language local station in Houston that played the Hong Kong Kung-fu movies dubbed in Spanish. At 5:00 am, when you're on your 2nd 24 hours, hearing spanish coming out of chinese faces would just skitz my brain.
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>>While Stage6.com was on, I sat through about five minutes of an episode of SG-1 in German. Not that I didn't understand anything - there isn't much to understand anyway, if you're familiar with the context, but what got me were things which weren't translated. "Da ist eine missile durch dem stargate gekommen, herr major" or something of the kind - the words in italics were in English. C'mon, a once-upon-a-time militaristic culture incapable of translating ammo and rank? Blyecchs. If I watch it in German, I want to hear German, not Germisch.
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>Then you're probably not a fan of Japanese RPG's on game consoles/computers then - what with the Engrish they've got going on

Daughters are the gamers... I'm too attached to stuff you play on keyboard, so I never made the transition to linear or even logarithmic controllers - mouse, more sensitive joysticks (i.e. not switches, but resistors) or today's pieces of plastic with twenty buttons with cryptic ideograms on them.

But I do appreciate good Engrish when I find it. We got a nice new Korean/Latin grocery here, and Engrish may be one of the reasons for the notice posted in the corner near the lettuce: "please do not take photos. please do not take prices". The other possible reason is just good sneaky marketing :).

Back to the subject - I don't mind when a word makes its way from one language into another when missing, but I do mind if there already is a good domestic word which gets killed in the process for no good reason.

For instance, we imported "vikend" (weekend) because when we adopted the custom of free Saturdays, we needed a word which would mean "those two no-work days". But then we went on and created a "vikendica" - a cottage with a bit of a garden just out of town, where you go on weekends; "vikendaš" - a weekender, someone who inhabits a vikendica on a vikend. Now if any translator would replace "vikendaš" with "vikender", I'd personally vote for having one healthy tooth pulled out of his jaw. With a lifetime limit of 32 good words to kill (and then be barred from translation because nobody would understand what they say), there'd be far fewer morons among the translators.

Set rant off.