The full quote in dirty imperial units:
I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those ten seconds or less, I’m free.
– The Fast and the Furious
How was this translated to metric?
Offtopic: The expression “Give someone an inch, and they’ll take it a mile” is 得寸进尺 in Chinese. 寸 is Inch, 尺 is Ruler. So I guess its “Give someone an inch, and they go the distance of a ruler”? Its either 12 inch / 30 cm? Or is it 1 meter / 1 yard (ya know, those big rulers)?
Or maybe we should just say “Give someone an inch, and they’ll steal your ruler?” 😆
But anyways: I think most movies just literally translate the words so they don’t have to do conversions.
I think since it was a reference to a drag strip it was translated as a quarter of a mile everywhere else. At least where I live we use metric and we still call it eight mile, quarter mile and half mile when it comes to drag events
I wonder if gas efficiency is still called mileage
Can’t say about other countries, but here in general you just say “n liters” dropping “per 100 kilometers”. Another metric that conveys the same thing.
Interesting-- does the word exist at all? Can you talk about a reliable appliance as something you can “get a lot of mileage” from?
I live my life two fifths of a kilometer at a time.
I live my life two fifths of vodka at a time.
I live my life two fifths of a rock of crack at a time.
The movie I saw in Australia had the quote exactly as is. I’d like to think most of us recognize that a mile is a bit longer than a kilometer and that those distances are common in drag racing, so they’re referred to as is. If we were measuring distance from driving to another city it’s in kilometers and miles aren’t used.
Tape measures have centimeters and inches on them. If I’m using approximations I might use inches and Subway has probably been the main reason Aussies know of inches and a foot.
If I’m doing any scientific measurement like building a cabinet etc, it’s mm and cm.
Serious answer, in italian it still uses miles
In Malaysia we use both metric and imperial even though we only learn metric in school, so ehh it’s still quarter mile
402.335 meters. Just round it down. 400 meters at a time.
Most US tracks are 4 laps to a mile, or about 400 meters.
Nah most US tracks are 400 meters, but everyone says quarter mile due to rounding
1319 doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same.
The 400 sounds sweet.
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.
.402336km at a time.
I live my life 400m at a time
It wasn’t, not really important to the plot? If it was half a mile or mile nothing would have changed. I have no idea how many bananas is it.
I guess it being a 1/4 mile isn’t directly relevant to the plot but the 1/4 mile is a standard measurement for a drag race.
It does have meaning.It does have a meaning, but not knowing how long is the race track changes very little.
72 gum-gums.
Haven’t seen the movies in German so I can’t tell you what exactly he says. But distances in miles are generally kept in miles for German localisation (except for VERY rare cases), using the German word “Meile”. Especially when it’s not actually about a physical distance but vibes. We may not use miles to measure anything but we still have expressions like “meilenweit gehen” (to walk for miles, i.e. a very long distance) so it’s not like we don’t know what a mile is.
Could say, “I live my life 9 seconds at a time.”
Lots of people call it the 1320. So just call it the 402. It doesn’t have the same linguistic rhythm but that is just semantics.
I live my life 400 meters at a time. For those 10 metric seconds or less nothing else matters.
I live my life 400 meters at a time. For those 91,926,317,700 ΔtCs or less nothing else matters.
This guy Systèmes
Club 133
I live my life 400 meters at a time. For those 12 .beats or less, nothing else matters
