REELING AND WRITHING II: AGONY OF THE FEET

REELING AND WRITHING
or,
Miss Dermark's 2015 Advent Calendar

DAY TWO

AGONY OF THE FEET
or,
IMPERIAL MEASURES IN MY TRANSLATIONS

The feet mentioned in today's issue's title are obviously Imperial measures. One foot (ft) equals roughly 30 cm.
The Anglosphere employs Imperial measures like feet, pints, and pounds in everyday use most probably because the decimal measures employed in Continental Europe (and the Anglophone scientific context) hail from the UK's age-old enemy (well, the World Wars changed that): France. The French scientific and state authorities of the late eighteenth century, after the Revolution, decided to create a metric system that would be easy to grasp and the same across the whole country (during the monarchy, every community, province, and/or region had its own different measures, so a Parisian ounce, for instance, was not the same as a Marseilles ounce, a Lorrainian ounce, or a Pas-de-Calais ounce). When Napoleon I rose to power, during the Regency of George IV, when the redcoats fought the French at Trafalgar, Quatre-Bras, and Waterloo, the decimal metric system was completed and established all over France and the lands it occupied (nearly all of Continental Europe). The British, of course, would never accept a system from an enemy country that threatened their independence, and thus, as response, they standardized the old measures (which had previously, just like in France, varied across regions) for the whole British state. The US and the colonies soon followed suit.

So how do we translate this use of, for instance, feet (the most famous Imperial measure unit) in Continental European languages? Most often, by turning those feet into centimeters and meters. 1 ft=30 cm (aprox.)

The title of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, for instance, becomes El ataque de la mujer de 15 metros in Spanish. In German, it's Angriff der 20-Meter-Frau.

Here are some instances of my own translations from the English (mostly into Spanish) in which feet are translated into decimal measures. Here you've got some lyrics and a little prose:

"All in a Mouse's Night", Genesis
There I was with my back to the wall,
Then comes this monster mouse, he's ten feet tall,
My translation:
Allí estaba yo, de espaldas a la pared,
llega el monstruorratón, tres metros mide él...

"Oliver Cromwell", Monty Python
The most interesting thing about King Charles the First
Is that he was 5 foot 6 inches tall at the start of his reign
But only 4 foot 8 inches tall at the end of it. 

My translation:
Lo más interesante acerca del rey Carlos I Estuardo
es que medía 1m 60 cm (un metro sesenta) al principio de su reinado
pero sólo 1m 45 (un metro cuarenta y cinco) al final.

"Every Sperm is Sacred", Genesis
You don't have to be a six-footer
My translation:
No importa que midas dos metros

"The Weir",
He ducks under the surface, but the water is the cloudy green of Victorian bottle glass and he can see for a couple of feet at most.
My translation:
Se sumerge, pero el agua es verde y turbia como el vidrio de las botellas victorianas, y él no puede ver más allá de medio metro a lo sumo.