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

I live my life two fifths of a kilometer 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.

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.

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.

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.

Feels like “I live a half kilo at a time” would be excellent.