|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hover over the green Chinese Pinyin and a brief definition will pop up; click on the word to see it's Glossary definition. |
|
| ||||||
|
|
wordscultural evolutionmovies in chinaIn January, 1999 I ran across an item in Salon Magazine (one of the first and, in my opinion, the best online magazine extant on the Internet today). It was a news item about Peter Jennings of ABC News and Chinese translations of American movie titles. Rather then explain, click here to see the original article. I had noticed the phenomena of bad translations of movie titles here in China. When a movie is released here (or pirated copies sold), the title will be Chinglishized often with hilarious results. Since my buddies Mike and Anna own a shop that sells and rents music and movie VCD's (the Chinese version of DVD), I e-mailed Salon offering to do a little "fact-checking". Janelle Brown, an editor at Salon green-lighted my offer. So with a few students and Mike, we went through stacks of movie VCD's and Chinese movie magazines and put together a list of Chinglish translations of American movies and sent it along to Salon. Salon used it in an article on January 11, 1999. But they left out some of the better ones. So here's a copy of the original report I filed with Janelle Brown at Salon: Janelle: First the bad news. I found a copy of Babe and it actually translates into Little Pig Babe (actually the title uses the transliteration characters Bei Bei for Babe). Pretty boring. In some movie titles they try to transliterate the title. For instance, Tootsie is Te Te Xi which sounds like Tootsie (or at least as close as you're going to get in Chinese). Interestingly for Tootsie, they added the character for Mister at the beginning so the Chinese title translates to "Mister Tootsie". JFK is transliterated as Ke Ne Di (Kennedy). But here they added the character for Kill so it translates into "Kill Kennedy" (There's no past tense in Chinese). The good news? I found quite a few really good titles. I had two sets of students and my friend the VCD store owner working independently on these. Here's what we came up with: Casablanca - North African Spy (Though these days it's known by its transliteration Ka Se Bei Ke due to the popularity of a western song "Casablanca" thats's popular in the thousands of Karaoke rooms in this small city-but Karaoke is another story for another time).
Click here to see the story that Salon ran based on my "research". |
|
