Chipanglish » Translations

iPhone Chinese Alphabet App

Peter — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 05:09:19 +0000

Good Characters, Inc has come out with a new iPhone application: Chinese Alphabet. Thankfully, the creators realize such a thing does not exist and this is for entertainment value only, to add “mystery” to your writing. Of course, everything from the Orient is mysterious…

To those gullible enough to think this will translate their writing into real Chinese, for just $1.99 you can sound like an idiot!

三內丁口了!

According to the app, it says “Enjoy”, but it actually says:
“Three inside diced meat/vegetables mouth [past tense marker]!”

On second thought, I might actually enjoy three pieces of diced meat/vegetables in my mouth. Mmm… beef stew.

A Compendium of Useless Spanish Phrases

Yvonne — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:06:21 +0000

In keeping with theme of my last post and Khatzumoto’s immerse-in-fun strategy, I’ve been watching some of my favorite movies with the Spanish language tracks turned on. I do want to learn how to say “launch photon torpedoes” in Japanese someday, but that will have to wait until we have some Japanese movies that aren’t Miyazaki or Kurosawa works.

In the meantime, you can probably guess what I watched today from this list:

¡Inconcebible! Sigue usando esa palabra. No creo que significa lo que cree que significa.
¡No soy zurdo! ¡No tampoco zurdo!
el Pantano de Fuego
Buenas noches, Westley, buen trabajo, probablemente te mate en la mañana.
¡Hasta la muerte! ¡No, hasta el dolor!
¿Qué tal? Mi nombre es Iñigo Montoya. Mataste a mi padre. Prepárate para morir.

I can’t quite make out what the Spanish for Rodents of Unusual Sizes is. The subtitles say Roedores de Tamaño Extraordinario, but that definitely doesn’t match the dialogue.

Chipanglish: Compiling impractical phrases in multiple languages since 2009.

Yes, I did happen to learn quite a bit of useful Spanish too, though I’m guessing the frequency of people yelling “¡Corre(n)!” in the movie world is a lot higher than in real life. “¡No comas eso!”, my personal Waterloo from months back, made an early appearance in Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban.

Intriguing Characters

Yvonne — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:28:19 +0000

We went to Half-Price Books today to sell some books. Which, by the way, I think is a total racket, albeit one I participate in willingly. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to sell books and not spend more than their entire offer while waiting for them to process my pile.

I’d hoped to get a bunch of children’s books in Spanish, figuring that since muchos hispanohablantes viven aquí I had above-average odds of getting something good. I did walk away with a copy of Cinderella (or Cenicienta) and passed on a copy of Harry Potter 2, but the Spanish selection turned out to be pretty disappointing.

But there were some unexpected finds on the Foreign Language shelf. First, a copy of 金魚が逃げた (Hiragana: きんぎょがにげた; Romaji: Kingyo ga Nigeta; English: The Goldfish Escaped).

And then I hit the mother lode:

Is that awesome, or is that TOTALLY AWESOME? From left to right, top to bottom, we have:

Chinese Title	Chinese Pronunciation	English Title
胖嘟嘟小姐	pang4 du1 du1 xiao2 jie3	Little Miss Greedy
迷糊小姐	mi2 hu2 xiao2 jie3	Little Miss Scatterbrain
明星小姐	ming2 xing1 xiao2 jie3	Little Miss Star
雙胞胎小姐	shuang1 bao1 tai1 xiao2 jie3	Little Miss Twins
聰明先生	cong1* ming2 xian1 sheng1	Mr. Clever
呆呆先生	dai1 dai1 xian1 sheng1	Mr. Clumsy
傷腦筋先生	shang1 nao3 jin1 xian1 sheng1	Mr. Dizzy
健忘先生	jian4 wang4 xian1 sheng1	Mr. Forgetful
匆忙先生	cong1* mang2 xian1 sheng1	Mr. Rush
雪人先生	xue3 ren2 xian1 sheng1	Mr. Snow
長腿先生	chang2 tui3 xian1 sheng1	Mr. Tall
傲慢先生	ao4 man4 xian1 sheng1	Mr. Uppity

Most of the translated titles are very close in meaning, but there are a few head-scratchers in there:

胖嘟嘟 doesn’t mean “greedy”, it means “chubby” or just plain “fat”. “Greedy” is 貪吃 (tan1 chi1). The back cover of the Taiwanese Mr. Men books lists Mr. Greedy as 貪吃先生, so I have no idea why they didn’t just go with 貪吃小姐 for Little Miss Greedy.
迷糊 is more “dazed and confused” than “scatterbrained”.
呆呆 doesn’t mean “clumsy”, it means “slow-witted”.
And 傷腦筋 most definitely doesn’t mean “dizzy”. The best translation I can come up with is “brainhurt”. Which isn’t even a legitimate English word.

They’ve also done something interesting with Mr. Tall. A direct translation to Chinese would get you 高先生, as 高 (gao1) means “tall”. Except that 高 is also a fairly common Chinese surname, mine and Peter’s surname in fact, and thus 高先生 is a pretty boring name for a whimsical character. So the translators went with 長腿先生, which means “Mr. Long Legs” (長 = long; 腿 = leg).

Even more interesting is the name of the series. What we know in English as “Mr. Men and Little Miss” is 奇先生，妙小姐 in Chinese, literally “Mr. Strange and Miss Wonderful”. 奇妙 (qi2 miao4) is a phrase that means “intriguing” and is part of the common idiom 莫名奇妙 (mo4 ming2 qi2 miao4), which means “to be baffling”.

*Pronunciation note: Despite what it looks like, cong is not actually pronounced with any kind of c sound. Instead, it sounds like tsong. Pinyin sucks that way.

Thank Goodness for the Internet

Yvonne — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:51:05 +0000

So I’m setting up a new personal blog. I wanted it to have multilingual capabilities for my non-US family which means that I have to translate all the main navigation headings.

It then occurred to me that I have no idea how to say “blog” in Chinese. And it’s not like my mom (aka Queen Luddite) is going to be any help here.

“Blog” is not in my 英漢漢英字典, which is not all that surprising considering this edition was published in 2005.

Google Translate gives 博客 (bo2 ke4) for “blog” and Mandarin Tools concurs and gives 部落格 (bu4 luo4 ge2) and 網絡日記 (wang3 luo4 ri4 ji4)—literally, “internet diary/daily log”—as alternate translations.

What did people do before they had the internet to look up the latest vernacular?

王大中 vs. Da-zhong Wang vs. DJ Wong

Yvonne — Sat, 16 May 2009 03:27:10 +0000

I wanted to respond to Peter’s post about the Texas voter ID law.

First, a bit of background on how Chinese names usually work.

Most Chinese names have three characters (though some only have two). The surname goes first, and the remaining two characters are your given name.

For example, everyone’s favorite Chinese textbook hero is named 王大中. 王 (wang2) is his surname. 大中 (da4 zhong1) is his given name.

How do you turn that into English? We here at Chipanglish use Hanyu Pinyin for transliterating Chinese words. It’s the international standard (at least as of 1982, and didn’t become the standard in Taiwan until January 1 of this year), but there are plenty of other systems out there.

In Hanyu Pinyin 王大中 becomes Dazhong Wang. Or Da-zhong Wang. Or Da Zhong Wang which becomes Da Z. Wang.

Use a different system (or make up your own) and you might wind up with Da-jong Wong instead. It’s the same name, just transliterated differently. Let’s assume for a minute that he goes with Dajong Wong for first and last names when filling out the immigration paperwork, leaving the middle name blank.

And after living in the US for a while, Dajong gets tired of people butchering his name and decides to go by DJ instead. His immigration papers, passport, and driver’s license still all say Dajong Wong, but his college transcript, his library card, his frequent flyer card, and his voter registration card (which tend to have more lenient ID requirements) all say DJ Wong.

He goes to vote, is asked to show ID, and is denied because the voter rolls say DJ Wong, but his driver’s license says Dajong Wong. He can’t prove it’s the same person.

That’s the issue in a nutshell. And it will rapidly expand beyond voting and into flying, as TSA Secure Flight now requires that the name on your ID, ticket, and frequent flyer information match exactly.

Now, I do think people have a legal responsibility to keep the usage of their legal name straight. It’s one thing to go by DJ socially, but if your legal name is Dajong, that’s what should go on official documents.

But Betty Brown’s suggestion that people could solve the problem by changing their names to something more American is completely asinine for two reasons:

A big part of the problem comes from people trying to do exactly that, albeit not through official legal channels.
This is not a problem limited to Asian names!

Say your name is Annemarie Smith, but you normally just go by Anne. If the voter rolls say Anne Smith and your ID says Annemarie Smith, well…that doesn’t match either.

Or now about a last name? Say your name is Ana Ramirez Delgado. In keeping with Hispanic naming customs, “Ramirez Delgado” is your full last name (no hyphen), but you just use Ramirez for most occasions. But thanks to clerical error, you show up on the voter rolls as Ana R. Delgado. Which does not match your ID.

Stuff happens with hyphenated last names too. Just ask Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.

From a policy standpoint, the obvious first step is to have a nation-wide standardized format for names that can handle hyphens and spaces in your names (and also really long names). Middle names should stop being optional—if you have no middle name you should check a box confirming thus. IDs should specify what is first, middle, and last, rather than leaving it up to clerks and bureaucrats of varying degrees of cluelessness to figure out what is what. Second step, be a bit lenient if it’s obvious a hyphen/space got screwed up in data entry, making you Sara Kelly Johnson instead of Sara Kelly-Johnson.

And now to bring it full circle back to Texas. Unlike the federal government and every other state I’ve lived in, Texas does not do hyphens on IDs. My middle name is hyphenated. I could either drop half of my middle name or mash the two parts together sans hyphen. I chose to mash.

And so now I have the absurd situation where the name on my passport (and social security card, and birth certificate) is hyphenated and the name on my driver’s license is not. My primary forms of government-issued ID do not all match exactly.

If I’m ever in a situation where that hyphen actually matters, I’m screwed.

What’s In a Name?

Peter — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:46:42 +0000

Recently, Rep. Betty Brown of Texas made some comments that are causing quite a stir, particularly in the Asian community.

Our resident Texan can correct me if I’m wrong, but Texas is currently reviewing a Voter ID bill. One problem with Voter ID is the matching of names, particularly Asian names. The point the speaker addressing Rep. Brown makes is that Asian names can cause ID problems because a person can fall under multiple “aliases” depending on who did the transliteration of the name and when it was done. Additionally, many people use English names, which may or may not be a legal name. Since the names don’t match, the person cannot vote.

However, Rep. Brown fails to grasp this concept and actually says, “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Not only would this add another name to the mix and defeat the whole purpose, it’s just stupid. But then again, I have always felt a little weird having both a Chinese AND an English name. Perhaps Rep. Brown, you are right. Maybe I do need just one name that I can use for ID purposes that is easier for government officials worldwide to “deal with”.

How about Ethelbert Grzeskiewicz?

Keeping My Eye on the Prize

Yvonne — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:59:48 +0000

Two prizes, actually.

The first prize that I’d win from a successful study of Chinese/Japanese would be increased/improved communication with the non-English-speaking family.

The second prize would be this.

I regularly read James Fallows, a Beijing-based writer for The Atlantic. And while I think his posts on China are very thoughtful and well-informed, I would really love to be able to read this and other Chinese stories straight from the source.

Because not all Western journalists do their due diligence when it comes to translations from Chinese. Remember the Olympic scandal about the lip-synching girl in the red dress? And how the real singer had been banned for being chubby and having crooked teeth?

I couldn’t read any of the stories coming out of China when the story broke, but there was a marked difference in the coverage from people who understood Chinese and people who couldn’t that seemed greater than the cultural differences. Eventually I tracked down a video of the oft-quoted radio interview where music director Chen Qigang revealed the lip-syncing:

I won’t claim to have understood it perfectly, but I got most of it and came to virtually the same conclusion as EastSouthWestNorth: the Western media were playing a game of Bad Translation Telephone and turned a relatively low-level ethical issue into a high-profile child-welfare brouhaha.

My problem is that some western media acted to defend the rights of Yang Peiyi by presenting her as a child who was rejected because of her “uneven/crooked/wonky/buck teeth” and “fat/chubby face.” That would be outrageous — if that were truth! In reviewing the primary evidence, I found that none of the principals (general director Zhang Yimou, music director Chen Qigang, the Lin and Yang families, the unnamed Politburo member now pinned on future topdog Ji Jinping, Sarah Brightman, and so on) said anything of the sort. Therefore, my interest in this case is how a convenient heart-tugging story detail gets fabricated and is made into an inflated urban legend without any accountability to anyone anywhere. That is the real story that I want to present here.

It’s better to cut out the middle man.

學中文加油!

P.S. Lest it sound like I’m unfairly disparaging Western journalism, I watched the coverage of the US Presidential election from Taipei, and the Taiwanese reporting was at least equally problematic. The speed of global news these days works in direct opposition to doing your due diligence, especially when you’re also working across a language barrier.

Chipanglish » Translations

iPhone Chinese Alphabet App

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