Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #9: Don’t Be a Pig
May 25th, 2009 | View Comments
Happy Memorial Day, all!
Now, I think Memorial Day is a mighty fine time to bust out the grill. Especially now that I live in the South where there’s Proper Summer Weather on Memorial Day.
So today’s phrase is:
“Don’t make a pig of yourself.”
你別吃太多啊!
Ni3 bie2 chi1 tai4 duo1 a5!
食べ過ぎないで！
Tabe suginai de!
I’m not quite sure what to make of this one, as both the Chinese and Japanese phrases translate to the significantly-more-polite “Don’t eat too much!”
Chinese: 你 = “you”, 別 = “don’t”, 吃 = “eat”, 太 = “e”, 多 = “much”, 啊 = word of exclamation. I’d like to note that 你 isn’t really necessary here. The “you” can be implied.
Japanese: 食べ = “eat”, 過ぎない = “don’t go too far”, で = command/request marker. The “you” is implied.
So what’s the deal here? “Pig” is a standard insult at least in Chinese so you could certainly do a more literal and ultimately better translation that captures the tone. On the other hand, it’s kind of bad to call someone a pig in Chinese—it’s a lot more insulting than the English equivalent, which is kind of grade-school.
The authors of this book are obviously not native English speakers. My only guess is that while “Don’t eat too much!” would have been a perfectly good translation here, they wanted something a bit more idiomatic (though who knows why) and didn’t have a good enough grasp of colloquialisms to come up with “Don’t stuff yourself!”
Either that, or they think English speakers are really, really rude.
Yvonne posted this on May 25th, 2009 @ 12:00pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #9: Don’t Be a Pig"
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American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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