Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #14: Tom Cruise
July 6th, 2009 | View Comments
Is being compared to Tom Cruise a compliment or an insult? You might want to suss that out before trying this phrase.
“Has anyone told you that you look like Tom Cruise?”
有人跟你說過你長得像湯姆克魯斯嗎?
You3 ren2 gen1 ni3 shuo1 guo4 ni3 zhang3 de5 xiang4 tang1 mu3 ke4 lu3 si1 ma1?
タム·クルーズに似てるって言われませんか。
Tamu Kurūzu ni niterutte iwaremasen ka.
We’ve seen English-words-turned-Chinese before, but this is the first time a name is getting transliterated. And what a disaster it is! “Tom Cruise”, two syllables that roll easily off an English-speaking tongue, becomes the tongue-twisting gibberish phrase 湯姆克魯斯 (tang1 mu3 ke4 lu3 si1). It’s “Soup Mother Restraining Stupid Thus”, if you must have an attempt at a translation.
The construction of the Chinese sentence is almost as brain-twisting as Tom Cruise’s name is tongue-twisting. 有 = there are, 人 = people, 跟你說過 = told you before (literally, “with you tell past”), 你 = you, 長得像 = look like (literally, “grown to resemble”), 湯姆克魯斯 = Tom Cruise, 嗎 = question marker.
The Japanese is a relief in comparison, though it’s still not one of the easiest sentences we’ve done. タム·クルーズ = Tom Cruise, nicely spelled out phonetically in Katakana, に = adverb marker, 似てるって = resembled, 言われません = been described, か = question marker.
Yvonne posted this on July 6th, 2009 @ 12:00pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #14: Tom Cruise"
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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Tang Mu is the standard translation for the name “Tom.”
It still means “soup mom”.
A crazy soup mom that jumps on Oprah’s couch.
Too bad it doesn’t say, “Soup Nazi”.