… ‘Cat King’. My co-worker guessed that it’s 'cause he looks like a cat :dubious:, or he sings songs about cats. :dubious: :dubious: :dubious: .
Me and my fellow Canadian-raised co-workers found this, and the three-inch tall letters on her (quite professionally done otherwise) Chinese CD booklet proclaiming to contain the works of ‘ELVES’, hilariously funny.
Then one of the other programmers-originally-known-as-Chinese came in, so she pointed it out to him, and he said “Oh yeah! Maybe it’s 'cause he looks like a cat.”, and it was funny all over again.
OK, I like to think of myself as fairly knowledgable about the Chinese language and culture, but I am completely stumped by this. Why the heck is Elvis translated into “Cat King”? I googled, and found some vague and lame explanation about being “cool as a cat” which I am very skeptical of, so I’m going to put my $15 (CAD$326.99) to work. Does anyone have the straight dope?
To fully realize the power of your $16.65, this thread would have to be in GQ, not MPSIMS. (Though if anyone wants to move it over there, that’s find with me)
I’ve always heard ‘cool as a cat’. Elvis was the 1950’s and beatnik’s and all that stuff. Of course, the Chinese in China didn’t know who Elvis was in the 50’s. It would have originated in HK or Taiwan
I thought that the Chinese “translation” of non-Chinese words take the pictograms that roughly correspond the sound of the words, regardless of meaning. Then, translating the pictograms, you get a phrase that is just coincidental.
Thus, “Schenectady,” in Chinese is transliterated as “Ska-Nek-Ta-Dee,” using one pictogram for each syllable. Then, if you translate the pictograms, you come up with “This pagoda will take over the Earth.” Fred Pohl once retranslated a translation of his story “The Wizards of Pung’s Corners” back to English this way; all the place and proper names had bizarre meanings.
RealityChuck: That would indeed make sense, except that her pronunciation of ‘Cat King’ sounded more like “Shing Jow” (or close to that) than ‘Elvis Presley’.
We talked about The Beatles right after, and she says their name on her CD was translated twice - once phonetically, and once literally. I’m pretty sure ‘Cat King’ was a literal translation, but what the people who did that originally thought they were doing… is a mystery to me.
That’s they way it is usually done, and that’s why I am asking.
Cat King, or “Mao Wang”, has NO connection, phonetically or otherwise, to Elvis Presley. If I didn’t already know what it meant there was no way I could have puzzled out from the Chinese that it referred to Elvis Presley.
Jeez, I read that once, around 1988, and I still remember the character named “Grid-in-the-Forest” and think about that story every single time I hear an English name transliterated into Mandarin.
previous post eaten during the recent board trouble.
spend a few minutes searching “elvis” and “cat.” It was the 1950’s, beatniks and “cool cat” was the slang. Elvis was also known as the “hillbilly cat.”
Not hard to see how US servicemen in HK and Taiwan brought over Elvis, which does not readily phonetically translate to mandarin or cantonese. Locals figured out he was also a cool cat and the King and voila maomang or King of Cats was born. Keep in mind also that no one in China would have heard Elvis music.
Didn’t Dave Barry do a column about the Chinese characters used to spell Coca-Cola translating into “Bite The Wax Tadpole”? (Yes, I know it’s not really true.)
I’ve known that Elvis is called “Cat King” in Chinese for the longest time, and it has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of translation of his Western name. I’ve also thought it had to do with the way the Chinese perceive the screaming females when Elvis is singing – like screaming cats. And who is at the center of all that screaming? The King himself.
is a mystery to me.
