I agree with Reply’s… reply.
The quoted translation seems really fanciful to me. That could very well be the intended meaning, but I would not have derived that from the text.
You are assuming the Chinese text was there first. I doubt that, until someone can confirm that it’s a traditional poem or something like that. Since it’s from an American scifi production it seems more likely that the screenwriters came up with the ‘translation’ first and then asked the first Chinese American they could find to write it up in Chinese characters. (The restaurant around the corner?)
Cool. So did you ever catch any leg pulling of that sort? I know for a fact that a tasteless game among my people (Dutch) is to provide some swear word when for instance a waiter in some tourist location abroad wants to know how to say ‘good morning’ or whatever in our language. Im not sure if Chinese share that sense of ‘humour’
I heard that Edward James Olmos’ character in Blade Runner (Gaff?) used a Hungarian profanity, but that may have been an intended joke.
He probably used Monty Python’s Hungarian-English phrasebook.
–Mark
No jokes so far. Most of them have been somewhat close to the rendered translation, although a few (like this one) took a lot of artistic license.
I think that’s what we both meant, that the eloquent English was butchered in translation into Chinese.
There was a story last year about precisely that on a mainstream TV show - I think it was *Homeland *? Basically your basic “american spies fight brown terrorists” show. For scenes set in the middle east they asked for Arabic/Urdu graffiti, and their hired help obliged with gems like “this show is racist”, “Homeland is a joke except it’s not funny”, “the reality is nothing like this” and so on.