I just finished translating a 40-part Chinese mini-series into English so that Courtney could watch it with me, and I now have a new level of respect for people who do subtitles for foreign language movies and shows, and I also understand why so many of those translations seem as bad as they are. I’m also thinking that it could be a cool job (maybe I’ll add “translating Chinese melodramas” to my list of freelance services). It was a lot of work, but also kind of fun too. It was also very interesting to translate between two languages that are as fundamentally different as Chinese and English, seeing the drastically different ways in which the two cultures express the same ideas — sometimes with one culture expressing something as a noun/an object while the other expresses it as a verb/an action — and running into the occasional instance where they share a common phrase or term.

In case you are interested, here’s the opening sequence of the show (sorry, I tried embedding the video, but it didn’t want to play nice), which is called 红尘有爱 — literally translated as “There Is Love in the Red Dust”, or, as Courtney lovingly calls it, “Opera Tools”.

Talk about translation challenges right off the bat — try explaining what Red Dust is to someone not familiar with Chinese and Buddhist culture. That was the most difficult aspect of the process — trying to translate words/phrases that express such culture-specific concepts that there is no real equivalent in the other language. For instance, the Chinese word 缘 (pronounced “yuán”). According to an online dictionary I found, it means “predestined affinity”, which probably means nothing to most native English speakers. It loosely means destiny or fate, but it’s a Chinese belief that 缘 is a quantitative property used to describe relationships between two people. The closer the two people are, the 缘 they have, and how much 缘 there is between two people is predefined by fate/destiny. Now imagine the difficulty of trying to come up with a translation that succinctly conveys all of that without disrupting the flow of the dialogue (I couldn’t, so I just stopped it when that came up and explained it all to Courtney).

Another word that came up frequently was 情 (qíng), which is translated as feeling, emotion, passion, and love. In Chinese, it means all those things and a bit more, and which of those concepts applies depends on the situation that 情 is used in. A lot of times it means love, but translating it as “love” is too specific, and translating as just “feeling” is too underwhelming for what it conveys. It was definitely a challenge to pinpoint the right English word to convey the meaning in each instance of the word.