⚠️ Notice
This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

Alex Hsu recently published two posts in a row discussing the topic of regional variations in Chinese.

Admittedly, from the perspective of “movie title translations,” the discrepancies between translations by distributors in different regions are particularly severe (especially some poorly translated ones, Taiwan seems to favor using “formulas” or even making dirty jokes). Alex has suggested that “film studios should unify their translations”. However, direct translation isn’t always the best approach, since different languages (and even different regions speaking the same language) can have different cultures, and direct translation may not always allow audiences from certain cultures to grasp the film’s theme or the artistic conception of the original language. (Some countries also have a tendency to include spoilers when translating foreign film titles) However, blindly forcing uniformity could also backfire.

Perhaps we should leave the previously established (or “accustomed to mistakes”) names for shit mountain untouched. It would be better to focus on choosing good names for the newly emerging ones.

Annihilating local languages?

I really admire what The Pokemon Company did. In 2016, they unified twenty years of divergent names. Taiwan had been calling it 《神奇寶貝》(“Magical Treasures”), Hong Kong used 《寵物小精靈》(“Pet Elves”), and China called it 《口袋妖怪》(“Pocket Monsters”). They scrapped all three and unified under one name: 《寶可夢》(“Pokémon,” phonetically). I remember thinking the new name sounded terrible. But I agreed with the decision. And time proved them right.
——Alex Hsu《How Taiwan and China rename English movies (and why it’s a mess)》

Pokémon is an example of an attempt to clean up the shit mountains. Alex’s remarks actually overlooked a very important aspect. When Pokémon (and other Nintendo products) were unifying their transliterations, they often tilted at Mandarin pronunciations, leading to accusations of “belittling Cantonese and substituting Mandarin for Cantonese”, which caused a stir in Hong Kong at the time. If you were to say something like that in a Hong Kong community, you’d very likely get a lot of flak. If I had a less favourable impression of Alex, I could immediately launch into a tirade, accusing him of being a Mandarin chauvinist (I really could do that), willing to sacrifice the rationality of local dialect¹ pronunciation and completely deny the value of local dialects in order to achieve his grand unification ideal.

妈的，你是不是中国人，是中国人就该讲普通话，别唧唧歪歪讲什么鸟语！
不说普通话的是不是辱华废青啊？
讲什么狗屁鸟语，等着被统一吧！
咱们有推出官方汉化版本，你们就得感恩了！
XX 人全都是二鬼子，一句普通话不说
——Design dialogue

However, on the other hand, some translations of names made in Hong Kong are also poorly done. Many translations in the sports world are based on the Cantonese pronunciation, but they often misjudge the original pronunciation, and the resulting translations are almost like random translations.

The Romanization school of thought

You say you’re not Chinese? Then don’t use Chinese characters!
——Romanized Taiwanese chauvinists

Tan Kian-Tiong mentioned in his article “葬送的芙莉蓮 EP1-2 語句選”, that he persuaded the team at PTS Taigi Channel to write transliterated foreign words in Latin letters (instead of directly borrowing characters from Mandarin Chinese), arguing that the Ministry of Education’s Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwanese Taigi also uses this format.

Such a mix of Latin characters is not a convention in written Chinese in Hong Kong, except in certain compromises (such as the case of “Pokémon” mentioned above).

The impossible triangle of faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance

One compromise solution that takes all the above arguments into account, is to try to find characters that sound similar in various Chinese dialects¹ when creating new transliterations (unless they deviate too much from established conventions or “accustomed to mistakes”). However, this adds many more issues for translators to consider:

Faithfulness: Does it accurately convey the pronunciation of the original text?
Expressiveness: Does it accurately convey the meaning and artistic conception of the original text?
Elegance: Will the combined translation sound unrefined (in some dialects)?

In pure linguistics, the distinction between “languages” and “dialects” is simple: what can be mutually understood is a “dialect”; what cannot be mutually understood is a “language”. However, the boundary between “language” and “dialect” is not always clear. In my blog, I may not strictly distinguish between the usage of “language” and “dialect”, simply using whichever sounds more natural to me at the moment. ↩︎ ↩︎