Problems behind translating: 02 (London)

 

I worked on a BBC documentary series (1984? 5?) called The Bamboo Screen, about the kind of material Chinese audiences got on their TV.  The director chose Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou (/Canton) TV station programmes, selecting from the whole range of news, entertainment (soap drama, e.g.), documentaries, etc., and also interviewed TV directors/producers plus experts over here.

    She came back with Chinese TV footage.  The clip featuring a Chinese new year variety show programme saw the audience falling about laughing almost every other line at what a comic duo (very common formula in Chinese entertainment) was saying on stage.  The BBC director was interested to include that clip in The Bamboo Screen, and got me to watch it with her and explain why they were laughing so much.

    Chinese comic duo sketches typically feature a thin man [the intelligent one] and a fat man [the slow witted one], with the thin one constantly doing word plays at the expense of the fat one, which the latter has difficulty following.  This is the case in this clip, and this is why the audience was laughing every other line.

    This was how the comic dialogue started: 

Thin man:  Here we are, about to welcome in the Year of the Tiger.  You were born a tiger, no?  (The Chinese use animal imagery a lot when insulting people, like in Engl but a lot more.)

Fat man:  Oh yes.  (Audience laughs.) (Fat man does a double take, as it begins to dawn on him that the thin man is saying he's a tiger, not a human, and he's just agreed.)

Thin man:  Oh, I meant you were born in the year of the tiger.

Thin man:  Your wife was also born in the year of the tiger, no?

Fat man:  Yes.

Thin man:  Then she's a tiger girl.  (Audience laughs, as fat man agrees.)  

Background:  There's a famous story in Chinese literature, 駱駝祥子 / luòtuò xiángzi / “camel auspicious man” /  Rickshaw Boy, published 1937, by Lao She*, featuring a young man kidnapped by some barbarian tribe, escaping later with their camels which he sold, and then worked as a rickshaw puller.   The daughter of the rickshaw-hire boss was a shrew, called Tiger Girl, so it's not a compliment at all -- a woman is not supposed to be tigerish anyway even if not for the story behind the name; any man with a Tiger Girl would be henpecked.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickshaw_Boy)

    So, only a few lines into the comic sketch, and the translation for the subtitles was already going to take paragraphs and paragraphs to decode the original.  The director gave up.  

    The English equivalent I can think of would be calling someone Shylock without having to explain it, but would need some background filled in for an audience that hasn't read Shakespeare or doesn't know the story at least.

* Lao She 老舍 taught Mandarin Chinese 1924–1929 at the then-SOS (School of Oriental Studies, now SOAS / School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).  Some of his stories were set in his time in London.

(London, 1985?)