Month: October 2014

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy

Went to watch the Guardians of the Galaxy yesterday. I’ve watched Captain America and The Avengers before, but for this movie I’m mostly watching because of Rocket and Goot. Yet Marvel does not disappoint; this movie is every bit as enjoyable as others in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

昨天去看了银河护卫队。之前看过前作《美国队长》和《复仇者联盟》，但这次主要是去看火箭和格鲁特的。结果这部电影并不比那两部差；漫威出品，必为精品。

Rocket was an interesting character. He might be tiny, furry and having a tail, but he is no friendly saturday morning cartoon; make no mistake, this guy’s a veteran and a wild beast at heart.

火箭是个有意思的角色。虽然他不高，毛绒绒还有尾巴，但他可不是什么可爱的小动物；这家伙有一身历经沙场的经验和一颗野兽的心。

Many talked about how all Groot can speak is “I am Groot”, so I expected to hear a lot of it in the movie. Turns out he’s a person of a few words, only speaking up occasionally, but his grunts can be very expressive. His personality is better displayed in actions. Kudos to the writers and animators for bringing these two extraordinary characters to life.

许多人都在说格鲁特的台词只有“我是格鲁特”五个字，所以我原以为会听到很多次。结果他竟然沉默寡言，只是时不时嗯啊一下。

This isn’t to say the humanoid main characters are boring. It took them the half of the movie to stop fighting each other for the orb, and start taking on the villains as a team. The villains were memorable, too. Even though Ronan only directly crosses the protagonists’ path twice in the movie, he’s clearly established to be a powerful murderous sociopath.

我不是说剩下的主角就很无聊——电影的一半都在讲主角如何从互相争斗的对手成为同仇敌忾的搭档。同时，《银河护卫队》也塑造了印象深刻的反面角色。虽然罗南和主角直接会面仅有两次，他作为一位强大的杀人狂的影响力却一直可以感到。

Among the minor characters, Nova Prime, the commander of the Nova Corps, really stands out. TVTropes calls her a “cool old lady”, and for good reason. Being the head of a planet’s defence force, she maintains a calm demeanor, even when the planet is under assault. Plus, she’s dressed in a kick-butt uniform.

次要角色中 Nova Prime 算是英姿飒爽的老奶奶，作为星球防卫部队的总指挥官，即使大敌在前，她也从容不乱。并且那身制服帅呆了。

The music was also enjoyable – the soundtrack features many 70’s hits by way of the main character’s mixtape; it makes me want to dance. The locations were also visually impressive.

音乐也相当动听——主角一直在听的随身听，许多70年代美国最热门的音乐，让我想要跳舞。各个场景也都具有视觉震撼力。

Guardians of the Galaxy is shown in China with English dialogue and Chinese subtitles. I expected the subtitles to be bad (okay, not “backstroke of the west” bad) but it turns out to be just… kinda meh, really. It’s mostly accurate, but some of the coarse language have been toned down. (Which is why it wasn’t dubbed, I guess.) The subs did have Chinese slang, but it didn’t feel as snappy as the original dialog.

银河护卫队在中国上映的时候是英文配音，中文字幕。观看前听说字幕质量不好 (还没有《西斯的反击》翻译成 “西方仰泳” 那么糟糕) ；观后感觉算是……马马虎虎。基本上翻译准确，但是有些原版是粗话的地方，中文用了一些没那么强力的俗语，总觉得没有原文有味道。

Also, the Chinese subtitle font is pretty much the equivalent of Times Roman. Which looked rather awkward in a space opera, especially with the futuristic font in the opening credits. The subtitles are also a little distracting, but I suppose that’s just how subtitles are.

另外，中文字幕居然用的是宋体。对于这种太空肥皂剧用一本正经的字体，实在是不得其解。和开头工作人员列表未来风格的英文字体形成了强大反差。另外字幕有一些烦人，但是字幕都是这样的吧。

As an addendum, the movie is shown in China as “Galaxy Guard Team”, which is a pretty close translation. In Taiwan it’s translated as “Interplanetary Special Attack Team”, and this is the name TVTropes quotes. I don’t know where they got that name from… Must be the same people who translated Final Fantasy as “Space Warriors” (not making this up).

最后说一下，台湾把片名翻译成“星际特攻队”，而 TVTropes 说这是中文的翻译。我真不知道这是怎么翻出来的，一定是把 “最终幻想” 翻译成 “太空战士” (确有其事) 的原班人马。

Night owls, code monkeys, and siege lions. 代码猴子和攻城狮。

Today I want to talk about a few words that are curiously similar between English and Chinese, and one word that is just curious.

In English, we tend to call people who are active late into the night, night owls. In parts of China, (small) owls are called 夜猫子 yèmaōzi, literally “night catty”. (I don’t know which parts of China would that be, but I guess it’s northern China.) More often, it’s figuratively used to refer to people who stay up late – the same as English night owls. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary also offers another word for late sleepers: 夜游神, literally “nigh-roaming god”, refers people who wander at night.

英语中对晚上还在活动的人叫做 night owls 夜猫头鹰。中国某地的方言 (北方吧？) 管猫头鹰叫做 “夜猫子”，也用来指晚上很晚睡觉的人——和英文night owls 一样。对这种人，现代汉语词典记载了另外一个可以用的词：夜游神，比喻晚上游荡的人。

Also in English, you might know people who program as “code monkeys”, invoking the image of a million monkeys banging on the keyboard. (Wiktionary editor Equinox notes this word is “slang, sometimes derogatory”. Of course, it can also be used self-deprecatingly.) Chinese has the perfect translation for this phrase: 程序猿 chéngxùyúan, pronounced exactly the same as 程序员 chéngxùyúan “programmer”. However, instead of using the character 员, that marks a person’s occupation or membership, as in 驾驶员 driver, 服务员 server or 演员 actor, instead the character for apes, 猿, is used, making it “programmape”. (Well, humans are apes…)

英语里，有时也称写程序的人为 code monkeys “代码猴子”，不由得让人想起百万猴子敲打键盘的形象。(维○词典编辑 Equinox 对此词的注释是 “俚语，有时贬义”。当然也可以用来自嘲。) 中文对这一词有一个绝妙的翻译:“程序猿”，发音与“程序员”完全相同；但是将驾驶员、服务员、演员中表示职位或团体的“员”一字，换成了“猿”。

Sometimes typos also make new words: one jocular name for engineers is 攻城狮 gōngchéngshī “fortress-attacking lion” or “siege lion”, again having the exact pronunciation as 工程师 gōngchéngshī “engineer”. The story is like this: Tencent is the company that developed the hugely popular IM program QQ (800 million users) and WeChat (300 million users – about the total population of United States) among other services. One of its microblog accounts posted that one of its security guards managed to go through rounds of interviews, and became an engineer at its research institute. A rare event in itself, and a notable accomplishment indeed. But instead of 工程师, the post coined the word 攻城狮, or siege lion. And the rest is Internet history.

有时候手误也会造成新词：称工程师为攻城狮。发音也是完全一样。来源似乎如此：腾讯公司（旗下QQ用户已达8亿，微信用户已达3亿——约与全美国人口相当）一微博上帐号贴出保安通过层层面试后，成为研究院的工程师的消息。这本是很罕见的事件，也是值得赞许的成就。但原帖使用的是“攻城狮”三个字……于是就传开了。

References

The Chinese National Day Golden Week, and other holiday-shifting craziness

October 1st is the National Day of the People’s Republic of China.

十月一日是中华人民共和国国庆日。

In the United States and Canada, statuary holidays like this tend to be on Mondays and Fridays, which creates a “long weekend”. The National Day in China, however, is a little different. The whole country do no work for a whole week! Many take vacations, so people call this the “golden week”. As a result, the tourist spots become crammed with people, all the expressways get congested from one end to another, and plane tickets sell out (I don’t know how are the trains doing). Hardly a way to take a relaxing vacation.

在美国和加拿大，这样的法定假日大多都在周一和周五，这样的安排创建了“长周末”。但中国国庆有些不一样。举国上下一周七天全部放假！许多人会去旅游，所以人们称这是“黄金周”。于是，旅游点看到挤满的人山人海，高速公路从一端堵车堵到另一端，而订机票也成了不可能的任务 (我不知道铁路那边怎么样)。完全没有放松的假日。

But the National Day is only a 3-day statuary holiday, so how is it possible that everybody takes a week-long vacation? The keyword here is “transferred holidays”: weekends that are swapped with days in the “golden week”. The State Council publishes a notice every year (like this one for 2014), deciding which rest days are swapped with which working days. Then add another weekend that would fall inside the golden week, and tada! You get a 7-day holiday.

但国庆法定只放三天假，怎么会所有人连休七天呢？这里的关键字是 “调休”：用平常的周末，与黄金周中的工作日对调。国务院每年会发布一份通知，决定哪些休息天与工作日对调。再加上黄金周里本来就有的周末，连休七天的假期就这么产生了！

The drawback is of course, you still need to work these two days transferred out. Before 2014, that means working 7 days in a row. For 2014, the days are shifted from a week before and a week after, so only two weeks of working 6 days in a row.

当然，调出去的那两天还是要工作的。2014年之前这意味着有七天要不休息连轴转。2014年调休，是从前一周和后一周各调一天，所以只要两周连续工作六天就好。

The same holiday transfer is also applied to the Spring Festival, which is like Christmas in that it’s a traditional time for family gatherings; applied to a country that has as many people as China, this results in even bigger traffic every year. Before 2007 this is also applied to the International Labor Day on May the 1st; after 2007, Labor Day is no longer a 7-day holiday. Instead, three traditional Chinese holidays are now designated as new statuary holidays (Qingming, Dragon Boat, and Mid-Autumn festivals). For 2014, all three fall between Friday and Monday, making these also “long weekends”.

调休不止在国庆，也对春节使用；春节有些像圣诞节，两个都算是传统的合家团聚的节日。对于有中国这样人口众多的国家，其结果就是春运。2007 年之前，在五一国际劳动节也调休 (美国、加拿大的劳动节在九月份)。2007 年之后，五一不再休整周，而将清明、端午和中秋，设成新的法定假日。2014 年，这三个节日都在周五和周一之间，中国也有了自己的 “长周末”。

In the three holidays, the Dragon Boat festival and the Mid-Autumn festival are based on the traditional Chinese calendar, in which every month is 30 days; so the dates on the Gregorian calendar fluctuates each year. (Instead of leap days, the traditional calendar has leap months.) But the Qingming festival is always April 4th or April 5th; this is because it’s observed 15 days after the Spring Equinox, and the Gregorian calendar is designed to track the seasons, and the Spring Equinox in particular very accurately.

这三个假日中，端午和中秋的日期都是根据传统农历的；农历每个月都是30天，于是在格里高利历 (公历) 上的日期每年都有变化。但清明每年都是四月4日或四月5日，原因是清明总是在春分后15天，而格里高利历设计上是准确跟踪季节变化的，特别是每年春分的日期。