Every time I go to a videotape store to rent a movie, I spend about an hour trying to find the movie I want because of the fact that the Chinese name is often (for about half of the movies) completely unrelated to the English name, so the only way to find the movie is to look at the name of every videotape on every shelf until I finally find the one I’m looking for. But if I had known the Chinese name for the movie, then I could just tell the salesgirl, and she could find it for me right away. Sometimes I have tried telling the salesgirl the names of the actors and the basic plot of the movie, but this usually doesn’t help unless the salesgirl has recently seen that movie and still remembers it.
And I’ve discovered that the salesgirls have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the English names of the movies. When I try telling the salesgirls the English name for a movie, they always say “ting1 bu4 dong3” and start laughing.
Here are a few examples of how the English names and Chinese names of movies are often completely different:
English: “The Mexican”
Chinese: “Dangerous Lovers”
(wei2 xian3 qing2 ren2)
So my question is: Does anyone know of a website that shows a table which has both the English names and the Chinese names for lots of popular movies? It would have to be a website, not a book, because I’m usuaully looking for recent movies, so books would become outdated too quickly. For example, I’d love to see Meg Ryan’s new movie “Kate and Leopold”, but I don’t have any idea what the Chinese name is.
So you were unable to see Pretty Woman, The Dish, or The Mexican?
You lucky bugger!
You won’t be so lucky with Kate and Leopold though – I think its still on at the pictures.
Before you flame my unhelpful reply, I’ll just add that I’ll ask my movie buff wife if there’s any kind of site such the one you asked about. I’ll post here if she knows of any.
Oh, and one more thing. In KPS, where I usually go, they let me go behind the counter and key in the English title in their computer (they’ll show you which window to type into). The computer will immediately spit out the Chinese name, the girl’ll go: “Oh THAAAT one! Of course we have it! Hold on and I’ll get it for you.”
Mark, I think you’re out of luck, unless you go to Blockbuster. They can cross-reference it for you.
Just thought of another way to get the names of movies in English and Chinese: Go to the movie sites for Cinemark Cinemas in the Living Hell shopping mall or to the China Post entertainment section, where all the current movies are playing. Save the webpages on to your hard drive every week, and then when you are ready to rent the movies months down the road, all you have to do is go through your saved files until you find the one you want.
I love the Chinese name for the Eddie Murphy movie “A Vampire in Brooklyn”. The Chinese name is “Wo xi, wo xi, wo xi, xi, xi”, or “I suck, I suck, I suck, suck, suck” Ha!
Thanks a lot for telling me about your list of Chinese names for Western movies at your website. It’s fantastic! I’ve been looking for a list like that for years! It’s just too bad that it only goes up to 1997. Where did you get all the information? Did you type in all that data one by one, or did you copy it from somewhere?
You can find Chinese movie titles pretty quickly using Google. All you have to do is put the English title in quotes, followed by a space and any Chinese character that tends to pop up in lists of movie titles: Try out the following search strings, for example:
Type it out myself? No. I usually limit masochistic exercises in typing to long lists of romanized place names. (I wish I were kidding about that.)
In the case of the movie list, I grabbed it off the 'Net and reprocessed it into a bandwidth-friendly format. But I don’t remember just where I found it. I only posted it to my site after you made the initial inquiry.
Actually the Matrix thing brings up a point no-one’s made.
Chinese names for Western movies aren’t standard across the Chinese community.
For example, in HK (I think - there or the mainland), the Matrix was called 22 Shiji Sharen Wangluo, or 22nd Century Killer Network, while here it was Haike Renwu, Hacker Mission. The names vary, and can vary wildly. Sometimes it’s a function of the difference between phonetic structures of the dominant dialects in each territory, sometimes it’s an idiomatic difference, sometimes it’s just… different.
The other day I decided to look for The Big Lebowski in a video store near Tai Da. Upon walking in, I realized that, shit, all of the titles are in Chinese, and there was no way I was going to find it unless I know the translation in Chinese. Is there any easy way to find movie title translations?
I can’t download the movie or buy it from abroad because I need it to have Chinese subtitles.
NOTE: I don’t speak or write Chinese yet, so don’t tell me to search. I will get my girlfriend to try though.
I am looking for a place where I can find movie titles translated in chinese. What’s Pulp Fiction in chinese? or Heat etc… is there a website that has a listing or anything like this?
Thanks
