• Tweet

We’ve been focusing so much on the earthquake lately that we thought we’d take a moment in between blogs to have some fun. We had a friend and his family over last night and had a very nice dinner followed by much conversation. My conversation with the husband was centered on the topic of movies and it was quite an adventure in translation. While talking about some of our favorite movies he told me about one he called “Sky Prisoner”, a movie he was convinced was popular in the US. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which movie he was talking about. After a lengthy discussion of the the main actors (Nicolas Cage) and the plot premise (a group of convicts is transported by airplane which eventually crashes in Las Vegas) we realized that the movie he was describing was actually “Con Air“. Con, short for convict, was translated as “prisoner” and “air” was translated to “sky”. Now I’ve never seen the movie personally, but it did get me to thinking about how movie titles are translated here in Chinese.

Upon further research I found the translated titles to be quite funny and thought we’d share some of them. Here’s the game: I’ll put the direct translations of the movies below and you can submit your answers as comments or e-mails. We’ll publish the answer later along with the name of the person who guessed the most correctly. Some will be quite easy to get, others not so much. All of the movies are big-budget films that can be from any genre, but will at least be recognizable to anyone over the age of 15. (Remember: these are direct translations and don’t sound as silly to the Chinese people)

1. Love at 1st Sight – 50 times

2. The King of Big Talking

3. The Politics of a Beautiful Woman Relating to the Law

4. Rough-looking Queen

5. Carribean Sea Thieves

6. Scary Creature Company

7. The Man-made Public Enemy

8. Searching the Seabed

9. The Fake God

10. Man Now Understands 100%

Find the answers to all of these on the answers page!