President must die? (chop suey)

These days there appeared an unorthodox set of春聯(chun lian2)*¹ in Taichung, Taiwan with the latter part as “總統也非死不可(zong3 tong3 ye3 fei si3 bu4 ke3),” literally meaning “president must die too.” What? A death threat to the president ?

If you look at the former part of the 春聯, 全民上線飆網路(quan2 ming2 shang4 wang4 biao wang3 lu4), everybody logs on to the Internet, you’ll get more of it. For the youngsters, there won’t be any difficulty understanding its meaning. They won’t be startled and panic, for they all know that 非死不可(fei si3 bu4 ke3) is jokingly used to call Facebook , generally called 臉書(lian3 shu).

To follow the trend, President Ma started his Facebook on January 15 this year. That’s what the 春聯 is about—even the president starts his own Facebook. It doesn’t mean what it seems to mean, president has to die too. In Chinese, 非 . . . 不可 means someone must do something. For example, 你非聽我的話不可(ni3 fei ting wo3 de hua4 bu4 ke3), you must listen to me.

It reminds me long ago at Disco’s age, instead of calling it 迪斯可(di2 si ke3) as it was generally translated, some people called it 踢死狗(ti si3 gou3), kicking a dead dog. In 80s when AIDS was first discovered, some people called it 愛死(ai4 si3) instead of 愛滋(ai4 zi) as we call it now. It implies not only the high fatality, but the connotation of “love to death.”

When I was teaching at junior high years ago, many of the students learned English vocabulary by changing them into similar Chinese. For example, 三個饅頭(san ge man2 tou2) , three man-tou*² for sentimental.

尖頭鰻(jian tou2 man4), pointed-headed eel, for gentleman.

There’s a joke wide spread on the net, which is a good example of how sometimes English is translated into Chinese hilariously, but in a wrong way.

On a test of English, students are required to translate English sentences into Chinese. Here are the answers of a student:

“How are you?”  --怎麼是你?  (Why is it you?)

“How old are you?” –怎麼老是你?  (Why is it always you?)

They are hilarious because the student ignores the differences of sentence patterns between the two languages and translate the English sentences word by word literally. Joke as it is, it does show a mistake we often make when learning a foreign language.

*Note 1: Please refer to my previous writing Obsessive with names and words (II) for more info about 春聯

2. Mantou :often referred to as Chinese steamed bun/bread--wikipedia

春聯=春联

總統=总统: president

網路=网路: the Internet

臉書=脸书

聽=听: listen

迪斯可=迪斯科

愛=爱: love

饅頭=馒头