Firefly Chinese (Tumblr)

October 30, 2012 5:33 PM

Firefly Chinese (Tumblr)
A friend and I are working through the Josh Whedon TV series Firefly and translating the Chinese phrases in each episode. We post video clips from the show and audio clips of us pronouncing the phrases along with our non-expert analysis of the word usage. We've posted everything from the pilot ("Serenity") and we're now working on episode 2 ("The Train Job"). Hopefully we'll finish up in the next month or so but I figured we mind as well share now as folks all over are already celebrating the show's tenth year anniversary.

Role: maker

posted by jng (5 comments total)

Wow, the format of this is really neat. I look forward to the rest!
posted by lholladay at 5:44 PM on October 30, 2012

It's mind-boggling to me that the writers went to the effort of making the Chinese all make sense, and the actors got the phrasing and pronunciations close. I just assumed they were Chinese-like nonsense words they just uttered to make up a fake future language.
posted by mathowie at 5:53 PM on October 30, 2012

I don't know if you know about it already, but this site may help - your format is great, but looks like the basic work of translation has already been done.
posted by Happy Dave at 2:14 AM on October 31, 2012

Thanks all! Happy Dave, yes, that was a really helpful resource, but figured updating it for Web 2.0 and re-translating some of his guesses (and providing context) would make it more accessible.
posted by jng at 7:41 PM on October 31, 2012

You might also want to check out my page of Firefly Mandarin phrases.
posted by jiawen at 10:54 PM on November 25, 2012