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Translate English movie titles into Chinese

by Jimmy Olsen | March 5, 2010 | 8 Comments

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The Chinese translation of the title of the movie Top Gun:

好大一把枪 (hǎo dàyī bǎ qiāng) “what a big gun!”

There are just some things that a dictionary isn’t suited for.

Ever try to talk to your Chinese friends about some English movie, but get blank looks? Movie titles are hard to translate, and when translated literally, usually make no sense and tell you nothing useful about the movie.

That’s where mtime.com comes in. How do you say Hoosiers (1986 basketball film, Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey) in Chinese? Enter the film name in the top right-hand corner…

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and you get 火爆教头草地兵 (huǒbào jiāotóucǎodì bīng), or “The Hot-Tempered Coach and the Grassland Soldiers”

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Who would’ve thought?

The site also has trailers, reviews, theater information and showtimes for certain cities. Although it’s in Chinese only, mtime.com covers both Chinese and foreign films.

Now, anyone know any sites for getting Chinese titles for English music, books, or video games?

 

 

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Comments

  • Erik

    Tried mtime.com but the site doesn’t load.

  • Darren

    hi Erik, just tried the site works here in Beijing, you can try again http://www.mtime.com/

  • Brian

    I use Wikipedia to translate proper nouns. Cities, airports, people, albums, sports teams, movies, etc. are all there. Go to the English page for the term you want, then choose 中文 under languages. Once on the Chinese page, there are tabs for different encodings (HK/Taiwan for traditional, and 大陆 for mainland simplified).

  • Chris

    M-time got canned outside of China. I’m in Taiwan and the site has been down for more than a month

  • Darren

    Hi Chris, I had several people mentioned this problem, I guess people had problem visiting m-time outside of China.
    so here are some other websites you can get movie information as well:
    http://www.m1905.com/
    http://ent.qq.com/movie/
    http://ent.sina.com.cn/film/
    http://yule.sohu.com/movie.shtml

  • http://www.bladfretzui.com Edward Larita

    Hi! Would you mind if I share your blog with my myspace group? There’s a lot of folks that I think would really appreciate your content. Please let me know. Many thanks

  • Charles Cooper

    Just type in: “[name of movie] + 中文名“. The first few results are usually Baidu’s knowledge page, mtime, or Douban. Quite easy.

  • Anonymous

    That’s true. sometimes, the translation of the movie would be different between Taiwan/HongKong and China mainland translation.