If ancient China had an equivalent of Hot Topic, I imagine they would sell clothes like this…
The Legend of Chusen 青云志, what we previously called Noble Aspirations, has released even more stills and a trailer. Starring Li Yifeng, Zhao Liying, Qin Junjie, Tang Yixin, and Yang Zi, after seeing some of the backgrounds the costumes look a bit less “mass produced” to me, especially after the trailer. :)
More stills below the cut.
Curious, is this drama in cantonese, madarin, Taiwanese? I don’t know the difference. TIA.
Mandarin
Woah, the trailer looks really good and I’ve been looking forward to this as I love Zhao Liying and Yang Zi!
Personally, I would translate the title as something like To Kill Immortals: The Will of Qing Yun. I thought that the 青云志 was more of a reference to the place Qing Yun. Judging from the trailer, it’s a very significant place, and that the “noble” meaning was used almost ironically because in the last line of the trailer, he says that there was no going back from the moment he stepped into Qing Yun and it looks like everything was fated to turn out pretty terribly.
But yeah, I agree with what you said before because it’s definitely a cultural and language thing because it’s hard to capture the nuances of Mandarin in English :( But then again, I’m not fluent and I may have interpreted thing wrong haha.
I think that just shows how different it is. I mean sometimes when you get into it, Mandarin is really actually quite beautiful but then translating becomes a huge bump in the road…
Would Qingyun mean Green(or Blue) Cloud? Does 诛 mean kill?
I still am fluent in Beijing style Mandarin but haven’t used it natively since I was 12, as such many literary nuances are lost on me and I translate everything into the literal English meaning in my head. I was watching 睡在我上铺的兄弟 and it took me awhile to realise that 我靠(taken aback?) doesn’t mean I lean or that 草泥马 is a homonym of 操你妈.
I think that’s a common problem that most if not all of us can relate to… XD
I don’t know the intent of the person who came up with the translation, but I’d always thought Nobel Aspirations was a play on Great Aspirations, in which case it’s kind of perfect.
Is there an official source for the name change other than it appears to be the name used by some video game fans? Other than Noble Aspirations being a better name, Chusen is just a strange choice since it’s Cantonese translation but in Pinyin-style. Also I read it out loud and can’t help but think it sounds like a derogatory word in mandarin.
It just seems like every other site that I have seen has been using that title for a while now and it seems to be what is sticking at the moment. Therefore, I changed it to help readers better navigate between this site and other sites.
Do you think I should change it back? I would be more than happy to do so if you guys feel it is necessary.
I don’t like this title translation, it’s generic and doesn’t mean anything. Don’t you think this is better?
诛仙：青云志
Let’s kill the gods: Noble Aspirations
That would be a more literal translation… but then that risks getting rubbed off as “Engrish” of some sort.
You have to remember we are dealing with different cultural spheres between the Chinese and English language and some things, especially the more literary you get, don’t exactly translate well… especially when it’s Chinese to English in my opinion.
Also, bemoan the English titles all we want but I think we have to remember that the last I checked, it seems like most Chinese dramas get a majority of their revenues from the Mainland market, above that the Sinosphere and other Chinese speaking countries/regions or countries with large overseas Chinese communities that maintain the Mandarin language through the education system like Taiwan, Hong Kong, maybe Macao, Singapore, Malaysia, and then after that comes Asia which tends to have a closer connection in terms of culture given history and large overseas Chinese communities and growing numbers of Mandarin schools and things simply seem to translate better.
With this in mind, the Western world and outside are probably one of the last on that list. True, there’s the glory of having a drama that was able to make it outside of Asia but let’s be realistic. I’m not sure about other countries but last I heard, a significant amount of Americans still do not like subtitles and that’s a major barrier in and of itself especially compounded with the cultural difference. That and in my opinion there’s still some disdain for Asian culture that is always lurking and just hasn’t rubbed off yet.
True, the titles are generic and it’s fun to joke about them but I guess at this point I’m just glad there aren’t that many WTF/Engrish/Incomprehensible-from-a-Western-cultural-standpoint/embarrassing titles out there. I think on this point, the West has to show that it can appreciate and reciprocate with some form of a success or a few of them before we see some better attempts at translating these beyond going the generic route.