Asian Word Play

http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Sports/NBA/03SportsBKN01042804.htm

Asian sportscasters, stumped by 'airball,' opt for 'bread roll'

By JOHN KRICH
The Wall Street Journal

Last update: 28 April 2004


SINGAPORE -- Television viewers across China last month tuned in to a clash of rivals known as Wolf King and the Warrior. In the end, the Warrior prevailed by subjecting his opponent to tong zai, a Chinese phrase meaning "death by beating."

This was no cartoon. Rather, it was a heated U.S. National Basketball Association game, as presented in Chinese by sports commentator Julian Lin Chih-Lung from a broadcast booth on this island nation. Mr. Lin gave the live play-by-play as Los Angeles Lakers center Shaquille O'Neal -- known to his Chinese followers as "Shia-ke" or Warrior -- fought for a favorable Western Conference playoff berth against Kevin Garnett of the Minnesota Timberwolves, known better in the world's most populous nation as "Lang Wang," or Wolf King.

"Calling him Lang Wang, the leader of the Timberwolves, gives our viewers something in their own heritage to relate to," Mr. Lin explains.

Mr. Lin is one of a team of broadcasters and researchers at the ESPN/Star sports network who translate the world of Western professional sports into Chinese or Hindi for an important Asian growth market. As new Asian stars such as NBA star Yao Ming widen the Asian fan base, viewership of televised sports in Asia is soaring. ESPN/Star, a joint venture between Walt Disney Co. and Hearst Corp., owners of ESPN, and News Corp., now reaches 185 million households, three times what it reached in 1996.

But the language of Western sports, littered with arcane terms such as bunting, double-dribbling and Hail Mary passes, has had to expand its vocabulary to speak to this important new audience.

Often, sports terms can't be translated directly. There's no way to replicate expressions such as "to hot dog," meaning to show off, or to make a basketball shot "from downtown" or from long distance, says Kennegh Lau Yeung, an announcer for ESPN/Star and former Hong Kong basketball player. "We have to avoid expert terms, like rotation defense, and look for things that are familiar in the Asian lifestyle."

That's why an "air ball," a basketball shot that misses the hoop and backboard entirely, becomes, a "mian bao" -- or bread roll -- in Taiwan. The Chinese-language analogy, created by Taiwanese fans, probably came about, says Mr. Lau, because bread rolls "look hard on the outside but are very soft on the inside." And a blocked shot, meanwhile, is "kai mao" in the Mandarin dialect of Chinese, meaning "a hat covering your head," while a slam dunk is "yup jun" in the Cantonese dialect spoken in Hong Kong -- roughly, "cork the bottle."

"It always sounds peculiar to an English speaker to hear these terms in another language," says ESPN/Star's Vice President of Production Huw Bevan, a native of Wales who once helped the BBC translate programs into the difficult Welsh tongue.

Early on, ESPN/Star realized it needed researchers to provide the vocabulary of sport if the broadcaster was to connect with Asian viewers. "We like to think we're setting trends that will become the international norm," says Mr. Bevan. "Our viewers, especially those exposed to ... American sports like NFL football or ice hockey, will benefit from the clarity of our new terms." ESPN/Star is considering possible expansion into other languages, including Thai and Malay, in its efforts to reach a wider Asian audience.

ESPN/Star's staff search daily newspapers and Web sites to research terminology already in use to describe sports action in Asian languages. But often, they rely on the fertile imaginations of announcers such as 31-year-old Darain Shahidi.

Mr. Shahidi, who has anchored ESPN's nightly Hindi-language sports news for two years, says Indian viewers will switch channels if he doesn't make his commentary as catchy as possible. So when teams lose, he sometimes tells Indian viewers they have been "strangulated" or "hanged for murder."

When Mr. Shahidi describes a slam-dunk by Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs in Hindi, he speaks of "shoving something in a hole with a broom." For baseball, he has used the terms of Britain's cricket, a deeply popular sport in India, to help illustrate the achievements of home-run king Barry Bonds.

But "even then," he notes, "calling a home run just like a sixer in cricket is technically all wrong, because he doesn't really score six points each time."

Just as U.S. commentators compete with unique terms, Indian announcers seek to outdo each other with distinctive expressions. One, a retired cricket player named Navjot Singh Sidhu, has become famous for his "Sidhuisms," as when he refers to a losing team as "tumbling over like a row of bicycles without their stands."

An American broadcaster might refer to a baseball slugger's ability to "jack one out of the yard." Indian announcers covering cricket, says Mr. Shahidi, might say "the batsman has a royal stroke," "his bat is roaring like a lion," or, the ever-popular, "runs are flowing from his bat like water flowing from the Ganges River."

In Chinese, even names are a challenge. Every Western athlete's name has a Chinese equivalent, often several. In Taiwan, Michael Jordan is known in the Mandarin dialect as "Chiao Dan" and in Cantonese as "Mai Gou Zo Doen," both attempts to approximate the sound of his name in Chinese dialects. Then there are his numerous nicknames. One, "kong zhong fei ren," roughly translates as "man who flies through mid-air."

Naming athletes in Chinese is full-time work for May Chew and a team of three other researchers at ESPN/Star's Singapore headquarters. Thousands of names from team rosters fill the 15 bulky loose-leaf notebooks that line Ms. Chew's tiny workstation.

Long names are particularly difficult to translate into Chinese, a language in which family names generally contain one syllable -- Chen, Wang or Hu, for example. Today, Ms. Chew hunts for the Chinese characters that approximate the names of players for the Greek soccer team, Panathainikos.

"This isn't sport, it's linguistics," Ms. Chew says. When Spanish footballer Jose Maria Gutierrez became known on his player jersey as just plain "Guti," making for a much shorter translation job, Ms. Chew says she breathed a sigh of relief.

She felt less lucky during the just concluded NCAA basketball tournament, known as "March Madness." Announcers needed new three-syllable Chinese equivalents for all the players on 64 U.S. college teams. Often during tournament season, Ms. Chew has to work 48 hours at a stretch with only five hours off, she says.

"For the language department," she says, "it really is March madness."

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Word Play


English renditions of Chinese terms used to translate U.S. sports jargon


Slam dunk: Yap jun (Corked the bottle)

Blocked shot: Huo guo (Hot pot)

Choke artist: Jin zhang da shi (Nervous wreck)

Touchdown: Da zheng (Reach the destination)

 

Then imagine the challenge for the fans listening elsewhere, and their translating announcers!