Some notes on popular culture in China and Taiwan

Every language and culture has words and characters that represents something in popular culture, or maybe expressed better, culture slang.

Some notes on popular culture usage such as the word “cool” and “hot” in Taiwan and Mainland China.

The following are characters that you may find in the Mainland Chinese context, and that character is "牛(níu)"

You may hear phrases such as 這部電影很牛(zhè bù diàn yǐng hěn níu) OR 這電視節目真牛(zhè diàn shì jié mù zhēn níu)

You can tell from the picture below

                                           

The interesting thing is the fact that the character "牛" literally means "cow" in Chinese. I suppose the metaphor here would be that cows are relatively big animals so when you have something cool or big we'd refer to cows.


The next character that represents "cool" is the character "夯(hāng)", this Chinese character came into prevalence around 5 years ago, it also means when something is essentially "cool" or really popular. If you break the character itself apart you'd notice the characters "大(dà)" which means big and "力(lì)" which means power, so I suppose the two characters combined together means "big power" which further translates into "cool".


Using the character "夯" in an example, I could say that the hit song "Nobody" by Korean group "Wonder girls" was the most popular song a couple months ago. The sentence could look something like this.


Nobody 這首歌真是本年度最夯的一首歌(Nobody zhè shǒu gē zhēn shì běn nián dù zuì hāng de yì shǒu gē). Which translates into: The song "Nobody" is by far the coolest song this year.


For those of you who haven't yet heard this song, here it is:

Please note: The Entire song is in Korean though, I'm using this song simply to explain the usage of the character 夯, in no way is the song sang in Chinese or otherwise.


Interestingly enough, many years ago, the cartoon character "Popeye" was adequately translated into "大力水手(dà lì shuǐ shǒu)".


To break these characters down, we have once again "大力" which means big power, and then we have the characters "水手(shuǐ shǒu)" which literally translates into "water hand" but actually means "sailor" in English.

Interesting translation isn't it?


Not too surprising though, another cartoon character also happened to borrow the Chinese characters "大力" for its translation, and that's "Hercules".

Hercules

The Chinese for Hercules is "大力士(dà lì shì)" which literally translates into "big power soldier" in English.

Amazing.

Till next time!!!