{"id":24,"date":"2005-12-11T07:44:44","date_gmt":"2005-12-11T01:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/?p=24"},"modified":"2006-10-12T07:47:15","modified_gmt":"2006-10-12T01:47:15","slug":"how-do-you-say-virtuous-shell-in-chinese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/?p=24","title":{"rendered":"how do you say “virtuous shell” in chinese?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night I went with a friend to see “Napoleon Explosive: The Chinese Napoleon Dynamite” at the Alamo Drafthouse<\/a> (which is one of the many places that I consider makes Austin the wonderful place that it is.) It was Napoleon Dynamite in “Chinavision,” which basically means that they show a DVD of the film from China which was subtitled in Chinese and then translated back into English subtitles. It was very surreal. <\/p>\n

I completely understood the translation of “Napoleon Dynamite” to be “Napoleon Explosive,” but how did Pedro’s name translate to “Virtuous Shell?” Is it a phonetic thing? Hopefully there is someone reading this out there who knows some basic Chinese and can resolve these profound questions of life.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite translations from the movie was when Napoleon asks about the chicken’s “large talons”, and it was translated to something like “big marketable skills.”<\/p>\n

For those wondering, no, alas, I was not one of the lucky ones to win a “Vote for Virtuous Shell” t-shirt. I like how those shirts made what was originally a somewhat obscure movie reference (and which became so mainstream that even Target was selling “Vote for Pedro” shirts) back into an obscure jest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I went with a friend to see “Napoleon Explosive: The Chinese Napoleon Dynamite” at the Alamo Drafthouse (which is one of the many places that I consider makes Austin the wonderful place that it is.) It was Napoleon Dynamite in “Chinavision,” which basically means that they show a DVD of the film from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shannou.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}