Thursday, May 21, 2009

Candy Critic in Chinese

I worked out in Chinese how one could say 'Candy Critic' - I believe it to be accurate/usable if not entirely correct. 糖批评家 would be said in Mandarin "Tang Pi Ping Jia" (tones omitted!) - quite literally 'sugar criticism expert' - but of course, less literally, for Chinese speakers, ought to simply mean 'candy critic'. An amusing side note to this is if one were to call the Candy Critic simply "Candy Man/Person" it would be written 糖人 (Tang Ren) which is very close to a colloquial term used by Chinese people to describe themselves: 唐人 which, if you look at the first character, is almost the same except for the 'rice' radical to the right of the 'Tang' radical.

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The second, simpler version of Tang was the character used by the Tang Dynasty of China long ago. So, if the Candy Critic were to tell someone from China that he was a "Tang Ren", people may understandably disagree with him (as far as I know, the Candy Critic was not born and raised in China, nor were any of his recent ancestors of Chinese descent - though I could be wrong!) In any case, if he were to then write out the first version of Tang Ren, above, it could provide a humorous moment as the Chinese speaker he was talking to would see that in fact, he is a different kind of Tang Ren - not a child of the Tang Dynasty, but a Candy Man!

Jon

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