Chinese has some really strong insults. Flipping through the pages of the excellent insult/slang-guide “Niubi” by Eveline Chao, one can find useful phrases like “fuck your ancestors to the 18th generation.” But when it comes to yo mama, insults in Mandarin Chinese stop at the standard “fuck your mother.”
I’m trying to change this with my new humanitarian culture project, the #YoMama翻译Project# on Sina Weibo. Back home in America, we have so many ways to talk about yo mama – her teeth, her funky breath, her short little IKEA-stool legs, the fact that everyone has hit dat nasty ass…and you know the bitch is poor. She’s so poor she can’t afford to pay attention, and that ho is so dumb it took her two hours to watch 60 Minutes.
I just wanna give the youth the same tools I had when I was a middle-class white kid in the suburbs. “Life Chances” may be the term preferred by sociologists. Some “humanitarians” wanna give laptops to all the poor kids in the world, but this is dangerous. We’re gonna end up with a bunch of kids walking around the African bush totally absorbed watching Dora The Explorer on a screen, headphones blaring, and BAM – eaten by a lion. Munch..munch…(lion spits out bones of young, technology-distracted Dora The Explorer fan).
The #YoMama翻译Project# does present some interesting sociolinguistic puzzles, though. Take the example above: “Yo Mama so poor, that bitch can’t afford to pay attention.”
Mandarin doesn’t have this phrasal verb “pay attention,” and translating this literally sounds bizarre. Something like “Yo Mama is so ugly she makes blind kids cry when they look at her” or “Yo Mama is so ugly, I took the bitch to the zoo and the guy at the door said ‘thanks for bringing her back!’” translates much better due to the lack of idiomatic English.
So let’s all join hands and come up with new, culturally-relevant ways to talk about yo mama – for the youth, before it’s too late.
The Pharcyde – Yo Mama
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[translation of this article coming soon]
really random bit about today’s photo – i was walking down yongfu lu with my dad and my chinese sister, talking about yo mama (obviously) and we saw this t-shirt for sale! no joke, ask yo mama.
…and i would say show this post to yo mama, but u know that bitch can’t read! yo mama is 文盲.
