Chinese Movie Translations Of American Movies

[Chief123]

Not really sure where to post this - hope this is okay.

Last week my family rented Avatar in Taiwan. If you've seen the movie you know that there is a lot of unknown "talk" (not sure what to call it). It's not English, French, etc. it's the language of the people in the movie - which as far as I know is not a real language.

However there were Chinese translations for even those parts. In America when there are aliens or whatever that talk in an unknown tongue we just deduce what they are talking about from facial expressions and other body language and what happens next.

How then did this language get translated into Chinese? Do the Chinese have a need to have a translation if there are words being spoken? Did they read the script and have some insight into what the people were saying?

My wife had no clue as to what I was even talking about so I just gave up after a while.

[aristotle1990]

no need to quote entire post directly above yours

Their parts are all translated into English. Read the script here.

[Shelley]

The alien language is translated into english. I watched an english version and they were subtitled in english. I don't know why it should be different for America. there is lots of info contained in the dialoge that i would not be able to infer from body language.

[trien27]

Avatar = 阿凡達

The alien language = Na'vi, 納美, which was created by a real linguist.

sources:

http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/%E7%B4%8D%E7%BE%8E%E8%AA%9E

http://tw.search.yahoo.com/search?p=avatar+movie&fr=yfp-s&ei=utf-8&v=0

[valikor]

Weird. In the version I watched, the subtitles showed them speaking German. I recall this very specifically because the person who was watching it with me swore that it was alien language, and I made a point to pause the movie, type in the sentence into google translate (according to the subtitles), and show that it was, in fact, German.

(The version I watched was from a Chinese website and looked like it was filmed by a guy in the back row of the theater)