Video title & syntax quick check

[ct00]

Hello! I had a go at translating this phrase: Selfies in Paris with Li = 与李一起在巴黎自拍

It is for a video title where “Li” is the name of the subject of the video.

The goal is for the title to fade from English to Chinese for a dual audience. My understanding is that the first two characters before the dash “与李一” mean “with Li”. 

For the Chinese version to read correctly, would two characters “with Li” need to come before everything else or could it read like this:

起在巴黎自拍
与李

so that it matches the English syntax structure:

Selfies in Paris
with Li

And I also would like to make sure the translation itself is clear and makes sense to native speakers.

谢谢

[Jim]

The dash is actually a character rather than punctuation and an integral part of the word 一起, meaning "together", "together with" etc, so you can't drop that and keep the other half, but I'd say the whole word is unnecessary for your title, in fact it definitely reads as extra. You could cut the whole thing to 巴黎自拍 ("Paris selfies", it'll be taken as read that you're there), then you have the 与李 which would look a bit awkward following the above, Chinese would prefer it preceding, but I'd get round that by making it 我与李 "me and Li" (if that's indeed who it is, change to "us" or whatever as suits) which won't seem so odd standing alone after the Paris bit.

[honglam]

On 12/9/2024 at 1:22 AM, ct00 said:

My understanding is that the first two characters before the dash “与李一” mean “with Li”. 

It seems that you don't have a knowledge of Chinese. You recognised the third symbol in this sequence as a dash. Yet that's a character meaning "one". Actually "一" and “起” together form a word, "一起", meaning "together". You have broken a word up, which would be unacceptable.

 

I'm analysing the translation you've provided first. "与" means “with", "李" means ”Li“, "一起" means "together", "在" means "at, in", "巴黎" is a transliteration of Paris, and "自拍" means "to take selfie" or "selfie". This expression is grammatically acceptable but there still some points to be ameliorated:

- First, Chinese seldom address someone by barely calling their family name (unless their family name are bi-syllabic, or in other words, containing two Chinese character). I'm not sure who this "Li" is in your context, but generally, if "Li" is in her/his 20s or 30s, we would add a "小"(small, young) to her/his family name, to make it "小李"(literally "young Li"); if "Li" is over 40, add a "老"(old) instead, to make it "老李"(but generally, the males address themselves so more. Maybe every girl on this earth wish their youth to be eternity.)

- Second, "与" sounds formal and tends to be used in written words. If you want to put this title more oral, use "和" instead. Generally these two characters mean the same, but the formality varies.

- Third, if you put “与李” at the end of the phrase, for native speakers, they could quickly understand that you're using machine translation, especially those with bad quality(since you're putting the adverbial at a wrong place, a stereotypical mistake newbies and worse machine translation would make). Languages have their own logic. Do not apply the logic of one language to another one mechanically. It may make the expression strange or completely incomprehensible. Japanese would say "李と一緒にパリで自撮ろう". If you change it into "自撮ろうでパリと一緒に李", that will be completely weird and unacceptable.

 

I don't know what you would put in your video so I could hardly give any advice on the expression of "在巴黎自拍". It doesn't sound casual to me, but it could be the best title for your video regarding on the contents.

 

So for now I'll give "和小李一起在巴黎自拍" or “和老李一起在巴黎自拍”(the difference between is elaborated above.). A plan of your video with more details may help me provide better advice.

[honglam]

On 12/10/2024 at 11:29 PM, honglam said:

- First, Chinese seldom address someone by barely calling their family name (unless their family name are bi-syllabic, or in other words, containing two Chinese character). I'm not sure who this "Li" is in your context, but generally, if "Li" is in her/his 20s or 30s, we would add a "小"(small, young) to her/his family name, to make it "小李"(literally "young Li"); if "Li" is over 40, add a "老"(old) instead, to make it "老李"(but generally, the males address themselves so more. Maybe every girl on this earth wish their youth to be eternity.)

BTW address someone by a mono-syllabic family name sounds like the Japanese invaders in WWII.

[honglam]

BTW be cautious using automatically translated Chinese subtitle since that may not work at all.