Mandarin Dub and Food Names

[erik-the-red]

Did the Mandarin Dub preserve the food jokes?

The jokes that came from Chinese should have been easily maintained.

For example, Tenshinhan and Chaozu are both foods. I can picture confused Chinese audiences getting hungrier every time "jiaozi" is mentioned (until they get used to it).

But, what about the food names that come from English?

How did the Chinese translate those (e.g. Butter, Cheese, Carrot, Vegetable, etc.)?

[nwoo_2002]

I can't speak for the Mandarin version, but for the Cantonese version the names of were just similar to normal chinese names. The only name I can think of that was a pun was Piccolo, his name was a reference to the devil.

[kvon]

Did the Mandarin Dub preserve the food jokes?

The jokes that came from Chinese should have been easily maintained.

For example, Tenshinhan and Chaozu are both foods. I can picture confused Chinese audiences getting hungrier every time "jiaozi" is mentioned (until they get used to it).

But, what about the food names that come from English?

How did the Chinese translate those (e.g. Butter, Cheese, Carrot, Vegetable, etc.)?

It depends on which version of the Mandarin dub you're talking about. The one I watched at around 1995 in Taiwan had preserved the puns from Chinese food. If the food name uses Kanji, then they would use the Mandarin pronounciation while keeping the puns intact, such as Tenshinhan to Tian Jin Fan, Chaozu to Jiao Zi. There's several exception, however, such as Paikuhan. Even though Paikuhan was spelled in Katakana, the Mandarin dub took the unofficial Kanji version of his name anyway (排骨飯) and pronounce it as Pai Gu Fan.

As for the English food puns, they almost never retain the meaning. If they want to use the exact meanings, the names would be obscured from the original pronounciation by a fairly large degree. So in general, the Mandarin dub sacrificed the English puns for the sake of phoneticology (is that a word?). Want examples? Kakarotto became Ka Luo Te, Vegeta became Bei Ji Ta (some other dubs had him named as Da Er for some strange reason), Raditz to La Di Zi, so on and so forth.

If anybody's wondering about how to pronounce the Chinese spelling I wrote above, check this out.

[tinlunlau]

Vegeta was known as "Da Er" because that's the name he was given in Tong Li Taiwan-Chinese edition of the manga.

his name in the Hong Kong dub wasn't any better. it's "Bei Daat".