Wednesday 30 January 2019

Many Palace Taylor's name origins

The Three Blades Street in the Lucky Charm Qr. has a large selection of Taylors to visit.


They are either interesting for their place in the story or what familiar NPCs they hold.
This one however, is interesting simply for the name it proudly displays on the storefront.


To me the naming of this store has definately always seemed somewhat... odd.

One would think it should rather say "Many Palaces Taylor" but even that is kind of a strange name and the sign, as it is, has a peculiar aura of Engrish, unlike pretty much any other in the game.
It finally peaked my interest enough to do some research on what could possibly be behind it.

As a disclaimer: I have no actual knowledge of the Chinese language and everything provided herein is just based on rather basic translation work.

In Chinese the sign says Qiān gōng cáiféng diàn (千宮裁縫店) meaning Thousand Palace Taylor Shop.
This shows that the English name used in the game is a pretty direct translation into English, unlike some other shops like the Dou Jiang Diner, which kept part of their original Chinese name.


The reason behind this, aswell as the naming of the store itself, can easily be linked to the owner.

The store is run by a 40 year old lady that goes by the name Bao Qiangong.
If you have a keen eye you might have already spotted the similarity to the stores name.
Yes, she simply used her family name as the name for her buisiness, that's it.

It just so happens to be that this very name literaly means Thousand Palace.
I'm not exactly sure where the liberty in the translation to read as Many comes from.
Might be possible that it was changed to sound better or just to fit into the sign more easily or it could just be that this just a different approach of interpretating it as an amount.
My research simply didn't turn up anything on that.

In my opinion it would've been a better decision to just stick with the Chinese and put Qiang Gong Taylor on the storefront. Since there are other stores in the vicinity that are named in a similar fashion, especially the afformentioned Dou Jiang Diner, it wouldn't feel out of place at all.

2 comments:

  1. Do you plan on translating (not "correcting/interpreting" as you did in this one), the many Kanji and Hànzì from both games?

    For exmaple, the graffiti outisde Yan Tin Apartments (presumably made by the Land-Sharks, against Guixiang), and the red letters found inside (it), by the staircases...

    There's many more, as you know, especially the signboards throughout Wan Chai and Kowloon, so i know it's not a light endeavour...

    ReplyDelete
  2. In Chinese poetry and idioms, “百”(hundread) “千”(thousand)“万”(ten thousand) is often a virtual numeral, and just means ‘many’ instead of the actual quantity. For example the “long live” is “万岁” in Chinese, (ten thousand years), but it is just saying “keep alive for many years”.

    As for the translation of the shop name, you can actually see a lot literal English translation in Hong Kong, because it’s the colony of British Empire at that time. And to be honest, it’s what attractive to me for the place of Hong Kong, while in other places like China mainland or Taiwan, you cannot see this kind of mixture of English and Chinese culture

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.