I went to the movie theater with my family on Saturday to watch Zootopia 2 (疯狂动物城2) here in Shanghai. As usual, we watched the movie with the original audio and Chinese subtitles, and enjoyed it a lot. But I did take note of the subtitles here and there and noticed a little translation detail that I liked. It relates to the new Shakira song “Zoo” I’m including below:
The part I’m talking about is where Shakira sings “zoo ooh ooh.” As song lyrics it’s slightly clunky, because the Chinese word for “zoo” is 动物园 (dòngwùyuán), which doesn’t rhyme with “ooh.” Not a huge deal, obviously, but the translators realized they could do better.
So they rewrote the song lyrics a little bit so that where the English lyrics are “zoo,” the Chinese lyrics are 动物 (dòngwù), which actually does rhyme with “ooh”. In this onscreen translation, the “ooh ooh” was also “translated” (transliterated) as 呜 呜 (wū wū). Nice!
I went to YouTube and then Bilibili to try to find a video with this translation, but I actually couldn’t find it. Instead I found this literal translation of “zoo” (to 狂欢乐园 and 狂欢动物园):
Let me know if you find the better translation somewhere. I haven’t heard a Chinese version of the theme song yet, but I’ll be interested to see what translation they use (hopefully the one I saw in the theater subtitles).
Related: The Laziest Animated Movie Title Translations Ever
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