Space Captain Smith goes to China

[Toby Frost]

So, this is rather strange...

Space Captain Smith and sequels are going to be released in China! Yes, a deal has been done and they are going to be translated into simplified Chinese and sold in China. Obviously, this raises a lot of questions, not least how a book of puns about extremely British things will work in another language and a completely different culture. My current answer to all such questions is "goodness knows". I'll let you have more details once I have them. It's good news, but rather odd!

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Fabulous!

 

[HareBrain]

Are they keeping the same cover art? If not, I'm dying to see it! (Though I wonder if you are.)

From what little I've seen of the somewhat kitschy Chinese attitude to things British, I think they could really take off.

 

[Toby Frost]

I think they might be, but I'd love to see what they came up with otherwise!

I didn't really know that the Chinese had much of a pop-culture concept of Britain (as opposed to the Japanese) but I suspect that has changed in recent years (especially in London). Who knows? It might end up being the year of the hamster!

 

[thaddeus6th]

Might be popular. I remember hearing somewhere that the Chinese actually quite like British culture.

And if it is, that's a hell of a big market. Best of luck

 

[Ursa major]

not least how a book of puns about extremely British things will work in another language and a completely different culture

I'm not sure about the suitability of your puns, nor the context in which they work, but I'm sure I've read that the Chinese are keen on puns and that Mandarin is full of homophones.

And having DuchDuckGo'd, I see that there's a Wikipedia article on this, which states:

Mandarin Chinese, like many Sinitic varieties, has a significant number of homophonous syllables and words due to its limited phonetic inventory. All languages have homophones, but in Chinese they are especially abundant. The Cihai dictionary lists 149 characters representing the syllable "yì". (However, modern Chinese words average about two syllables, so the high rate of syllable homophony does not cause a problem for communication.)

Many Chinese take great delight in using the large amount of homophones in the language to form puns, and they have become an important component of Chinese culture. In Chinese, homophones are used for a variety of purposes from rhetoric and poetry to advertisement and humor, and are also common in Chinese loans, for example phono-semantic matching of brand names, computer jargon, technological terms and toponyms.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Amazing news! Well done.
Perhaps though the main issue will be the different way Chinese and English language works in the brain. See also Proust & the Squid.

 

[Vladd67]

That’s great news, although when I saw the post title I thought it meant that Smith would be travelling to an interstellar Mandarin style empire.

 

[The Ace]

That’s great news, although when I saw the post title I thought it meant that Smith would be travelling to an interstellar Mandarin style empire.

I wonder what they'd make of him.

 

[Dave]

When I went to China I visited a school where my daughter had been teaching English. It was in a very provincial part of China but we were treated like we were Posh Spice and Becks. They were extremely interested in England, and the children were even told that if they studied hard, then one day they could go there. The reality is that most will never leave their province rather than leave China, and the information they get from outside China is heavily censored. The English language books are all American in any case.

I also think that some of the humour will go well over the heads of most but I do hope it is successful.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Congratulations, Toby! I hope you sell a zillion books.

 

[Droflet]

Wow, Toby, that's a massive market. Huge congrats.