Facebook Absolutely Must Die
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The official name of Facebook in China, as it appears on the Chinese version of its Website, is simply "Facebook." It is unofficially, but commonly, referred to as Liǎnshū 臉書 (lit., "face book").
Lately, however, Fēisǐbùkě 非死不可 has become a popular way of transcribing the name "Facebook."
And what does Fēisǐbùkě mean? "Absolutely must die." Fēi means "not," sǐ means "die," and bùkě "impermissible, cannot." In other words, Fēisǐbùkě may be rendered as "cannot not die" (double negative), i.e., "absolutely must die."
Although this is a very clever transcription, it — and all other Facebook name games in China — amount to no more than a hill of beans. Facebook is usually blocked in China (as it is in Pakistan, Iran, and Syria; does North Korea have an Internet?), so I suppose it doesn't really matter much what people call it. No matter how they refer to Facebook in China, they can't use it. The government of China is undoubtedly pleased with the Fēisǐbùkě ("Absolutely Must Die") moniker.
[A tip of the hat to Tansen Sen]
Brendan said,
May 22, 2010 @ 9:48 pm
There are a few cute transcriptions along these lines. The one that comes immediately to mind is 易破 'yìpò' ("easily broken") for "iPod."
Outis said,
May 22, 2010 @ 10:23 pm
非死不可 isn't a China-only meme: it is actually relevant for HK and Taiwan netizens. Doing a search on 非死不可 in Facebook turns up a number of "page" and entities, most of them seem Taiwanese.
And then there are also alternatives like 肥死不可, which is arguably semantic nonsense.
GAC said,
May 22, 2010 @ 11:05 pm
Interesting that this should come up as Facebook is getting challenged on privacy and alternatives might be coming up on the horizon. We'll see if Facebook really "absolutely must die".
Daan said,
May 23, 2010 @ 1:17 am
非死不可 fēisǐbùkě 'absolutely must die' is also sometimes used in Taiwan to describe the attitude of some people to the possible abolition of the death penalty, a matter of considerable public debate lately. Recently, a debate was hosted at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. Posters advertising it cleverly said:
非/廢死不可?
廢 fèi means 'to abolish', so this means something along the lines of 'they must die / we cannot abolish the death penalty', I suppose. Others may have better suggestions for a translation…
Christina said,
May 23, 2010 @ 1:57 am
So, is 非 … 不可 a normal idiom for "absolutely must"?
Elizabeth Braun said,
May 23, 2010 @ 4:40 am
Yes, I noticed that one too when someone said it to me recently!!=)
Elizabeth Braun said,
May 23, 2010 @ 4:41 am
@ Christina: Yes, it is.
w said,
May 23, 2010 @ 6:05 am
Scott's Vocab mentioned Feisibuke on the 22nd of September last year (based on a BBC report): http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/fei-si-bu-ke/
It seems to have been (mis?)translated as "doomed to die", though, and my hazy memories of Mandarin from 10 years ago tells me that's not quite the same.
Lareina said,
May 23, 2010 @ 7:19 am
I heard originally they wanted to translate it as '脸谱书'. But 非死不可 sounds better, since Chinese government want Facebook ’非死不可’in order to build a 'harmonious society'. =(
(one of the many reasons why i m not a huge fan of THE current party)
Sili said,
May 23, 2010 @ 10:19 am
Yes. But like everything else it's only available to the Dear Leader.
DMH said,
May 23, 2010 @ 5:21 pm
This was suggested at least once in my second year Chinese class at the University of Georgia a little over a year ago. (Coinciding with learning the 非…不可 idiom.)
~flow said,
May 23, 2010 @ 7:14 pm
so i set out to compare the facebook slogan:
http://facebook.com/: Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.
in different languages. here is what i, to my surprise, found:
chinese for the mainland: http://zh-cn.facebook.com/: Facebook帮助你与周围的人联系和分享。
i would translate that as ‘Facebook helps you and the people around you to connect and participate’; or ‘… share’. i’ll have something to say on that 你與周圍的人 later on.
chinese for taiwan: http://zh-tw.facebook.com/: Facebook，讓你和親朋好友保持聯繫，隨時分享生活中的每一刻。
this is the longest of the chinese language samples; it can be rendered as ‘Facebook lets you keep up relations and share every moment in life with your relatives and friends.’
chinese for hong kong: http://zh-hk.facebook.com/: Facebook 能助你與身邊的人保持聯繫及分享一切。
this is in fact not written not in cantonese (which is a written language enough to have appeared printed on the back of a mars chocolate bar wrapper at least 20 years ago, so it sure is a viable option), but rather in mandarin or whatever you call it; i translate this as ‘Facebook can help you and the people near you to keep up relations and share it all.’
in all of the examples given so far, the construct ‘助(讓)你與(和)他人聯系’ is grammatically ambiguous; it can be understood as both ‘helps you and others to connect’ or ‘helps you to connect to (with?) others’. to me all of these translations look equality correct and equally awkward. like so many translations done from english to chinese, they read pretty translationese-ish (this is even true for a lot of english translations to german these days). i do not claim to speak or write chinese better than anyone, but i did not have a hard time to come up with a few attempts at translating that tag line in ways that to me read more, well, more ‘chinese’. here they are: (#1)助你與親朋好友聯絡分享生活。 (#2)幫助你交友聯絡分享生活。 (#3)幫助你與親友聯絡分享生活。sample #3 has the added value of making a nice meter:
幫助 你與 親友 bangzhu niyu qinyou
聯絡 分享 生活 lianluo fenxiang shenghuo
as is well known, in chinese there is a strong preference for two- and four-syllable compounds, one expression of which are the well known 四字成語 (‘tetragrams’ or simply ‘proverbs’: http://www.sinoglot.com/blog/2010/05/23/chengy; that article also accidentally includes a backlink to the 鳥-discussion here a few days ago). i remember seeing, in the 1980s, a concrete looks-like-wood display board in a taibei park with the visitor regulations, all written out in terse four-by-four character arrangements. sure that’s a long time ago, but even poor me was able to make sense of that text, so natives would not necessarily perceive that style as cryptic. i don’t know, but maybe many chinese would consider such a text as ‘backwards’ by now and enjoy text written in what is perceived as a ‘fresh style’. if you care to read this article: http://www.sinoglot.com/blog/2010/05/05/an-unfortunate-epigraph/ you will probably end up thinking that the chinese culture, at least as far as commemorative texts (which were really set in stone in this case) go, is in serious troubles.
as for the above translation, putting ‘你與’ in contrast to ‘分享’ will probably make any fine poet cringe, but frankly ‘你與周圍的人’ sounds to me a lot like ‘you and the bystanders around’ and makes *me* cringe. i just want to demonstrate that shorter and nicer wordings are within easy reach of anyone doing that language, and that none of the six translated versions i have visited comes anywhere close to the good things one could say about the english slogan.
to close, let’s have a look at how the languages of the axis deal with anglosaxon cultural imperialism:
http://ja-jp.facebook.com/: Facebookは、友達や同僚、同級生、仲間たちと交流を深めることができるソーシャルユーティリティサイトです。
now this is a typical single-spaghetti japanese sentence. i don’t know why but the japanese seem much more prone than the chinese to produce those phrases that go on and on and on, filled with literally dozens of nouns and often not even ending in a real verb, in this case です (there is 深めることができる to be sure, ‘can do the deepening’, ‘can deepen’). i would translate this (emphasizing original wording, not english nativeness) as, brace yourselves,
‘Facebook, that is a social utlity site which can do the matter of deepening the exchange of friends, colleagues, students in the same grade and acquaintances.’
wow. you sure do not want to be exposed to Facebook’s deliberately legal statements in japanese after this. many readers of this are probably right now off to the phone to cancel flights for japan and quit japanese evening classes. admittedly, ‘can do the matter of deepening’ renders a very frequent syntactical construct in japanese, and also 同級生 has to be translated as ‘classmate’ in a proper translation. my reluctance to do so in the above essay stems from the fact that will japanese do use 同僚, ‘same office; colleague’, along with a number of similar words like 同室人 ‘same room person; roommate’, they prefer 同級生, literally ‘same grade student’, over the equally possible (and chinese standard) ‘同學’ ‘same school; (maybe also) same subject, specialty’, stressing the fact how incredibly important seniority is in japanese institutions of learning, so it is not the school, the subject or the class, it is the grade that defines who is eligible as my buddy.
but that still leaves us with ‘people in your life’ rendered as ‘friends, colleagues, classmates and acquaintances’. why they did not go on with ‘housewives, taxidrivers and railfans’ evades me. my japanese is worse than my rudimentary chinese, but how about starting out with ‘Facebook:人々とイクスチェンジ。’, ‘to exchange with everybody’. i mean it’s not like people are talking like lawyers all day in japan. that said, my previous literal translation suffers from not doing the matter of acknowledging GO AWAY VIRUS that omitting the addressee or subject from a sentence is very common and good style in japanese; where the english original has two references to ‘you’, the japanese slogan has no such reference. the only possible vestige of ‘you’ appears to be hidden in the particle (…仲間たち)と, which i think could be changed to の: 友達と交流する means to ‘exchange with friends’, whereas ‘友達の交流’ means ‘the exchange of friends’, ‘the communication of friends’. but then again, the polite way of explicitly referring to someone else’s friends would lead to お友達と交流する. this お/ご ‘prefix of politeness’ is so common, you can read ご案内 ‘polite information; information for you’ in big letters atop of maps in japanese subways. so maybe yes, the slogan is really intended to mean ‘Facebook is a social utility site that can deepen the exchange between (all sorts of people)’.
my posts tend to be too long, so just a snappy look at how facebook tries to take over the other evil countries:
http://it-it.facebook.com/: Facebook ti aiuta a connetterti e rimanere in contatto con le persone della tua vita.
http://de-de.facebook.com/: Facebook ermöglicht es dir, mit den Menschen in deinem Leben in Verbindung zu treten und Inhalte mit diesen zu teilen.
the german is a little horrible: ‘ermöglicht es dir’ (enables you) in place of ‘du kannst’ (you can); ‘in Verbindung zu treten’ (to step into contact) in place of ‘zu verbinden’ (to contact). worst of the worst: ‘Inhalte mit diesen zu teilen’. for me that is like watching a splatter. bäh. ‘to share content with those mentioned’ doesn’t really render the horrors a bit. this growing and unfortunate tendency of people to use ‘somit’ (so therefore) and ‘diese’ (those said) has destroyed untold sentences in the past decade—many are still lying around, oozing forth, trying to copy themselves in a drive-by-fashion into the brains of unsuspecting readers.
both examples somehow display the matter of deepening the perceived impression GO AWAY VIRUS GO GO GO of the author’s————leave me with the impression facebook has its legal department do the translations for them. i mean, ‘ti aiuta a connetterti e rimanere in contatto’ for ‘connect and share’? not bad for a manual on how to build friendships but in a tagline?
i am almost sure most english speaker would not come up with ‘content’ when asked what noun if any was implicit in the original slogan’s ‘share’; one could imagine people coming up with ‘files’, ‘thoughts’, ‘this life’, ‘dates’, ‘news’ before coming up with that riaaish ‘con, tent’. the german ‘Inhalte’ is worse, much worse. i think the instinct of the chinese translators was quite right when they chose ‘分享’ which is really ‘to participate, to share a fine moment, to enjoy together’, and who would doubt that ‘to share data’ is in fact part of the idea that facebook is?
vanya said,
May 25, 2010 @ 10:53 am
~Flow, the Japanese doesn't sound as stilted as you portray it. The "[verb] koto ga dekiru [Noun] desu" construction is very common. It's really no worse than saying "Facebook is a social utility site that can deepen…etc."
The Italian is awkward even for a manual – "connetterti e rimanere in contatto"? Hunh? Why connect if you're not planning to stay connected?
~flow said,
May 25, 2010 @ 1:35 pm
@vanya: quite right and i agree completely that said construct is an everyday device in japanese speech. but it is still lengthy, and i observe that texters often seek to avoid lengthy constructs in their slogans even if they are staple items in the language. slogans can be snappy even in japanese but this is certainly not one example. to me the japanese and german versions are similarly awkward. ‘inhalte mit diesen zu teilen’, ‘connetterti e rimanere in contatto’, that’s all the same failure to carry over the succinctness of the english original into another language. this is funny because facebook appear to have put a lot of thought, money, and work into making their site available to a very broad audience.
Wentao said,
April 29, 2011 @ 2:22 pm
I would say 非死不可 is closer to "no choice but die" or "doomed to die".
The version I know about iPod is 爱破的 ai4po4de and iPhone 爱疯
YouTube has a number of funny transcriptions, 你吐吧, 你土鳖, and the profanity 你2B