Knight Rider TV show, does KITT actually speak Chinese? Need translation help

seven

seven

Sr Member
In Season 3 Episode 1, Knight of the Drones, KITT supposedly speaks Chinese. The show translates it as "Go back to the zoo where you belong". The script says "Go back to where you came from or I'll call the zoo and have you locked up where you belong" The length of KITT speaking in the show would make me think that he didn't say either.

I had a co-worker who speaks Mandarin listen to the clip and he said that could not understand a word of it. Is it Cantonese? Korean? Gibberish?
I've tried Google translator, and it says that KITT should be saying "Huí dào shǔyú nǐ de dòngwùyuán" (回到属于你的动物园) which does appear to match.

Can anyone help with a translation, and how it would be written out? What I hear, written phonetically, is "nay hum unjow, wa job you dot to monte doc oonlay lay la day"


 
Last edited by a moderator:
Sounds like Cantonese to me, too.
You can tell by the complicated inflections (Cantonese has 6, compared to Mandarin's 4).
 
Could be gibberish, it was the 80s be glad KITT didn't say "Ching Chong Ching Ching Chong"

If the show were Disney based the translation would have been "Your Mama's a Fat WH---" or the like.
 
Could just be bad Cantonese, butchered languages (particularly Chinese of any dialect) are always hard to understand. Firefly is a good example of this, they're supposed to be speaking Mandarin occasionally but whenever they do I can't make heads or tails out of what they're saying.
 
Riceball said:
Could just be bad Cantonese, butchered languages (particularly Chinese of any dialect) are always hard to understand. Firefly is a good example of this, they're supposed to be speaking Mandarin occasionally but whenever they do I can't make heads or tails out of what they're saying.
Click to expand...

Absolutely not a Mandarin speaker here, but I kind of chalk it up to the two languages mixing as the cultures did, and English speakers appropriating/corrupting the Chinese words into slang. I was reading/listening to an assessment of the Firefly Chinese and it's crazy hearing some of their pronunciations vs the real way, Mal in particular gets a few chuckles from the writer for being "robotic" in his delivery.
 
Cant help with the language, but that dude with the long hair and mustache (Al Leong) appeared in almost every action flick and TV series in the 80's!
 
I speak Cantonese. I understood the first two words which are "You are." The rest of it was a jumbled mess that I have no idea what was said. It also sounded like Mandarin was mixed in.
 
Every syllable is an audio edit, so they might've just pieced together a bunch of "Chinese sounding" phonemes. They might have started with an attempt at a genuine insult, and then perhaps feared offending any native speakers listening, so just settled with gibberish.
 
I tried using the audio feature on google translate, and it only "recognized" words in Korean. It picked up "Family" & "Restaurant", but I don't really trust it being fool-proof
 
Treadwell said:
Every syllable is an audio edit, so they might've just pieced together a bunch of "Chinese sounding" phonemes. They might have started with an attempt at a genuine insult, and then perhaps feared offending any native speakers listening, so just settled with gibberish.
Click to expand...

I'm willing to believe that it was actually Chinese (Cantonese or Mandarin) but horrendously butchered which is very easy to do. Chinese is just one of those languages that's hard for American/Westerners to speak and even harder to speak well. Given that this was just one line for a brief scene they just had someone write out the lines phonetically and had the actor recite the lines as best he could without the help of a speech coach versed in Chinese.
 
I have to agree with Riceball on this.

For the purposes of this, I will concentrate on Mandarin and Cantonese, the two major languages of China. Mandarin is the official language of China and Taiwan, whereas Cantonese is chiefly spoken in Hong Kong, Macau, and overseas communities. There are literally hundreds of different dialects of Chinese spoken throughout China, but the dialectical differences between them are more closely analagous to the Romance languages than the English dialects of the United States. Basically, they are practically their own languages with instances of certain dialects being unintelligible to speakers of others.

But I digress...

Chinese is extraordinarily difficult to learn for the following reasons:

1) It's a tonal language. Tonal languages (chiefly Far Eastern languages) use the pitch and tonality of a word (HOW you say it) to dictate what the word means.
2) Chinese does not have an alphabet. Chinese children do not learn the equivalent of their A-B-C's growing up. Imagine learning English without an alphabet.
3) The writing system is not phonetic. The sound a word makes will give practically zero clue on how to write it, leaving you with two phrases that sound somewhat similar to the untrained ear but are written wildly different and mean two different things.

It's been said that someone with zero training in Spanish and three years of studying Chinese can pick up more information out of a Spanish-language text than a Chinese text. That's how hard the language is.
 
I got myself some audio CDs about 10 years ago to try to learn Cantonese.
Even having spoken sentences to emulate, the inflections/intonations can be so subtle, I can recite what I think I learned to a Cantonese speaker, and they'd say "huh?".
 
Thanks everyone, i appreciate the feedback and help
"You are..." is a good start. Perhaps it was intended to be "you are [aminals, you belong in a zoo]" ?
 
Last edited:
This thread is more than 8 years old.

Your message may be considered spam for the following reasons:

  1. This thread hasn't been active in some time. A new post in this thread might not contribute constructively to this discussion after so long.
If you wish to reply despite these issues, check the box below before replying.
Be aware that malicious compliance may result in more severe penalties.

Similar threads

JediMichael
Twisted Metal tv show
Replies
17
Views
1,074
JediMichael
JediMichael
rocketeer25
Constellation - Apple TV+
Replies
10
Views
475
Magenta12
M
yaris
Arnold - The TV Show and Some Fubar
Replies
3
Views
433
batguy
B
ghostryder
Dark Matter (Apple tv series)
Replies
3
Views
225
CB2001
CB2001
JiminSTLouis
Alien TV Series???
Replies
14
Views
973
CB2001
CB2001
Back
Top