How to say “Joe the Plumber” in Chinese (叫阿祖食屎)

I’m not interested in American politics. Quite frankly, I’m with Stanley Bing at Fortune China. Stanley wrote a piece in Chinese entitled 乔已经够多了 (I’ve had enough of Joe).

Me, too.

On a bad day, I’d be less polite and 叫阿祖食屎!

But, like it not, the US is having an election and the rest of the world has little choice but to watch – if not react.

So, how to turn all this into a positive learning experience?

Here’s what I do. I try and figure out how the English media jargon will get translated into Chinese.

Take “Joe the Plumber”, for example. Any bets on how to translate this? I wasn’t sure. The last time I lived in China you could just use 师傅 for any worker/tradesperson. It sure made communication simpler. But what’s the usual word for “plumber” these days? Back in Taiwan in the late 70s I learned 木匠 for “carpenter”. That seemed to have a Southern flavour, though. By analogy, would 水匠 work for “plumber”? I wasn’t certain but I tried “水匠 Joe” into Google, anyway.

Here’s what I found:

水喉匠阿Joe Wikimedia
水喉佬阿祖 Ming Pao
水管工喬 Fortune China

I doubt if you’ll find 水喉匠 in your Chinese dictionary. The å–‰ here is originally an English loanword in Hong Kong Cantonese and serves for “hose”. I first noticed this on a fire hose box in the MTR in HK. A slight semantic extension to “pipe”, as in Standard Chinese 管, gives us a perfectly normal word for “plumber”. Where Standard Northern Chinese uses å·¥, 匠 is fairly widespread in the South.

The Ming Pao’s translation 水喉佬阿祖 will get frowns from your Mandarin teacher – but is surely the most suitable for colloquial Hong Kong Cantonese. The 佬 is equivalent to “guy”. It’s the same 佬 we find in 鬼佬 as in “foreign devil”, or maybe “whitey” (the most common way of talking about white guys or “Caucasians” in HK when they think we can’t understand Cantonese ^^). I never felt it was especially racist. A good friend of mine in HK always addressed me as 阿鬼佬. I reciprocated by referring to him as 阿老人家 – the “old guy”.

(Thankfully the politically correct language police have not yet made it to HK. If they did, the language would surely lose its character – if not most of its vocabulary!)

The 阿 is frequently tacked onto the beginning of names in Southern Chinese. 祖 is used here because the Cantonese pronunciation is close to “Joe”. Standard Chinese prefers å–¬.

I, too, am sick of Joe the Plumber. I don’t know why, but somehow 水喉佬阿祖 has a warm and fuzzy feeling that “Joe the Plumber” just doesn’t have.

Tagged as: English, English - Chinese translation, Hong Kong, Joe the Plumber, Standard Chinese, US election, US politics, language, learn Cantonese, learn Mandarin, lessons, 水喉佬阿祖