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

by admin on October 22, 2008

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.

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