jiachuanxin

Localization / Translation of 真心英雄

真心英雄 by 李宗盛 (The Sincere Hero by Jonathan Lee), sung by Jackie Chan, Wakin Chau, Anthony Wong, and Jonathan Lee. I liked this song a lot while listening to Jackie Chan’s discography, and the lyrics are easy enough to understand.

Again, the hope for this exercise is that I come up with something that is:

Singable within the original melody.
Grammatically and idiomatically passable in English.
As faithful as possible to the original imagery, varying only to satisfy the previous two conditions.

So here is my localization and thoughts:

[Verse 1]

在我心中　曾經有一個夢
I have a dream that’s been in my heart
要用歌聲讓你忘了所有的痛
To use song to make you forget your sorrows.
燦爛星空　誰是真的英雄
Oh, starry sky, who are the real heroes?
平凡的人們給我最多感動
Ordinary people inspire me the most.

[Verse 2]

再沒有恨　也沒有了痛
To end all hate and know no more pain
但願人間處處都有愛的影蹤
If only everyone was a beacon of love.
用我們的歌　換你真心笑容
Let our song put a smile on your face
祝福你的人生從此與眾不同
May your life never be the same from now on.

[Chorus 1]

把握生命裡的每一分鐘
Seize every minute of our lives
全力以赴我們心中的夢
All for the dreams in our hearts
不經歷風雨　怎麼見彩虹
Without the rainstorms, where are the rainbows?
沒有人能隨隨便便成功
No one randomly succeeds

[Chorus 2]

把握生命裡每一次感動
Seize every inspiring moment in life
和心愛的朋友熱情相擁
And the passion in every friendship
讓真心的話　和開心的淚
Let sincere words and happy tears
在你我的心裏流動
Flow freely in all of our hearts

[repeat verses]

[repeat chorus 2 three times]

Some overall thoughts:

Some idioms are more fun to translate literally than idiomatically because the metaphorical imagery makes for prettier language.
Rhythmically it’s always a challenge when the Chinese is able to pack so much meaning into fewer syllables due to the single characters carrying so much or when the Chinese uses a two-character phrase and English has a single syllable word for the matching concept. Having to figure out how to make up or to lose syllables makes the localization tough.

Why Mirrored Images Feel Like Bad Reflections

Art, Math, Musings

Many artists and observant folks are already well aware that creating an image with a reflection is an art and that it can be very jarring when one is poorly crafted. This is a brief post where I explore specifically what optically is wrong when a reflection is created by mirroring an image.

First we have to understand how real reflections look. Let’s say we have a situation where an observer sees an object that is being reflected by the ground (it’s made of glass, there’s a layer of water, whatever) in Fig A below.

Fig A:

2019-04-11 21.14.42

In this case, the observer sees the physical object at one angle and the reflection at a slightly different angle. In Fig B, I’ve updated Fig A to show a 90 degree viewing angle to the physical object and an approximately 45 degree viewing angle to the image. Depending on the shape of the object, this may allow the observer to see more of the “underneath” surfaces in the reflection.

Fig B:

2019-04-11 21.15.26

Now, if I am in the process of creating a fake reflection where I’ve simply taken an image of an object and flipped the pixels, the flipped image because it is 2D is at the same viewing angle to the observer as the unflipped image. Since in a real optical setting, the image should appear at a steeper angle, now it appears to be leaned in towards the observer (Fig C).

Fig C:

2019-04-11 21.17.06

And an even more fascinating realization is that for such a case to even be physically possible, the reflective surface would have to be bifurcating the angle between the image and its reflection and be perfectly in line with the observer’s eye (Fig D). The fact that this is a physically impossible situation means that seeing such a reflection should feel completely alien and unsettling, especially in a doctored or Photoshopped or drawn image.

Fig D:

2019-04-11 21.18.30

Now of course this is an extreme simplification of the situation. Clever artists know that distance matters as well. Shrinking the reflection to accommodate for it’s perceived increased distance helps the reflection feel like it is in the right place. In addition, if the reflective surface has texture and is not completely clear, the observer’s mind will fill in the gaps and think that the image should make sense. Finally, as the distance between the observer and the object increases, the delta between the viewing angles of the object and the reflection becomes a negligible difference anyway.

Nonetheless, I found it to be an interesting thought exercise to explore the physical reality (or non-reality) that may sometimes underlie a gut feeling of a mirrored image being “wrong.”

Localization / Translation of 朋友

Musings

Here’s another song I’d like to translate and localize:

朋友 by 周華健 (Peng You by Emil Chau). It was a pretty popular song from two decades ago and I remember that our Chinese American Cultural Association had all the kids sing it for graduation one year.

Again, the hope for this exercise is that I come up with something that is:

Singable within the original melody.
Grammatically and idiomatically passable in English.
As faithful as possible to the original imagery, varying only to satisfy the previous two conditions.

So here is my localization and thought process:

[Verse]

這些年一個人風也過雨也走
All these years, on my own, winds have passed, rains have gone.
Not much to say here. This translation is easy to match with what others have come up with.
有過淚有過錯還記得堅持什麼
There were tears. There were wrongs. But I remember why we held on.
The second half is where this starts getting looser. I like how “hold on” half-rhymes with “wrong” and “why I hold on” is an evocative English idiom, though not exact to the Chinese.
真愛過才會懂會寂寞會回首
When you’ve loved, then you’ll know, you’ll look back, you’ll feel alone.
I found that “alone” rhymed better with “know” and decided to swap the order of the looking back and the loneliness.
終有夢終有你在心中
But there are dreams, there’s still you, in my heart.
I wanted to capture the meaning of 終 implying the passing of time, and settled on using “still finding” to reflect that this is something that has been on the singer’s mind.

[chorus]

朋友一生一起走那些日子不再有
Friends are always by your side, in all those days that have gone by,
I preferred the idiom of “days gone by” and it also half-rhymes with “side” from the first half.
一句話一輩子一生情一杯酒
one good word, one lifetime, with one heart and a cup of wine.
This was the toughest line. It repeats the idea of one lifetime and lifelong friends, but there just aren’t as many different English words for “life” so I decided to change the latter lyric for redundancy.
朋友不曾孤單過一聲朋友你會懂
Friends will never be alone, with a true friend, you will know:
The idiom I pulled in here was the phrase “true friend.”
還有傷還有痛還要走還有我
There’s still sorrow, and pain to bear. Though we’ll part, I’ll still be there.
Literally, there are “wounds and pain” but “sorrow and pain” is the more common English idiom. This was also the toughest line to keep the rhyme (I settled on “bear” and “there”); whereas the Chinese lyric ends the beat on “there’s still me” that accusative noun feels weird in English, so I went with the gentler “I’ll still be there.”

[repeat verse]

[repeat chorus]

Some overall thoughts:

Admittedly this song is not that complex to begin with, but I find that most other translations I read are more literal translations and don’t feel like things I would actually say in English. This was my biggest focus here.
Also, because the song itself wasn’t as complex, I tried to also match the rhyme scheme where the first half of each line would rhyme with the second half; this made arranging the English rather challenging for some of the lines while trying to preserve the original meanings.
One of the toughest things about this song was figuring out the implied speakers and audiences. There are few pronouns and unlike English where verbs have first or second-person conjugations, in Chinese the verbs are always the same. It takes some context to make your best judgment about how to translate that context. (for example, making the decision that the end of the second line is spoken by an “I” directed to a “we”)

Localization / Translation of 飛得更高

Musings

Translation can be a technical and literal task. However, localization is an art.

As a Chinese-American who knows a bit of my ethnic language, but not enough to be fully comfortable in it, I often wonder if I can make great English versions of the various Chinese songs I come across. The goal is to make sure that the English version is:

Singable within the same melody.
Grammatically and linguistically acceptable.
Evokes the same emotions, if not the same imagery.

Today’s challenge is: 飛得更高 by 汪峰 (Fly Higher by Wang Feng)

Here is my localization and thought process:

[Verse 1]

生命就像一條大河
Life is just like a winding river:
“winding river” is a stronger idiom in English than the literal translation “long” or “big” river.
時而寧靜時而瘋狂
at times it’s calm and quiet, at times it’s crazy.
“quiet” by itself matches the syllable count, but doesn’t feel as complete as “calm and quiet.”
現實就像一把枷鎖
Reality is like one big shackle,
To keep the rhythm of the Chinese measure words here that don’t exist in English, I’ve added “one big” to the imagery.
把我捆住無法掙脫
holding me down with no way to get out.
“holding… down” is a looser translation here but fits better with the overall narrative of flight.
這謎樣的生活鋒利如刀
This mysterious life is sharp like a razor.
刀 just means knife, but razor is the stronger image in English when talking about injury.
一次次將我重傷
time and again causing me pain.
I couldn’t find a two syllable word/phrase to end this line that felt as concise as “pain.”
我知道我要的那種幸福
But I know the happiness that I want
I think this line translates very nicely as is.
就在那片更高的天空
is in that wide open sky over there.
I am actually still on the fence about whether “is right over there in the open sky” ends better with the final emphasis on “open sky.”

[chorus]

我要飛得更高飛得更高
I want to fly even higher, fly even higher.
Literal translation.
狂風一樣舞蹈掙脫懷抱
I want to dance like the wind, breaking away.
The second phrase is tough to translate as it’s a Chinese idiom; there’s more meaning there than I can pack into the English.
“break away” is a bit of a cheeky callout to the Kelly Clarkson song of very similar imagery to this one.
我要飛得更高飛得更高
I want to fly even higher, fly even higher.
翅膀捲起風暴心生呼嘯
My wings kicking up a storm, my heart shouting out for joy.
This is pure idiom localization. “rolling up a storm” and “heart whistling” don’t work as well literally.
飛得更高
I want to fly even higher.

[Verse 2]

一直在飛一直在找
I keep on flying. I keep on searching.
Literal translation.
可我發現無法找到
But you just can’t find what I’m looking for.
The Chinese uses first-person this whole line, but to facilitate the transition to the indefinite second-person in the next line, I brought “you” into this line.
若真想要是一次解放
If you really want a taste of freedom,
“taste of freedom” is an idiom localization choice, though the imagery differs slightly with the rest of the song.
要先剪碎這誘惑的網
you have to cut loose from the nets of temptation.
This was a very difficult line; I like the imagery but the word “temptation” feels clunky here.
我要的一種生命更燦爛
I want a life that’s more brilliant.
Literal translation.
我要的一片天空更蔚藍
I want a piece of the sky that’s more blue.
Literal translation; I really like the imagery here.
我知道我要的那種幸福
I know that the happiness that I want
就在那片更高的天空
is in that wide open sky over there.

[repeat chorus]

Overall, some of the hardest challenges with this were:

Keeping a similar syllable count: certain semantic phrases in Chinese are shorter than in English and vice versa. Luckily, music can often be a bit forgiving, allowing for you to create an double eighth note rhythm to accommodate the extra syllables in what was a quarter note in the original language.
Keeping to the important musical enunciation: as a counter to the previous point, there are certain musical high points or held moments that cannot be sacrificed without changing the rhythm and you HAVE to build around these. For example, in the original Chinese, much of the emphasis falls on the two-character phrases that end each line; thus in English, I have to look for two-syllable words or two-syllable phrases with similar power and rhythm to preserve the overall structure of the song.
Literal vs. idiomatic? This is part of the artistry as well. Making decisions about where the artist’s original imagery is great and should be kept versus where a more idiomatic English construction would be more powerful is a very subjective decision that really boils down to the transcriber’s own opinions.

Clock Hand Motion

Math, Musings

Saw an analog clock today at a school, and it surprised me. The minute hand moved every 15 seconds, and moved a quarter of the way to the next minute each of those times.

Now, the analog clock I have at home is continuously geared. The minute hand is always moving, just at 1/60th the speed of the second hand [illustrated below]

I couldn’t help but to wonder exactly how the internal gearing of that clock in the school worked. While we live in an age where a simple internet search and digging through some manuals and videos could explain this very quickly, it seemed remiss to pass on the chance to see what my own knowledge can afford me in an explanation.

My instinct in reverse-engineering something like this would be to think of the states that each hand can be. The second hand has 60 states, so give it a gear with 60 teeth. The minute hand moves every quarter minute and therefore must have 240 states, so give it a gear with 240 teeth. Now how to convert between the two gears? The seconds gear changes the state of the minutes gear only every 15 times it moves, so perhaps another gear on the same axle but with four teeth, corresponding to every 15 on the seconds gear [illustrated below]. The discontinuities between the four teeth would create the lack of continuous motion in between.

However, there was still one last puzzle. The minute hand and second hand moved exactly in sync during that one tick on the clock I saw in the school, which implied to me that the teeth must be the same radial size. Moreover, now that I knew the 1:15 relationship, I could imagine an easier gear pairing to make: Rather than a gear with 60 tiny teeth and another with only 4 teeth the same tiny size, how about a gear with 15 well-defined teeth and another gear with a single 1/15 tooth [illustrated below]. These can then be linked up to the appropriate 60-tooth and 240-tooth gears. Moreover, in this arrangement, instead of power traveling from the seconds hand then to the minutes hand and having to overcome torque of each in the chain, the power that drives the clock comes from a single axle that transfers power to both the seconds hand and the minutes hand at the right ratios.

String Held Up in Tension

Math, Musings

Saw this image online today, and was pretty fascinated by it.

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I decided to do a quick free body diagram to get a better sense of how exactly tension was distributed across the string.

I color-coded the left-side against the right-side so that you can see the forces balanced by being from the same “spring.” As with any freebody diagram, taking any specific section of the string and summing up the forces coming into it from either direction gives us a sense of the net forces on it.

We see here that sections 1,3,5,7,9 are equivalent and 2,4,6,8 are equivalent. The odd-numbered sections are in tension with force F, while the shorter even-numbered sections are in tension with force 2F.

This of course is a simplified view of the system because it does not take into account any moments of rotation generated by the masses hanging on the string.

Chinese New Year 2017 Graphic

Art, Design, Musings

For this Chinese New Years, I wanted to take a shot at making my own version of a graphic hat captured the year of the rooster.

A quick look revealed a lot of designs that were very stylistic or that only hinted at the rooster partially. I decided that I wanted to attempt something that utilized the whole number as part of the rooster while retaining the legibility of the numbers.

A quick initial investigation on the form revealed to me where I would like the numbers to be and I then began to bring the numbers back to a more legible state.

2017-01-29-15.17.52

Attempting to keep the numbers in a printed font like state proved difficult as the blockiness conflicted with he angles I wanted for the rooster (the upwards angle of the head and neck and of the tail). I ended up deciding to angle the numbers slightly up at each end to accommodate this.

2017-01-29-15.19.58 2017-01-29-15.19.11

Then it was onwards to the calligraphy. Ink is a very punishing medium; without layers and undo buttons, a single mistake on a later stroke can make an entire image trash. On the other hand, this means that you get a lot of practice, and by the final draft, every stroke is very familiar to you.

As I started, I still needed to play with thickness and dryness of the brush.

2017-01-29-15.20.47

With a bit of workshopping with my friend Dan Lin (https://aeveis.tumblr.com/), here is my final version below.

Geometry 6/7/2016

Design, Math, Musings

FullSizeRender-4

Stared at some ceiling tiles today, which was a bad call for my productivity because I immediately wondered how the contractors cut and installed the cross pieces, and whether or not their was a standardizable piece that allowed optimal tiling.

FullSizeRender-2

So I started with some exploratory thought experiments. Pieces that have one intersection and one edge can perfectly cover one square (in pink below) so let’s go from there. Unfortunately as we add to it (green pieces), we create spaces that standard pieces don’t fit into. A failure.

FullSizeRender

What about a longer pieces that spans an intersection and two edges? This creates a very familiar weave-like pattern that definitely tessellates (below).

FullSizeRender-3

However, we aren’t close to a generalize-able rule. Indeed, one could imagine many other strange angled or partial length shapes that I have not tried yet, and I wondered if there were at least some property that influenced their tessellate-ability.

I began to think that it has to do with the number of intersections and edges that a piece crossed since the relationship between those helps to define how much space the cross pieces need to cover.

An inductive analysis can be used: a single tile has 4 corners and 4 edges, then four tiles have 9 corners and 12 edges, and then nine tiles have 16 corners and 24 edges (image below). This is solvable by looking for the pattern (n^2 corners to 2n^2 edges), but the answer is easier to come to if we simply look at the general situation of each corner and each edge instead.

FullSizeRender-5

In a fully-tiled situation, a corner sits at the intersection of 4 tiles while an edge sits at the intersection of 2 tiles. There we have it then! For an infinitely tiled surface, you will need a corner for every 4 tiles, but an edge every 2 – there will then be a ratio of edges to intersections/corners of 2:1. Thus, this must be a design constraint of the cross-pieces (which agrees with why my second thought experiment worked unlike the first).

While this does not give us a way to define all possible cross piece shapes (one could imagine a complicated cross-piece shape with 74 edges and 37 intersections but does not tessellate), it does allow us to check if a cross piece shape could potentially tessellate.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Power Levels

Math, Musings

When physics and “superpowers” reconcile (or not), it’s all in great fun.

A show that I like for various reasons, but that has also shown a variety of great feats is “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and the subsequent “Avatar: The Legend of Korra.”

One of the most extreme examples of bending happens when Ghazan melts the Northern Air Temple Mountain:

Given: an approximate energy of 900kJ/kg to melt rock[1] and an average density of 2.7g/cm^3 for rock [2].

[1] ( http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/lava.htm )

[2] ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_crust )

Approximate: The temple has a footprint of about 500m x 500m = 250,000m^2. The mountain has rather sheer faces so let’s give it a cylindrical profile and say about 400m vertically is melted. That’s 100,000,000m^3 of rock.

Based on our givens, that is 270,000,000,000kg of rock or 243,000,000,000,000kJ of energy, 243 petaJoules.

Gazan outputs the energy equivalent of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear device ever tested.

Or enough to power all the electricity in New York City for 6,136 days, i.e. 17 years.

If the energy all came from within him through conventional biology, he burned 5.8×10^13 kilocalories (or just capital “C” Calories – of which we are recommended to eat 2000 a day by food packaging), that’s 29,000,000,000 days or 79 million years of meals. If he was converting mass directly to energy, then via Einstein, he lost 2.7kg of pure mass (not bad!).

One could argue that characters are tapping into energy sources external to themselves when bending, nevertheless, it is interesting to know just how much of it they must be accessing.

See this Google Doc for further calculations with Zaheer, Avatar Kyoshi, etc.

Google Doc with More Details

On Reasons I Like Third-Person Camera

Design, Games, Musings

There has been plenty written about why one should make a game in third-person or first-person: Convention and what your target audience will already be familiar with. How much you want the player to be immersed as the character in your game. And so on. Today, I would like to discuss my biggest consideration: information – as a gamer who likes when UX/UI emphasizes information and clarity, third-person camera appeals to me more.

While first-person camera appears immersive immediately, there is quite a bit of information that it will not be able to capture until VR tech gets further along. Forefront is touch/proprioception. In addition to the first-person view I have out of my own head, I can feel where the ground is below me and where a wall is behind or beside me without having to look at it. Touch/proprioception allows me move comfortably around my environments in spite of my own limited field of view. With first-person camera however, you can’t tell that you’ve landed on a surface or if you’ve bumped up against a wall unless the camera stops moving or if one your directional movements starts pushing you along something. It’s not ideal and, at least for me, requires an additional moment of mental processing to figure out what is going on.

Now enters third-person camera. It does not give us completely natural proprioception of the environment; however, it does allow me to see the floor and the walls in lieu of feeling them. I can more closely see where my character is in space just as I would feel where they are in space if it were ideal first-person. In lieu of physically being able to brush up against things, at least I can see where the 3D models touch. This restores more of my sense of space and allows me to move in the game more reflexively.

I can’t just outright recommend third-person camera. Of course, when poorly implemented, it can cause just as much frustration. What I do want to say is that in most cases, when given a choice by a game, I would choose the third-person camera over the first-person camera because it feels more natural to me. More natural because, though it sacrifices the sense of immediacy and of seeing “through the character’s eyes”, it offers information normally provided by touch/proprioception.