


The range of the pitches is relative to the very highest and very lowest pitch of each speaker’s normal speaking voice.
SERENITY SYMBOL CHINESE MOVIE
Firefly (and the later movie Serenity), except for the pilot episode, used a made-up phonetic system for the scripts (e.g. (Jenny Lynn, questionnaire answer in E-mail attachment to author, November 11, 2004)įor writing Mandarin in the Latin alphabet (romanization), this site uses Hanyu Pinyin romanization, the standard of Mainland China and more recently of Taiwan as well.

On Firefly, they were working in a vacuum with no feedback and aside from a non–Chinese-speaking script supervisor, there was no one to correct them on tones or pronunciation. I think the fans will notice their vast improvement from small to big screen. As I’ve learned from actually coaching the cast on the feature film Serenity, each and every one of our core cast members has a great, musical ear and they’re pretty diligent about learning their lines. And for anyone who knows anything about the intricacies of Mandarin, it’s hard for a novice to know whether or not you’re saying things correctly. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go to set to supervise or coach. On the tapes, I’d say the Chinese line at conversational speed, say it three times slowly, then again at conversational speed. Translator Jenny Lynn pointed out the limitations of the learning process: Even so, the Chinese pronunciations aren’t native. The pronunciations of the actors are sometimes Taiwan Mandarin instead of Modern Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) ( see below: (2) Are the actors speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, or some other variety of Chinese?). Very loose translations from script English into script Chinese were sometimes used on Firefly and Serenity (movie).Words marked by “quotation marks, bold, and typewriter font” come from the published scripts or from relevant English appearing near the Chinese characters.* Pinyinary is a word I made up for “pinyin dictionary” after putting the scripts’ Mandarin into standard Hanyu Pinyin romanization. Kai3wen2 Sha1li4wen2, Ying2huo3chong2–Ning2jing4 Zhong1wen2 Pin1yin1-dian3 Kevin Sullivan, Firefly–Serenity Chinese Pinyinary* Fellow fans of Firefly and Serenity for translating some of the Chinese elsewhere.Pip for helping me find unpublished versions of the Firefly scripts in 2003.Jenny Lynn for answering my questions in 2004.Firefly– Serenity Chinese translator Jenny Lynn graciously answered some questions (before any scripts were published) to fill in some gaps in the Firefly part, but she hasn’t verified the accuracy of this site as a whole.įei1chang2 gan3xie4 非常感谢 (thank you very much) to For this unofficial site, I’ve used Chinese dictionaries, the DVDs, and the published scripts and comic books. Page Sections: Disclaimer & Thanks | Site Entries | Frequently Asked Questions | Search: Disclaimer & Thanks
