Originally posted by kelmah
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Michael Shanks actually did a better job than Tamlyn Tomita at the Mandarin. She's barely comprehensible, while he could pass for a foreigner who can understand the written, but has had limited opportunity to actually speak it. Good enough for Daniel, for the supposed Chinese ambassador the lines made everything worse.
Personally, I liked it when the show generally had Daniel stumbling around in languages, not really understanding how they were spoken--mixing up vowels, etc. It's realistic for a linguist who studies language features more than speaking it as opposed to a polyglot who should actually be competent in conversation.
What she was probably trying to say:
Shen Xiaoyi: ?????????(?) Ni de guoyu xuede zenmeyang? (How's your Chinese?)
But her pronunciation was off on a lot of it. ?orse, a Beijinger would not use "guoyu" for Mandarin. That's the Taiwanese term for it. A Beijing diplomat would definitely use the term "putonghua" ??? instead.
Daniel, while sounding a bit odd, was at least clearly understandable in the first line.
Daniel Jackson:????????meiyou nide yingwen hao. (Not as good as your English.)
The next exchange is far worse. I honestly cannot understand what they are trying to say.
It sounds like "Na ge yan gang, ditsta"
The scripts says: It shows . You're bringing him along?
Perhaps:???????????????? But it wouldn't sound even remotely the same.
Daniel is mostly understandable, but there's a bit that's not very clear. Probably without the context of what she had said his scripted answer doesn't make much sense.
Daniel: ????????women haizai guanzhe ta. (We're looking after him) But the word he uses for "babysit" isn't what I'd expect--sounds more like "manage"
Mitchell gets the profanity part right (equivalent of F* you), but then adds a "da" at the end that spoiled it.
Overall, the scene failed pretty badly for anyone who speaks Chinese. Can't blame Michael Shanks, or even Tamlyn Tomita--they were trying, but it didn't work. Either the director should have made sure it was authentic sounding or it should have been written differently. (Or maybe their language consultant just wanted to be a 'yes' man and said it was good even when it wasn't.)
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