DIS Walt Disney Co

Attractions get renamed to make sense in Chinese; Little Flying Elephant

By Ben Fritz 

SHANGHAI -- When Qi Zhu visited Shanghai Disneyland on a day of testing before the theme park opened last week, she was confused by its slogan: "Ignite the magical dream within your heart." When translated into Chinese, those words can easily be read as "strange dream."

"I was like: 'What is a strange dream?' " says Ms. Qi, a marketing employee at a Shanghai company. "Why would I want a strange dream in a park?"

Walt Disney Co. spent more than six years planning every detail of its new world of princesses, superheroes and swashbuckler Jack Sparrow, which has cost more than $5.5 billion and is expected to attract more than 10 million people in its first year.

It hasn't been easy, though, to translate the Disney magic from English to Chinese. In order to make sense to local visitors and mesh with their cultural sensibilities, the names of some attractions at Shanghai Disneyland read very differently in the two languages posted on signs throughout the theme park.

Because the animated classic "Dumbo" is little-known in China, the Shanghai Disneyland ride inspired by the movie is Little Flying Elephant when written in the simplified characters used on the Chinese mainland. Shipwreck Shore, a play area for children, sounds more ominous than fun in Chinese, so it is called Ship Water Play Area instead.

The princess-themed beauty salon known as Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique makes no sense in a literal translation to Chinese, so Disney decided to call it the Colorful Magical Fanciful Transformation. The Chinese version also has an alliterative "B" sound.

"Every time we come up with a name, we had to make sure it has a whimsical Disney feel, it resonates with Chinese people and it conveys what the experience is," says Fangxing Pitcher, a writer for the Disney Imagineering theme-park design group. "If you just do a straight translation, all of that gets lost."

Ms. Pitcher is one of numerous Chinese natives hired to work on Shanghai Disneyland from its earliest designs. Disney owns 43% of Shanghai Disney Resort, with the majority controlled by the local government's Shanghai Shendi Group Co.

Disney also hired as consultants for the new park Chinese designers, cultural experts and even comedians. In Southern California, where Disney is based, the company used Chinese tourists as focus groups while in the early stages of planning Shanghai Disneyland.

The focus groups showed that instructions that seemed to make perfect sense in English sometimes didn't register. Words that sound whimsical and inviting to Western ears were confusing or off-putting in Chinese.

For its earlier foreign theme parks in Paris and Hong Kong, Disney did much of the initial design work in English, handling translation later in the process. Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland, which opened in 1992 and 2005, respectively, struggled at first to connect with local audiences and have had financial problems.

In Hong Kong, Chinese visitors sometimes complained that they couldn't navigate the theme park and didn't know what to do there.

"We've learned through the years it's always a good idea to be as accessible to your guests as you can be," says Stan Dodd, an Imagineering creative director. "I think in previous parks we may not have thought that through as specifically as we did here."

Getting Chinese translations just right is increasingly important to Disney. China is the world's second-largest movie box office, behind only the U.S. "Frozen," the most successful animated motion picture ever, is loosely translated as "Enchanted Destiny of Snow." Disney park designers borrowed the name and song translations for a singalong show at Shanghai Disneyland.

Still, many Chinese names for attractions at the new theme park had to include literal descriptions because the movie references that work for Americans fly right over the heads of visitors here.

Tron Lightcycle Power Run probably doesn't mean much to anyone who didn't see the 1982 science-fiction movie "Tron" or its 2010 sequel, "Tron: Legacy," featuring neon-colored electronic motorcycles.

In Chinese, though, Superfast Speed Light Cycle gets across the point of the thrill ride loud and clear.

Roaring Rapids doesn't quite sound like an adrenaline-charged adventure when translated literally to Chinese, which is why it is called Roaring Mountain Rafting Journey.

Disney's theme-park designers in Shanghai realized that coming up with puns is a particular challenge, since playful misspellings aren't possible in a pictorial language.

Their solution was to rely on written Chinese characters that sound the same but have different meanings. Hunny Pot Spin, a Winnie the Pooh ride, is known here as Spinning Honey Pot, in which a Chinese character used in the word for "honey" is replaced by the one meaning "crazy" or "wild."

"People look and they know it's not a very rigid ride, it's something playful," says Imagineering assistant producer Chang Xu.

Opinions among the new park's first visitors about the effectiveness of Chinese names were mixed. Zhang Anzhi, a Shanghai-born business consultant, said the Fantasyland area was "boring" because he was so unfamiliar with central characters like Alice in Wonderland.

Zhao Siyu, who is from Shanghai and attends the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says she appreciated little touches such as tombstones in the Pirates of the Caribbean section written in ancient-style characters.

At last week's grand opening, visitors seemed to care much more about getting on the most new popular rides than understanding how much effort went into the surrounding signs.

"I don't have much memory about the translations because I spent most of the day waiting in line," said Wang Mengmeng, 24 years old, from Jiangsu province just north of Shanghai.

--Yang Jie and Zhou Wei contributed to this article.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 22, 2016 02:50 ET (06:50 GMT)

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