Chinese UNC student finds translating Jordan doc fun. But Roy Williams? That’s frickin’ hard
The fifth and sixth episodes of The Last Dance air Sunday night on ESPN, but at least one person in Chapel Hill knows what happens in Episode 8, and it’s not Roy Williams.
Stuck on North Carolina’s campus for the foreseeable future because he can’t return to China, UNC freshman Aiqi Sun spent his weekend finishing up the translation of the eighth episode of the documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls into Chinese for subtitles on Chinese rightsholder Tencent. He did the same for the first episode last month, which with its focus on Jordan’s time on campus made it a special kind of thrill for a UNC basketball fan.
“I heard this Jordan documentary is coming out and they’re asking people if they want to take this job,” Sun said. “I said, ‘I’m doing this!’”
It’s also an existential quest that connects North Carolina’s campus with the biggest country in the world: How do you translate “frickin’” into Chinese?
Sun said the work isn’t particularly lucrative, but it’s a way to occupy his time while he’s one of two students left in his dorm on a mostly empty campus. He can’t return to his hometown of Qingdao until the end of the month at the earliest. With a cafeteria menu that never changes and nowhere else to go, he’s free to focus on this side gig he stumbled into on the Chinese social network Weibo, one of several translators working on the project around the world.
But it is certainly a labor of love for a basketball fan who grew up in the Yao Ming/Kobe Bryant era — “I’m a LeBron fan, by the way” — and has jumped into UNC basketball since he arrived on campus and saw his share of games at the Smith Center.
“I wish I didn’t, but I did,” Sun said. “I think I went to every single game we lost on a buzzer-beater: the Duke game, the Boston College game, the Virginia game…”
Sun has done some basketball translation work before, but he jumped at the opportunity to work on this project. He is given an English transcript roughly two weeks before an episode airs, and he was assigned the first and eighth episodes. That makes it easier than doing it from the video, but it presented its own challenge here because of the way the series jumps around in time. Sun also exchanged transcripts with the translator of Episode 2 to check each other’s work, so he knew what was coming that first weekend before just about anyone.
“Translating is actually kind of difficult sometimes,” Sun said. “Phil Jackson says something or (Jerry) Krause or the owner, but there’s no context sometimes. The whole documentary, there’s something in 1998 then 1986, jumping back and forth. I had to go on YouTube to search for little clips of when they were in Paris to actually confirm what they were talking about. That was kind of fun.”
He does two separate translations, one with profanity, one without, since profanity is frowned upon on Chinese television. That even includes diluted American slang, so Williams presented a particular challenge in the first episode.
What Williams said in English: “Michael Jordan’s the only player that could ever turn it on and off. And he never frickin’ turned it off.”
What China read at the bottom of the screen, via Sun: “Michael Jordan is the only player who has a switch inside him and he never turns off the switch. For God’s sake, he never turns off the switch.”
Mostly, though, Sun has enjoyed following along like any fan, from the UNC lore — he always thought of Jordan and James Worthy as being from different NBA generations, not college teammates, and he had to explain to the Episode 2 translator who Dean Smith was — to the details of a Bulls dynasty he knew only as legend. It turns out Jordan’s jabs at general manager Krause are just as funny (and biting) in any language.
“Michael Jordan asking if Krause is going to warm up with them and saying we have a lower rim if you want to, that’s pretty hilarious,” Sun said.
Sun ended up at North Carolina in part because two of the teachers at his school in Qingdao were Americans from Chapel Hill, and their parents — both huge Tar Heels fans — still live here. An economics major, he made the Dean’s list last fall. He went back to China for Christmas, and he’s really glad now he did. The Chinese Embassy in Washington sent a box of supplies — hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes — and he has a plane ticket home for May 31. But he’s had several tickets home over the last six weeks, all of which have gone nowhere.
He’s trapped but safe, just eager to get home. For now, he has a little coursework to finish and one episode left to translate to keep him busy.
“They don’t pay a lot,” Sun said. “It’s more like a hobby. We’re not like professionals. We’re just students. We love basketball. We enjoy doing it and we can make some money at it.”
This story was originally published May 2, 2020 at 1:18 PM with the headline "Chinese UNC student finds translating Jordan doc fun. But Roy Williams? That’s frickin’ hard."
