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This amazing song from Taiwan seems to have been inspired by some Japanese cultural practices, which we will explore later in this post.

First of all, the guy is singing Spanish, but using Mandarin and Taiwanese words, as well as a few short English words. Well, he's not really singing, but transcribing with Chinese characters and a few English syllables a very famous Spanish song, "Despacito" ("Slowly"), sung beautifully by a Puerto Rican. Not only do his transcriptions not make any sense on the whole, they amount to hilarious gibberish.

Second, ㄇㄇ樣, the handle of the artist, looks like a Japanese-style name. I wouldn't know what ㄇㄇ mean if I interpret them as two Chinese characters, but I do recognize them as the repeated bopomofo symbol for the "m" sound, whose shape is derived from the archaic character and Kangxi radical 14 mì 冖 ("cover"). If we were pronouncing the 樣 à la japonaise, it would be "sama" ("Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms."), hence "Momo sama", but the way he himself pronounces his moniker is "Mōmō yàng". In Chinese, yàng 樣 means "appearance; kind; sample; shape; form; pattern; style".

I can spot at least half a dozen Taiwanese expressions in the transcription, several of them originally from Japanese.



In the title of the YouTube video, after the artist's name comes this: kōng'ěr gēcí 空耳歌詞, which literally means "empty ear lyrics". That really looks Japanese — soramimi kashi. What does it mean? This is how the word is defined in jisho: "homophonic translation of song lyrics for comic effect​".

Wikipedia tells us that it is:

…a Japanese term for homophonic translation of song lyrics, that is, interpreting lyrics in one language as similar-sounding lyrics in another language. A bilingual soramimi word play contrasts with a monolingual mondegreen or homophonic transformation, and is usually caused by pareidolia. Soramimi transcription is also commonly used in animutations for comic effect.

Although soramimi has been quite popular in Japan for some time (see below), most informants from Taiwan and China that I asked about it had never heard of the word.

A language teacher told me that students often spontaneously use this technique as a mnemonic device for memorizing vocabulary items (e.g., dàogē 道哥 ["way brother"] for "dog"), but it becomes a tour de force when used to transcribe an entire song. He comments further:

While the music video looks cute and funny, the transcriptions (mostly in Mandarin, with a few words in Taiwanese) are actually random and don't really make any sense. So, from a language teacher's perspective, I would say this is more entertaining than educational. The transcriptions are for the most part combinations of unrelated words and phrases, so translating them would be pointless and even a bit ridiculous. Maybe that's the intention of this kind of work. Nevertheless, I was really impressed with the time and effort that was put into making this work.

One of my correspondents tried to make a go of translating one section of the soramimi transcription. She says that, although the meaning of the transcription is nothing like that of the original song, the words and expressions used in the transcription must have actual meanings and cannot be just a cluster of unrelated characters.

Starting from 0:41 in the video, the original Spanish lyrics are:

Sí, sabes que ya llevo un rato mirándote

Tengo que bailar contigo hoy

The actual meaning of this sentence is:

Yes, you know that I've been watching you for a while

I have to dance with you today

The Chinese transcription in this video is:

膝，小布希假借嚕馬桶，沒人投他

地公給芭樂跟地溝油

Xī, xiǎo Bùxī jiǎjiè lǔ mǎtǒng, méi rén tóu tā

dì gōng gěi bālè gēn dìgōu yóu

It sounds similar to the original lyrics but means something totally different. With the help of the pictures attached to the lyrics in the video, we may translate these verses as:

Knee, George W. Bush pretends to wash the toilet, but nobody votes for him.

Tudigong (God of Soil and Earth) gives gutter oil (repeatedly cooked oil) to a guava.

The word "despacito" as transcribed in the song is another good example of how soramimi transcription works in the hands of a skilled artist:

diē shì pà xǐtóu 爹是怕洗头 ("dad is afraid of shampooing")

Observations by Nathan Hopson on soramimi in Japan, its birthplace:

This is a great example of the 空耳 (soramimi) "genre," which refers to the phenomenon of hearing something (usually a snippet) as if it was in your native language because you don't understand the language being spoken. It was the subject of a long-running and often very funny TV show in Japan, featuring the famous comedian Tamori. His 空耳アワー (Soramimi awā = "Soramimi Hour") ran at least ten years.

Collections of "greatest hits" can be found here and here.

One of the more famous early soramimi YouTube videos was this one.

The song, which has lyrics in Romanian, was animated by a Japanese YouTuber according to what she heard. I recall that this was "viral" before we called videos "viral."

For the video at the top of this post, apparently a Taiwanese YouTuber is doing the same thing with the song "Despacito", which was a massive hit last year. It was everywhere, no matter how I tried to avoid it, having "topped the charts of 47 countries and reached the top 10 of ten others." (Wikipedia)

So the Taiwanese YouTuber is "hearing" the Spanish lyrics of "Despacito" in his/her native/familiar languages.

Here's the video of the original "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee, with more than five billion (!) views:

And here are the lyrics to the Spanish song, if you want to try to match them to the Taiwan Mandarin version:

Ay

Fonsi

DY

Oh

Oh no, oh no

Oh yeah

Diridiri, dirididi Daddy

Go

Sí, sabes que ya llevo un rato mirándote

Tengo que bailar contigo hoy (DY)

Vi que tu mirada ya estaba llamándome

Muéstrame el camino que yo voy (Oh)

Tú, tú eres el imán y yo soy el metal

Me voy acercando y voy armando el plan

Solo con pensarlo se acelera el pulso (Oh yeah)

Ya, ya me está gustando más de lo normal

Todos mis sentidos van pidiendo más

Esto hay que tomarlo sin ningún apuro

Despacito

Quiero respirar tu cuello despacito

Deja que te diga cosas al oído

Para que te acuerdes si no estás conmigo

Despacito

Quiero desnudarte a besos despacito

Firmo en las paredes de tu laberinto

Y hacer de tu cuerpo todo un manuscrito (sube, sube, sube)

(Sube, sube)

Quiero ver bailar tu pelo

Quiero ser tu ritmo

Que le enseñes a mi boca

Tus lugares favoritos (favoritos, favoritos baby)

Déjame sobrepasar tus zonas de peligro

Hasta provocar tus gritos

Y que olvides tu apellido (Diridiri, dirididi Daddy)

Si te pido un beso ven dámelo

Yo sé que estás pensándolo

Llevo tiempo intentándolo

Mami, esto es dando y dándolo

Sabes que tu corazón conmigo te hace bom, bom

Sabes que esa beba está buscando de mi bom, bom

Ven prueba de mi boca para ver cómo te sabe

Quiero, quiero, quiero ver cuánto amor a ti te cabe

Yo no tengo prisa, yo me quiero dar el viaje

Empecemos lento, después salvaje

Pasito a pasito, suave suavecito

Nos vamos pegando poquito a poquito

Cuando tú me besas con esa destreza

Veo que eres malicia con delicadeza

Pasito a pasito, suave suavecito

Nos vamos pegando, poquito a poquito

Y es que esa belleza es un rompecabezas

Pero pa montarlo aquí tengo la pieza

Despacito

Quiero respirar tu cuello despacito

Deja que te diga cosas al oído

Para que te acuerdes si no estás conmigo

Despacito

Quiero desnudarte a besos despacito

Firmo en las paredes de tu laberinto

Y hacer de tu cuerpo todo un manuscrito (sube, sube, sube)

(Sube, sube)

Quiero ver bailar tu pelo

Quiero ser tu ritmo

Que le enseñes a mi boca

Tus lugares favoritos (favoritos, favoritos baby)

Déjame sobrepasar tus zonas de peligro

Hasta provocar tus gritos

Y que olvides tu apellido

Despacito

Vamos a hacerlo en una playa en Puerto Rico

Hasta que las olas griten "¡ay, bendito!"

Para que mi sello se quede contigo

Pasito a pasito, suave suavecito

Nos vamos pegando, poquito a poquito

Que le enseñes a mi boca

Tus lugares favoritos (favoritos, favoritos baby)

Pasito a pasito, suave suavecito

Nos vamos pegando, poquito a poquito

Hasta provocar tus gritos

Y que olvides tu apellido (DY)

Despacito

Songwriters: Erika Ender / Luis Fonsi / Ramon Ayala

[h.t. Grace Wu; thanks to Melvin Lee, Zeyao Wu, Xinchang Li, and Yixue Yang]

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