I liked the amusement park cover =P
This pic, according to someone in another forum, is from someone selling the CD on ebay or something... if it's fake, I don't know... some people do have A LOT of time on their hands...
On another note, does anyone know chinese?
I' ve always wanted to know what is written there on the side...
Posted by Dreamline
Heh. Sorry guys. I had planned to do thread about it and got sidetracked somewhere.
I'm fluent in Japanese, not Chinese. Japanese uses many of the same characters and variations of characters that Chinese does, but obviously it's not the same language. So this is based on my knowledge of Chinese characters, some internet research, and also from talking to a Chinese translator that works at my company.
I should figure out a better layout for this, but anyway...
Page 5:
First 2 are "dream", second 2 are "street". "Street of Dreams"
Page 6:
"China's democratic (political) system." I didn't notice this myself, but my Japanese GF said that this is crappy caligraphy - the individual characters are not well-balanced. She says it looks like someone who doesn't know Chinese wrote it while looking at something. Take that for what it's worth.
Page 9:
Had to look this one up. "To scrape"
Page 10-11 (both the same):
Chinese Democracy. Technically, I think it says China Democracy, but don't quote me on that.
Page 14:
The character for "Yuan", I think, which is the currency of China. Can also mean "money", which explains its use on the IRS lyrics page.
Page 15:
(The image I had was shitty)
Madagascar
Page 16:
The character for "love". Appropriate, but translating it to "This I Love" is a stretch IMO.
And finally...the bottom of the new logo:
"Democracy"
And the spine of the jewel case:
Guns and Roses.
This is interesting though. It does say "Guns n' Roses," but I think it's "wrong." I made this image to show how I think the band name is actually written in China:
Basically, the 2nd character is different, but both mean "and." However, this version gets about 87,200 hits on Google, while the album version gets only around 7,500 hits. When I first started translating these - back before the album release when we only had the leaked liner notes, I believe there were even less hits. Incidentally, the online translator Bablefish spits out the version that is on the CD jacket.
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