Better translation for 春节联欢晚会 than New Year's Gala

Question

On the night of New Years Eve in China many people watch the annual New Year's Gala. This in Chinese is called 春节联欢晚会 in English this is translated as New Year's Gala.

So what exactly is a 联欢晚会? Can someone break it down and explain the parts. Google translates 联欢晚会 as "gala". But if you type "gala" in as the English it doesn't provide 联欢晚会 as the translation.

Answer 1

Meaning no offense, it sounds like you're overthinking this.

The point of translation is not necessarily to go word-for-word. The point is to express the idea in the way it would have been expressed had the original writer been a native speaker of English (in this case). "New Year's Gala" is perfectly acceptable for this.

You could (optionally) choose to use a synonym like "Extravaganza", "Show", "Variety Show", or whatever, but it really doesn't matter much.

Trusting Google translate as the basis to make decisions about translation or translation quality is also not generally a very good idea. It's much better to get in touch with someone who's an actual (professional) live translator, and in this case, a native speaker of English. (Yes, I'm all of those things.)

Answer 2

According to my ABC comprehensive Chinese dictionary, 联欢晚会 means gathering or party, but I think both of these are fairly synonymous with Gala. Google Translate doesn’t necessarily provide the right or best translations.

Personally I think Gala is a good fit to describe the CCTV festivities on New Year's Eve, and sums up a collection of different performances quite well..

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

I don't think I know the exact meaning of gala.

In 联欢晚会, we will have a lot of performances of different kind to celebrate a certain event. These performance would include songs, dances, magic, acrobatics, Chinese traditional performing arts (e.g, Xiangshen(相声), Xiaopin(小品), Chinese Operas), etc. These will be performed on the same stage sequentially.

Answer 4

First, you should not translate an expression word by word. Second, let me explain what 春节联欢晚会 is...

• 春节：when it is held
• 联欢：being happay together
• 晚会：an evening party. refer to fefe's answer for what it does

But party is not exactly what 会 means... Here 会 means being together, but people do NOT dance together, sing together, or talk together. That's very different from party.

So then I'd recommend Spring Festival Cohappy Wanhui with an explanation.

• cohappy: verb. being happy together. e.g.: We cohappied while we are playing games. （我们在一起玩游戏很开心）
• wanhui: noun[C]. a term comes from a Chinese word, "晚会", (explain what 晚会 is)