What the magic circles say in Lego Monkie Kid
(U can skip to the end for the tl;dr)
My fiance (skittle) is very good at languages. so last night, they stayed up while i was asleep and decided to rewatch monkie kid (as one does). well, they got to the clone episode and they wanted to know what the magic circle says. this one specifically
they arent an expert, nor are they fluent, but let me walk you through their process.
Skittle has an apple pencil and an ipad, which means they can write things and the ipad will turn it into text. so at first they tried drawing it onto google search, but it wasnt working. they assumed the area wasnt big enough for the ipad to properly read the Hanzi (the symbol), so they opened their translate app and tried there. each time it kept putting a diferent Hanzi instead.
Skittle wrote it over and over multiple times but never got the same one (for over an hour. they got very upset lmao). so they looked at the spell again and noticed something a bit off about it. if you look back up to the circle, you can see the L shapes in the top left, which isnt something you normally see in handwritten chinese. it looked more 'computer friendly' like a font. so they decided to do everything the same, but change those two marks to diagonal lines (going in the same direction). and they got this!
So the spell MK uses in episode 2 translates to "Disappear"
Then skittle remembered the spell Wukong used to seal some of MK's powers. this one
this one was not as easy to figure out
So they followed the steps again, and got this
they were obviously confused. because that IS the right Hanzi, but that translation makes no sense, right? so they went to google translate and put in 'confer a title upon' and got this
not the same thing at all. It made more sense, seeing as it was multiple words, but then what was the app talking about? so they decided to try putting what would make the most sense for the Hanzi to mean, which was 'seal up'
it was still longer, but the first hanzi was correct. so they pasted it back into google translate and got this!
then out of pure curiosity (and because they were half asleep) they pasted it twice into the translator app to see if anything changed
Which it did!
So the spell that Wukong used on MK in episode one roughly translates to 'Seal up.'
Chinese is a very hard language to translate, so im very proud of my fiance <3
(tl;dr the magic circle Wukong uses in episode one roughly translates to "Seal up", and the one MK uses in episode two translates to "Dissappear.")
