Found in Translation

All Your Mistranslation Are Be long to Us
An Internet meme is a concept that spreads via the World Wide Web in a manner no one could have
predicted. “All your base are belong to us,” a strange broken English translation spoken by a
character named CATS in a 1991 Japanese video game called Zero Wing. This sentence has the
dubious honor of becoming one of the most famous Internet memes to date—so much, in fact, that
it’s often abbreviated AYBABTU or simply AYB. The garbled translation gained notoriety in email
and Internet posts and soon began appearing in unlikely everyday scenes and even on T-shirts. Its
original meaning of “CATS has taken all of your bases” (
CATS
) is
hard to decipher from the botched translation, but it’s a great example of a mistranslation spreading
and permeating popular culture to become a veritable phenomenon.

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The Pride of China in the NBA
Sports and entertainment inhabit similar spheres, with athletes who are often
larger-than-life celebrities. And the interpreters who work for them? Often,
they are major sports fans. Take Colin Pine.
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As a student, Pine was far more
interested in basketball than he was in languages. He thought he lacked any
language talent. But his college roommate had invited him to visit Taiwan, so
Pine asked his parents for a nine-week intensive language course and a ticket to
Taiwan as a college graduation present. Pine ended up staying in Taiwan for
three years. For the first couple of years he taught English at night and worked
in an all-Chinese office during the day. During the third year he enrolled in the
National Taiwan University for a formal Chinese language program. In his
limited spare time, what did the American sports fanatic do when he was far
from home? Play pickup basketball games, of course.
Now, this last activity was probably not the first thing Pine thought to put on
his résumé when he returned to the United States. However, it certainly ended
up helping with the job he landed a few years later, representing a truly larger-
than-life figure, someone who held the hopes of more than one billion people
in China. Pine became the interpreter for Yao Ming, the most talked-about and
anticipated basketball player entering the NBA in 2002.
In the United States, the seven-foot, six-inch (2.29-meter) basketball
phenomenon was a sensation, whose every step and game were followed
closely, analyzed, and overanalyzed. But in his home country, he was simply—
and overwhelmingly—the “Pride of China.” As Pine waited anxiously at the
Houston airport to meet his famous client for the first time, he suddenly
realized the extent of this responsibility. And it showed. When Yao was later
asked what he first thought when he saw Pine, he said that he looked “very
young and very nervous.”
Interpreters typically do not play a starring role, but especially during the
2002 and 2003 NBA season, when the media and fan attention was most
intense, Pine’s face was on TV alongside Yao’s before and after every game of
the Houston Rockets. One fan even created a sign dubbing him the Robin to
Yao Ming’s Batman.
Pine, who today works for the NBA in Shanghai, looks back on that time of
his life as “a dream job, but very exhausting.” What Pine did for Yao (and
Yao’s parents, who lived with Yao in Houston) was to intensively decode a new
culture and a new life. Aside from his regular interpreting duties, Pine was
Yao’s driver and driving instructor. He helped him open a bank account and
showed his family where to shop in Houston. He even moved in with Yao and

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his family.
It is interesting that Pine never had to interpret during actual games. Even
though he was heavily involved in interpreting as the coaches set up plays and
strategy during practice, during the game, the players’ physical memory counts
most. How much did he have to interpret of the infamous NBA trash talk
between players? Not at all, because Pine figured that it was actually to Yao’s
advantage to miss that element of what was transpiring on the court.
Some of the more public insults—such as those from rival center Shaquille
O’Neal—he did interpret to Yao, who handled the jabs with diplomacy and
maturity. In fact, looking back on those years, Pine claims that Yao was by far
the more mature of the two. Yao, who had lived under intense public scrutiny
back home in China since the age of fourteen, seemed to take the inevitable
criticism and injury-related setbacks more nonchalantly than his interpreter.
“How can you not feel defensive for such a nice person?” Pine asks.
The feature film The Year of Yao chronicles Yao’s and Pine’s first year in the
NBA, making clear that the professional relationship between interpreter and
employer had developed into a veritable friendship. After Yao’s second year in
the NBA, Pine was surprised to be asked back for a third year. Yao’s improved
English skills made the need for interpretation rare, but again, this was a
different kind of relationship. In fact, when Yao was asked during an interview
around Thanksgiving what he was most thankful for, he said, “My interpreter,
Colin.”