What is the latest craze? Pokemon Go of course! The kids and adults are all crazy over catching pokemons. Fortunately, mine are in the “Pokemon No” camp, so I don’t have to deal with requests to drive them out to some remote park somewhere to catch pokemons in the middle of the night. (True story told to me by #2!) Still, it is useful to know how to say “Pokemon” in Chinese. Maybe parents can use this as a kind of incentive : For ever Chinese pokemon term learned, the child gets to play 1 hour of Pokemon Go!
So here’s the vocabulary list for Pokemon Go. Unfortunately, because Pokemon has been around for many years, and it seemed like in the beginning, nobody thought it was important enough to come up with some kind of standardisation in the Chinese translation for it, there are actually many different Chinese names for Pokemon, from 神奇宝贝 in Taiwan, to 宠物小精灵in Hong Kong, to anything goes in Singapore (we mainly just say Pokemon) to 口袋妖怪 in Mainland China. Right now, 口袋妖怪 seemed to have fallen out of favour in China, and the unofficial official translation most adopted in China seems to be 精灵宝可梦. So Pokemon Go is simply 精灵宝可梦 Go. I try to use only terms that are widely adopted in China (since we take Mainland Chinese as a standard to follow and not Taiwanese Chinese). There may still be variations but that’s because there really isn’t any official official translation. Sigh.
The only pokemon included in this vocabulary list is Pikachu because, in my opinion, Pikachu is the most iconic of all the pokemons, and I cannot possible include the Chinese names of all 140 over pokemons in the list. So in case you are interested to find out, I included a link to a Chinese website where you can find the Chinese names of all the pokemons (and some game strategies, in you can read Chinese).
