@sparky this doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not an expert, but I've taken a handful of years of mandarin language classes, and it's just.. It really doesn't check out, IMO.

First, it's impossible to pronounce an ideogram.

You can pronounce the word an ideogram represents, based on your dialect... But even then, that's still not right, there's more than one way to pronounce most ideograms because Chinese has many spoken dialects.

And even then, the translated joke isn't good. In mandarin Chinese, 'moo' is usually translated as 'móu' or 'mōu' (pronounced kind of like "mouh?" or "mouh" but like in a high-pitched cat meow voice). That's a fine inaccuracy. But! The real kicker here?

Móu's closest "philosophy" homonym is 牟 (móu), roughly translated as "to seek" or "try to gain", at least in standard mandarin. This is basically a canonical pun baked into the language (at least in mandarin).

The closest to your joke I was able to find is 莫 "mò" (pronounced like "mow", except you say it like a firm command, with a fairly short 'o'). From what I can find in the translation notes, this really isn't used in spoken Chinese much.

Anyways, "nobody there spoke Chinese" is a lame punchline, IMO. But, you know, like a student, I just had to 'go seek' if you would. As is, though, it reads like.. Kinda racist? Because it's not really funny to anyone who's kinda familiar with any of the subject matter, so it's like you're laughing at some other group in a way that doesn't really let people laugh together, if that makes sense.

I'm definitely not a fluent speaker, though, so I could be misunderstanding something. Am I missing some context here? Anyways, lame joke, maybe take it down, but I hope you enjoyed the translation notes!

For reference, I used Pleco's dictionary app to help with most of my translations.