Things I Translated

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Things I Translated

Very few things on this list, but more soon™. Rather than reviews, these will be more like how I feel about something translation-wise. So, uh, warning for self-indulgent rambling, I guess?

Note: I don't rate things I've translated out of a sense of fairness, since I'll inevitably have a closer connection to them than if I was just reading these stories for myself. My general rule for translating something is: if it's something I want to reread often, then I translate it. This says nothing about how good or bad the work itself is LOL, just how *interesting*.

So, yeah, sometimes I translate shit. But it's my shit. :')

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emiliers

Created: Apr 28th, 2020, Updated: Jan 23rd, 2023

Created Apr 28th, 2020

Updated Jan 23rd, 2023

CN (4.4)

#1Record of the Missing Sect Master

146 Chapters Every 89.3 Day(s) 8020 Readers 81 Reviews 09-12-2020

Completed Romance Yaoi

I'll probably leave a formal review of this when I reach the halfway point, but so far I like this! Most of this will be how I feel as a translator, rather than how I feel about the story itself, that'll be for the formal review. (Though the story is quite good!)... more>>

Anyway, as a translation project, I'm glad I chose this as a starting point. It's relatively fun and easy to translate since the author is very clear with her writing. No ambiguous pronouns, little to no typos, etc. It's clear that this is a WN that has undergone extensive editing.

Writing-wise, the author definitely has a fairly unique style that I haven't really seen replicated in my (admittedly few) forays into other Chinese WNs. She's very into /long/ sentences, where she ends the sentence only when she absolutely has to, in order to change subjects. This has taught me stuff about translating right off the bat: namely, I can split up sentences as much as I want when I'm translating, because there's no way to make such long sentences work in English. It's also helped me a lot when there are multiple people in the scene because the author is extremely careful about never mixing up pronouns, etc. I always know exactly which person each 他 is referring to, which I have learned is frankly extraordinary in the world of WNs.

Her writing style also tends to be fairly... concise? For lack of better words. She uses descriptions relatively sparingly, and only when it's necessary to the narrative. There's also not many actual fight scenes, despite this being a wuxia. This style actually closely aligns with my own style when I'm writing original fiction, so I never feel too much of a strain when I'm translating (because descriptions, and fight scenes, are my fatal weakness!).

The author also has a really great naming sense, in that all of her character names roll right off the tongue. Maybe it's that I'm reading them in Chinese, but every time I see the pinyin, their tones just roll right through my head. I definitely suspect that she picks her names for sound first before meaning, haha.

As for stuff I'm not a huge fan of... I think this is mostly attributed to it being a wuxia, but there's so many 教主, 門主, 幫主, etc. running around. It's admittedly tiring for my little translator heart to try and work out a way to differentiate them in English... which is kind of why I don't, sometimes, haha. I'd love if someone has any suggestions, but I honestly think that she picked them mainly to differentiate the major characters at a glance in-text. Though if this comes back to bite me in later chapters, I guess I deserve it for not taking it seriously...

Finally, one of the things I like best about this story is how carefully the author seeds hints and clues early on. She's really great at foreshadowing and Chekhov's gun, I gotta say, and seemingly unimportant bits of information becomes significant later on. As a translator, I'm retaining a lot more information than I would've as a reader, so that's a cool upside I never expected when I first decided to translate. (Though I'm extremely sorry to my readers when I mangle an important point of foreshadowing and have to go back and change it later. Forgive me! I'll work hard to root out errors in the future!)

EDIT: Rereading my translation a few years after I finished translating this, I feel like my translation is kind of... bad lmao. Lots of weird word and grammar choices... Definitely way less readable than my later translations. I'll try and fix this, uh, soon™. <<less

CN (4.3)

#2Depth Charge

1 Chapters Every 400 Day(s) 614 Readers 9 Reviews 06-12-2021

Completed Sci-fi Shounen Ai Tragedy

So I'll admit that I've read most of 卡比丘's work predominantly in translation, so this is my first real encounter with her actual writing, and I'm legitimately impressed.... more>>

CN (3.4)

#3Like Love But Not (PN)

53 Chapters Every 69.7 Day(s) 769 Readers 9 Reviews 12-28-2022

Completed Drama Psychological Romance Shounen Ai Supernatural Tragedy

Me: Eh, this novel is OK.... more>>

Also me, months later, after rereading this for the nth time: OK, I think I'm going to translate this.

So the risk of emotional stories is that, the closer you look at it, the more, uh, flimsy the actual underpinnings of it are, which is definitely true here. I wouldn't say that Like Love But Not is a /bad/ story by any means, and it still succeeds very well at what it sets out to do -- which is to tug at your heartstrings and deliver a good ol' scum abuse novel. But, well... having to translate it is really not as fun as just reading it, especially because the author wrote this as a teenager -- and it really shows sometimes.

Namely, and /particularly/ during heavily emotional moments, the author really loves her run-on sentences with a bajillion long-ass descriptors. (For those who don't know, basically any word/phrase in Chinese can be grammatically changed into an adjective. It's one of the reasons why Chinese is able to be so beautifully concise in poetry. Unfortunately, it's used to the opposite effect here.) Usually, when I run across a difficult to translate phrase in other works, it's that there's no English equivalent. Here? It's that the author has built up such a long-running adjectival arc that I've lost track of the subject /even in the original Chinese/. And even once I found it, I still have to set to work untangling it so the sentence isn't just gobbly-gook in English.

For a very, very small taste of what I had to deal with, here's an actual sentence I had to translate: "Luo Yuchen then left well-wishes to the person who he didn't know yet was dead, the me who used to love him." And if you think that already sounds a bit unwieldly in English, oh, trust me, it's 10 times as unwieldly in Chinese.

Thankfully, she doesn't write like this all the time, only when things get more than a bit emotional, but that also (for me, the translator) kind of takes away from the emotional parts of the narrative because I spend the majority of it wracking my head over how to disentangle this (essentially) stream-of-consciousness adjective soup instead of actually enjoying the feels.

So, uh, yeah. This story is definitely one better read than translated. (But, also, the rough writing is kind of excusable if you remember that the author was eighteen -- it's certainly not sophisticated writing, but it's definitely not bad for a teenager.) Hopefully once I'm finished I can purge my hours of translating this story from my mind and start enjoying it again lmao.

EDIT: Now that I finished translating this (finally), I have to say: I'm actually really proud of my translation work for this one, even moreso than Record of the Missing Sect Master LOL. I think I did a fairly good job trying to make the author's amateur sentence structures sound good!! I mean, the story is still... questionable, but I'm proud of my translation work here, and that's what matters lmao. <<less

CN (4.1)

#4Flower Vase

46 Chapters Every 29.9 Day(s) 1643 Readers 21 Reviews 02-08-2023

Completed Comedy Drama Mature Romance Yaoi

Oh gosh, I think I'm cursed with these types of scum abuse novels ahahaha.... more>>

Anyway, while I think Flower Vase is definitely better written in general than the above Like Love But Not, it's actually... hm, not as well-written as I seem to remember just from reading the raws. As in: translating it has honestly been a bit of a pain lmao.

The author, while capable of writing really good and fun dialogue, is not great at descriptions, and it shows. There's a whole heck of a lot of pronoun confusion to the point that I find myself editing her sentences for clarity by adding in names where there used to be pronouns, etc. It really makes me nostalgic for 卡比丘 or 一世华裳's writing, both authors who are really good re: clarity in their descriptions LOL.

Oh, and some of the descriptions are super repetitious to the point where I swear she was copy-and-pasting older descriptions in later chapters. It doesn't happen super often, and it's not super noticeable if you're just reading it, but translating it? Boy oh boy, do *I* notice. Usually, if something repeats, I double-back to my previous translations to check for consistency, but here? I purposely didn't do that to break up the repetition, which I don't think was intentional (or if it was, it was intentional laziness lmao).

For reference, while I think repetition can often be used to great effect for emphasis, here, she's clearly repeating scenes (including internal character thoughts) but with *two different characters*. Like, there were times in the ML's perspective when he literally thought the *same exact thing* as the MC had earlier in the narrative -- and like it'd be one thing if it was just a general idea, but no, it's literally a word-for-word copy-and-paste lmao. Which feels ultra awkward considering they're, like, two different people. Which is why I purposefully tried *not* to keep the repetition in-translation, just to make it sound less weird. :P Because I don't think the repetition was intentional -- I just think the author reuses a lot of pet phrases on accident.

Anyway, like the above Like Love But Not, I honestly can't wait to be done translating this so I can go back to enjoying it, haha. I still love the heck out of the latter half of this, but translating this, especially the descriptions, has made me genuinely doubt my abilities as a translator. <<less

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