Today In Niche Genres Of Joke That I Can Never Get Enough Of And Will Probably Still Be Secretly Thinking

Stars of Chaos 杀破狼 Vol 1, Notes 2

Pages 86 - 146

More translation and cultural notes:

It’s obvious in Chinese that Priest just means “his eyes were red with hatred,” but really eloquently.

More under the cut.

Yup. Priest fit in a pun/joke related to male-exclusive anatomy, and it’s just really cute.

It’s a cute turn of phrase where Shen Yi is being appropriately humble as a servant of a prince, and Chang Geng is using the exact same phrasing but saying “I’m not a prince.” And it’s all very concise.

There’s this thing called 歇后语 which Pleco translates as “two-part allegorical saying” and is really just yet another type of cultural inside joke. They’re so fun.

This one is 老寿星上吊 — 活得不耐烦了, for those who can read Chinese. (The translation is pretty spot-on, too).

Yet another nice way to talk about death and the dead.

Yah. I had to look that up.

Stars of Chaos - All The Notes List

All The Seven Seas Books Masterlist

Mongolian Dancing. ❤️

one of the deans in beijing dance academy rehearses with students

posting on twitter feels like throwing something you worked on for hours, days, weeks into a river, hoping it'll get swept out to sea for many people to experience, only for it to immediately crash into some rocks and explode. its gone now. if no one sees it in the 0.00003 seconds it exists on their timelines, no one ever will

posting on tumblr is like carefully placing your work in the middle of a dark abandoned factory, and slowly a bunch of weird little goblins manifest from the shadows and touch your work all over with their little raccoon hands and share it with each other. sometimes they find your thing again many years later and excitedly share it again

the weird goblins are much more enjoyable

Stars of Chaos 杀破狼 Vol 1, Notes 6

By Priest. English translation by 7 Seas.

Notes on culture and translation decisions.

Pages 288 - 414.

More under the cut.

长庚低声道：“让开。”

Chang Geng doesn’t shout. He lowered his voice and politely warned the people around him (that he was going to stab them if they didn’t) “Move aside.”

Definitely check the Glossary for 江湖 Jianghu. It’s the foundation of an entire genre of story, very nearly of the entire Chinese culture.

Gu Yun is never careless! And he also doesn’t care what you think of him.

Hmmm. Self-deluding people of limited education and even less critical thinking skill. Never seen one before.

姐姐。Big sister. Polite way for teenager to refer to a young lady.

Yao Zhen knows that Gu Yun’s version of the story will get him into trouble. Shen Yi must be glad that at least it’s not him having to fabricate Gu Yun’s story this time!

No French warning. Just a 小心 = “Careful!” as he attacked.

“功夫扎实，主要看自己肯下多大工夫，功夫厉害，主要是战场上生死一线的情况多了，谁教都一样。”

It’s hard to translate. The first and second half of the argument match perfectly, and we’re talking about a topic for which English doesn’t really have the vocabulary.

扎实 = solid, strong.

厉害 = intense, amazing, devastating (in a good way).

Stars of Chaos - All The Notes List

All The Seven Seas Books Masterlist

I’m annotating the Official Translation of MDZS before I lend it out to non-Chinese friends, and as I was reading I realized that the Chapters are different! Paper Book ch 1 = online book ch 1-4!

Which is ok, fine, sure…but that also means that there are no incredibly cute chapter titles to make the relationship between author and reader feel more intimate. I love MXTX as much as I do partially because every few chapter titles felt like it was a charming little inside joke that she wrote just for me (and her other millions of readers).

Here is a screenshot and link to Awesome Charming Cute Chapter Titles:

Here are the English Translations, courtesy of the MDZS wiki ❤️:

So my questions now:

do I just Pencil In the Cute Chapter Titles in the paper novel where they would/should appear?

Do they matter as much when it’s so difficult to translate the completely different style that they are written in — cutesy slang — vs. the writing style of the novel — proper “period” XianXia? I mean, of all the LWJ references in the chapter titles, she only writes his actual name Lan Wangji “properly” twice. Twice, in over 100 chapters. I learned how to read slang in Chinese because of these chapter titles! (And the end-chapter notes, and some of the comments :)

What’s the best way to introduce this story to a non-Chinese, non-XianXia, non-BL-reader?!?!?

A co-worker the other day commented on how he had heard that the Chinese government was trying to crack down on femininity in men in the media, and I went crazy trying to find that awesome video of Wang Yibo wearing Chanel runway looks. Women’s Chanel runway looks. And I was blathering on and on (while still trying to stay professional and not-weird-obsessed) about how Wang Yibo can just DO that, and I can’t imagine anyone being able to stop him, or even slow him down, just because he likes wearing dangly earrings and orange eyeshadow. And women’s jackets.

I couldn’t find the video again on tumblr, but I had some success on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/hIAOXIf9Alw

Enjoy!

all right guys, let’s have a conversation about linguistic register, Lan Wangji, and I guess Wei Wuxian can come too

(and I do genuinely mean conversation, I’d love to hear other people’s input on this, because I did just write a long-ass post about the subjectivity of interpretation in translations)

So when I started interacting with the fandom and reading people’s fics, I got really confused by the way some folks were writing dialogue for Lan Wangji; he often sounded super awkward, spoke in fragments, and sometimes exclusively in third person. To be fair, all of those are elements of his speech at various times, but like, seeing it in English-language material felt like a really heavy-handed way of rendering it in translation?

I guess when you use third person within the first three episodes of the show, it makes a pretty big impression on the audience

This is not at all intended to be a criticism of people who are 1000% writing and creating wonderful work, which is more than I can say for myself, but I want to poke and prod and tease at some linguistic nuance here.

Take a deep breath, grab a pot of tea (this’ll take more than a cup), because we’re going to take the scenic route on this one–

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MDZS Volume 4 Annotations

Part 5, pages 174 - 208

And so begins my “Please No American Slang!” tirade, plus a few more grammatical / vocabulary changes to make the story flow more clearly.

The Chinese for this is super funny. I could totally see Jin Ling staring at his JiuJiu, staring so hard that JC felt the stare and looked over to see his teenage nephew absolutely googly-eyed as he tried to Jedi-mind-trick / wish his JiuJiu into saying something nice to him.

Jedi mind tricks don’t work on JC, of course. (Wishes don’t work on him, either.)

More below the cut:

Guess who finally finished reading 镇魂 Guardian!

镇魂 translations etc. masterlist

I was going to put up a masterlist of my translations and then decided I might as well compile a list of all the Guardian 镇魂 novel translations that I know of, so they’re available in one place for your convenient reading. :D This also includes links to some novel meta posts and name/honorific discussion. ♥ to my fellow Guardian fans.

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