Translating

This is a place for highly unprofessional, unofficial, purely for entertainment Chinese translations. Need I emphasize purely for entertainment any more.

I’ll start off by reiterating what I’ve already mentioned in my lengthy rambly About page. Yes, I am Chinese. No, this does not mean I am good at it. Now, if you had asked me about my Chinese level back when I was four years old, I would tell you that yes I was absolutely amazing at Chinese back then. I could even throw in several hundred words of a couple Chinese dialects back then as well. But after living for almost 20 years in the US, I will also say I regret taking almost 5 years of Spanish in middle/high school and probably should have taken Chinese instead. Despite already taking almost 5 years of Chinese school earlier. Learn Chinese, people.

That being said. My current level of Chinese is pretty comfortable conversational Chinese, mediocre reading and abysmal writing. But of course most of the Chinese vocab words I know are almost entirely unapplicable to Chinese LNs. MTL is a life saver. Bing Translate is my best friend. Don’t ever use Google Translate. The Bing Translate Safari extension has probably seen just about as much activity as my two Adblock extensions. Google for Chinese terms, and recently, Yabla have been crucial for looking up terms/phrases that don’t make any sense after Bing. It’s basically a 3 step process.

Using this 3 step process, I can usually understand 80-90% of the pretty good stories, 60-70% of the more confusing ones. Most of the time, I skip the Googling portion when the phrases aren’t necessary for my understanding, balancing out to around 75% while speed-reading for the good stories.

In my “translations”, I’ll probably attempt to get to understanding and translating with around 90% accuracy, which would likely increase me from 10 minutes/chapter reading to around 1 hour/chapter translating? This is my first time translating, so we’ll have to see from experience what really happens.

Some translating struggles:

  • Often I find that Chinese characters have nuances that are really difficult to express in English. Like the word 爽. When I read it, I form a vague impression in my head, but it’s hard to express it in words. There are a lot of Chinese words like this, so that’s definitely going to be hard.
  • Plus, frickin idioms. Chinese people love idioms. That’s also something Google is going to be searching up a lot.
  • Also, Chinese slang. I love reading those Weibo-esque commentary and slang, but I’m not that caught up at all with Chinese everyday pop culture.
  • Smex! Love reading them, not sure if I’ll love translating them. I’ll probably have to go reread some Mo Chen Huan bed scenes for context 😎 (I strongly recommend Rebirth of Supermodel and Superstar Aspirations btw)

I am a full time student. I am also full time irresponsible and lazy, so I will likely be spending my forcibly squeezed out free time on reading/translating when I feel like it. Hence the unprofessional and purely for entertainment translations. Probably won’t be editing, so there might be typos. I’m usually pretty good about typos, but I am a pretty fast typer so who knows what might slip through. I try to keep as close to the structure and meaning of the author as possible, though if it’s really confusing I’ll probably be liberal with my changes. While sticking to the meaning, of course. If I make any mistakes on the meanings/miss an idiom or something, let me know! I like learning new things sometimes…
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