I have a few criteria that needed to be checked off before I’ll pick up any project for translation from CN to EN. This is mainly I want to know that I can commit for it till the very end.
- The work needs to be completed in status. So that I can gauged how much work is needed.
- Has to be less than 1000 chapters. This is an arbitrary figure but there’s no way I’m spending years on a single project that run for multiple thousands of chapter. Besides, those long serialized story tend to be very draggy and repeating in nature. No author is that good to be able to keep my attention throughout, and those who could are rare and few in between.
Less importance in the selection order.
- No asshole MC. If I’m going to stick with it for the year, I might as well not be that irritated with their attitude.
- No overt racism/nationalism. Every author has his own tinted lens, doesn’t mean I have to be comfortable with it. Refer above.
- Less word play. Mainly because I don’t understand it. I didn’t learned about Chinese literature so I’m clueless when it comes to poems etc. Also, I didn’t keep up with the modern lingo/slang so I won’t know about a lot of the expressions used.
I don’t have much formal Mandarin education except for a few years of language course in my youth. However, I did speak the language, just that I can’t read or write them. Hence, whatever translation I do is by the ear via text to speech. Also, that’s why no word play because frankly, there’s not so much idioms etc used in daily life and it’s harder on my ears/brain.
*Fun fact: A lot of my primary/secondary friends are not aware that I can converse in Chinese. It wasn’t till a couple years after graduation when some of them expressed shock when I replied back to them in Chinese. I’m multilingual so i just tend to reply back in whatever language the conversation was started with. I guessed they never started speaking Chinese, huh?
Because of these few reasons, a lot of the works are crossed off the list mainly because popular works are long. Others that fit in has been picked up so I’m searching through the dregs. I’m calling dibs on 神偷化身 first, but I haven’t read ahead. I reserved the right to drop it if the story turned crappy halfway through.
Serious work has to wait until after the Chinese New Year ~ mid Feb because I’m traveling extensively these 2 weeks and moving the week after that. One of the work I’m currently enjoying is the Quanzhi Fashi translated here. I’d went through the raws and it’s one of the few I’m still catching up every time there new chapters out.