GTI Chapter 6

Regular release 2/5

I dozed off as soon as I returned home from work. I slept for 1-2 hours before I stirred awake and took a quick shower to freshen up.

I didn’t realize how tired I was.

I have to work both days this weekend as well so less time to do any translation.

Also, I’d touched up on the site because it wasn’t showing up right in mobile. Do let me know if there’s any issue cause I won’t know otherwise.

Chapter 006

GTI Chapter 5

Regular release 1/5 for the week.

Directly work to publish this after I left a business meeting that ended at 10pm.

That’s the downside with having team members in all the different timezones. Not a fan. I need to rethink how to balance my time if this continue.

On the bright side, I worked out a lot of kink from the site, so it should be slightly nicer.

Chapter 005

GTI Chapter 4

Chaprter 4 is out.

I’m still testing how things go. Will the servers crash under the load? It shouldn’t be since I paid for ample amount of resources.

For the theme, I’d sent out an email to the creator about the missing comments. If I don’t get any response, I’ll change to another theme but that’ll probably be next weekend when I have more time. If there’s anything, leave comments under this post.

It’s still pretty empty here.

Chapter 004

GTI Chapter 3

Chapter 3 is released.

I’m still messing around with the website. I might have to change the theme because I can’t get comments to show up on Pages. I suspect that the theme I’m currently using doesn’t has any comment in its Pages. I tried to mess around in the php but it was all hidden within global object and get_template_part function. I might have to change the theme but I’m reluctant because I’d spent the greater of last afternoon to get it up and running.

Anyway, at current rate, I spent about 4 hours to translate one chapter and another 1/2 to edit (Not counting chapter 2, that monstrous chapter.)

Chapter 003

GTI Chapter 2

Here’s chapter 2. Enjoy.

I have to admit. This chapter almost killed me. It’s painful to work on. I’d work on it for 3 days before I could come out with a draft. It’s almost 6000 words long.

I have to rethink my release schedule if all the chapters are this long. And I discovered another problem with translating straight from the raws.

The grammar. I’m still so stuck with Chinese grammar because I was doing it by audio that when I translate it, I followed the Chinese version directly. Too many passive voice etc doesn’t make for an interesting read, and Mandarin doesn’t differentiate past and present tense well. But I’m too tired or numbed from the sheer amount of text to go correct them one by one. So, this won’t be my focus. Minimum viable product.

Also, I brushed up the website, and had apply for Adsense. Since I never used it before, it’ll probably take some time to be approved which is why I’m still seeing blank space.

Chapter 002

Open For Business

Like I’d said earlier, I was planning to kick start this off after the mid of February. Once I flew back, I still have to unpack things because I was in the middle of moving house before I dashed off for the New Year. That took a couple days for me to settle down.

After that, I was thinking, hmmm, I want my own domain and webhost. So, I went to set them up on the weekend but there was some issue with my bank account and credit card that caused the delay. The bank call center wasn’t working on the weekend. Plan postponed till two days ago when I managed to get all things running. Things will probably start moving from tomorrow onwards.

But, one good thing about the delay was that I have a slush pile of raw diamonds ready for polishing so there won’t be interruptions. Which bring me to my next points. My work schedule. I’ll reveal a bit of my personal life. I’m a finance executive in a Fortune 100 company. One of the stars if I am to brag. And the problem with being an ambitious Turk was that I needed to put in my dues. If I said I’m busy, I’m probably working from morning till midnight daily that week. If I said that I’m in peak period, this means that I’m busy and was working throughout the weekends as well. My record was probably three weeks of continuous work in the office non stop before I finally got a day off. That was really mentally draining.

I’m slightly busy 1-2 weeks in March, and peak in April (really hoping that this won’t be a 3-4 weeks ordeal). I’m planning to build a slush pile to plow through next month, after which work should ease a bit.

Current plan is to have 4-5 chapters per week + additional sponsor chapters.

Project Selection Criteria

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.

  1. The work needs to be completed in status. So that I can gauged how much work is needed.
  2. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. No overt racism/nationalism. Every author has his own tinted lens, doesn’t mean I have to be comfortable with it. Refer above.
  3. 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.