Translating

My translations here are not official and are purely for entertainment.

Starting off, like I mentioned in my About post, Chinese is my Mother Tongue and I have been speaking it since young; but it is in no way any better than any other person that took up Chinese as a second or third language. I speak English almost all the time, so it’s no surprise that my Chinese is not at the level that it is supposed to be. Moreover, due to my country having a large number dialects, my English may not also be the best and sometimes my sentence structures may be a little weird so please do inform me if there is anything that is weirdly phrased in my translations!

Continuing, I will have to use dictionaries for phrases that I come across in novels that I don’t understand, and due to different dictionaries having different translations, the meaning may stray a little from what it originally meant to allow the sentence to flow better. Despite that, I will still try to retain as much of what the original meaning of the word is supposed to be.

This is my first time translating a novel, so the time taken for me to translate one chapter may vary depending on my understanding of the chapter. 

Here are some struggles I have when translating:

• There are some characters that are used to represent sounds such as “嗯”. I understand what the word implies but it’s hard to express it in proper English. There are many others out there as well which adds on to the pain.

• Chinese slang. Many authors like to use slang or memes often found on Weibo etc. but there are many times where I don’t understand the context or just the slang in general and have to do lots of research and put in more effort into translating for it to be easily understood to the readers that don’t get the context as well. But it is rather funny doing research; I’ve broadened my use of slang and emojis.

• Idioms; I always have trouble understanding them. Google helps heaps.

I am a full time student, and I have National Examinations coming up at the end of this year. I will try to keep to my schedule of one chapter per week, but there will be times that I may fall behind translating and I’m very sorry about that. All translations are done in my free time after studying so I hope everyone understands! I don’t have an editor and I doubt I will have one anytime soon, so my translations are largely unedited. I will try to keep typos and grammar errors to a minimum but there are times where some slip through so do inform me about them!

Happy reading! 🙂