And then I got distracted about my personal thoughts about what I like to see in a translation VS what other people like to see in a translation and the kinds of conversations I wish we could have about translation. I don't know how to talk about this without sounding ungrateful and nitpicky!!!
I also would like to see more actual thoughtful conversations about translation. It was fun when we had that discussion about blocking and magically appearing cows/chairs under that post on The Creator's Grace on the baihe comm. I was pleasantly surprised that it seemed to chime with quite a few people's reading experiences!
(slight rant: as a preliminary conversation starting point, I need so many people in c-novel fandom to face up to the fact that they either have no standards for prose or lose all of those standards when they start reading a c-novel in translation. The number of times I've seen otherwise intelligent people praise a translation as near-professional and smooth only to look it up and find that it's hideously clunky is... well, suffice to say that I feel regularly gaslit by this fandom. Someone will go 'oh I'm a professional working-with-words person so I'm really picky about prose' and in the very next comment go on to praise the 'style' of a translator whose approach can best be described as 'shove English-language near-synonyms into an unmodified Chinese sentence structure and call that a day'. It's astounding, and not in a good way. Sorry rant over!)
Also, I really don't think being critical of a professionally published translation that is sold as a commercial product for multiple times the hourly wage of the average Southeast Asian worker counts as ungrateful and nitpicky at all! Why should I be grateful for... the opportunity to overpay for a subpar product? (not that I buy danmei in English or indeed at all, but you get my drift)
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I also would like to see more actual thoughtful conversations about translation. It was fun when we had that discussion about blocking and magically appearing cows/chairs under that post on The Creator's Grace on the baihe comm. I was pleasantly surprised that it seemed to chime with quite a few people's reading experiences!
(slight rant: as a preliminary conversation starting point, I need so many people in c-novel fandom to face up to the fact that they either have no standards for prose or lose all of those standards when they start reading a c-novel in translation. The number of times I've seen otherwise intelligent people praise a translation as near-professional and smooth only to look it up and find that it's hideously clunky is... well, suffice to say that I feel regularly gaslit by this fandom. Someone will go 'oh I'm a professional working-with-words person so I'm really picky about prose' and in the very next comment go on to praise the 'style' of a translator whose approach can best be described as 'shove English-language near-synonyms into an unmodified Chinese sentence structure and call that a day'. It's astounding, and not in a good way. Sorry rant over!)
Also, I really don't think being critical of a professionally published translation that is sold as a commercial product for multiple times the hourly wage of the average Southeast Asian worker counts as ungrateful and nitpicky at all! Why should I be grateful for... the opportunity to overpay for a subpar product? (not that I buy danmei in English or indeed at all, but you get my drift)