halfcactus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
halfcactus) wrote2024-05-26 09:12 pm
halfcactus) wrote2024-05-26 09:12 pm
Entry tags:
Weekend reads
Recently read
Joe Sparrow, "Fishing"A comic that compares the concept of creativity, inspiration, and struggles to execute artistic ideas to fishing. Concise, well-communicated, and good choice of colors that differentiates what's above and below the water.
Snowlattes, "Grief Log" & Fatima Wajid, "Prism"
Both of these artists are ESL and could use a friend to help them copyedit (though I firmly believe that most amateur artists who get into comics need to run their stories with writing/editing and reading friends anyway); it still feels like a privilege to be entrusted with such personal and beautifully illustrated journals—one about grief and loss, the other about getting high with old friends. Fatima Wajid’s art and worldview are so marvelously depicted I got all emotional lol.
Megan Abbott, "The End of Everything"
The mystery cdramas I've been watching have me raring to read mystery, but unfortunately this... was not the type of crime/mystery I wanted to read. /o\ It's grooming and sexual harassment/assault framed in a missing persons case and told in the PoV of teenage girls who have daddy issues and are navigating school and sexual experiences. It's more interested in the psychology and the emotions than the crime and mystery, but the psychology and feelings aren't very interesting and the final twist is very standard.
The prose is attractive and the scenes of girlhood would fit really well in a coming-of-age novel. It has a writing style that I associate with fanfiction and amateur writers, ie. a lot of made-up verbs and "smelled like x and y and z"s but the word choices, at least, are quite logical and not just running on vibes. They still get a bit much sometimes though. XD
(I have a Kanae Minato novel lined up as my next mystery/thriller read, we'll see how that one goes since I've never read any of her work before.)
Recently sampled (then dropped)
Elizabeth Hand, "Wyldling Hall"I... simply don’t have the brain to read a story written as a documentary/series of interviews. Also not sure how much horror is in this?
priest, "Stars of Chaos" (Sha Po Lang)
Sampled the first chapter of the first volume because I saw people in
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cnovels talking about how smooth the translation is and... well, the first chapter does read very smoothly. It's a lot less distracting than MDZS and Little Mushroom. But I still bounced off it because of a couple of oddities, and because I'm likely familiar enough with priest's writing style to feel the disconnect. 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!!!Anyway for this novel I might have to either cross-reference with the raws or supplement with the audio drama which is too much work and defeats the purpose of reading a translation. Stepping back for now and coming back in my own time, unprompted by any concurrent discussions.
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Drama-wise I'm now at the final episode of Tender Light and trying hard not to laugh at the recent plot developments. Setting aside the issue of the plot not plotting, it's just really funny that there's this entire Devotion of Suspect X plot development when the author of the original novel has been accused of plagiarizing Suspect X in a completely different canon a couple years ago. I never watched Better Days but I would argue that Tender Light's setup is closer to Suspect X. I did hear that Tender Light deviates a lot from the original novel, which is allegedly plagiarized from a couple of other things, but I'm not interested in reading the original novel and checking. ^^;
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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)
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PS: we don't know each other but I'm just so relieved to hear someone else say this XD
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Yeah this is the thing for me - I consume a lot of translated media that involves a translation and localization team (mainly Japanese videogames, but also movies and anime/manga) where the translated work is meant to stand well enough on its own, and I want the same for cnovels! But I'm also very unfamiliar with novel translation conventions, so I don't have a standard to compare to. ^^; Would love to see them more talked about though!
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Yeah I have... a lot of feelings about this. I think both are true, unfortunately. The first because the standards are likely based on fantranslations--I was like this for a while; it's easy to forget what polished writing looks like when all you read is fantranslations lol. The second because people seem to want to read clunky and awkward phrasing and equate that with "cultural nuance". Which to be honest I find kinda exotifying/Orientalist... And sad when the problem is inside the house (cdiaspora translators who are doing their best to retain everything in their translation, at the cost of meaning).
And then there's this whole other problem that I'm afraid to bring up in public spaces because people can be touchy about it - that most people are not, in fact, qualified to make quick judgements/recommendations about the translation quality. A readable translation is not always a good one, and unless you have read the novel in its original language, it's hard to gauge. Like I don't this makes anyone's opinion is less valid (because I really like reading different opinions lol), but sometimes I need the perspective of someone who translates or is familiar with the original text and doesn't have a personal agenda in favor of or against the translator/publisher when they comment about translations. The danmei translation circle is a small one, and steeped in fandom and social media cliques, which I think makes it harder to talk about these things neutrally.
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
Lol true, I myself am a SEAsian who struggles with the licensed translation prices because libraries aren't a thing where I am and my currency is worth peanuts. XD I really wish the publishers would slow down a bit instead of racing to buy licenses and get the translated books out ASAP. Frankly I wish people would read slower too HAHA.