Finished reading Three Hundred Years of Longing, volume one, by Mu Su Li.
Since it's volume one of four, I obviously can't say much about it as a story at the moment! Except, I suppose, that it's a promising and intriguing start. I'll be reading the next three volumes straight away, since I felt confident enough in the author after reading one of her other books earlier that I went ahead and waited to start this one until I had all four volumes.
Anyway, while I can't really say much about the story as a whole yet, what I can talk about is the translation/localization. Two things in particular about it bothered me a lot. (Also some lesser things where the translator used some odd choices for translating/approximating genre conventions. For example, bags or pouches that can hold a vast (or even infinite) amount are common in xianxia fiction. Most translators use the Chinese term, qiankun, and don't bother to translate it, letting the context and/or reader's pre-existing genre awareness do the heavy lifting. This translator decided to use "bag of holding," which I feel like is probably a D&D copyrighted term, but maybe not. 🤷🏻♀️ It felt odd in this context, though, that's for sure.)
So, as to the things that genuinely bothered me. First, some strange name choices. A character came up at one point whose name was written in the English text as "Ayao." Which made me go "well, that's weird!" But I didn't do much more than that until much later, when a different character talked about her daughters "Ayuan" and "Atai" and then I was sure: the translator decided to slam the prefix "a-" into the front of the names without the dash that indicates "prefix" rather than "actual syllable." Normally, the use of this prefix has been "A-" in these official translations. (Early on in my danmei fixation, I came across a fan information thing that talked about using a lower case "a" since it's not part of the name, and I personally liked that way and have been using it in my fanfic, but I have no idea if that's viewed as more or less "right" than the capital "A" version.) But here they're slammed into the name, thus giving "Ayao" instead of the "A-Yao" you would see in other officially translated novels. (Like MDZS, for example, which in fact does have a character called "A-Yao" by one of the other characters.) Even more bizarre to me is the character whose name is being written as "Gao E". What the heck does that "E" mean? In all of these books that I've read, in all the name generators I've used, in the books of actual history I've looked at, I haven't seen any use of "E" as a Chinese name. (I admit that this is of course a very small and limited sampling, and my genuine knowledge is minimal at best...) I keep thinking it's maybe a weird attempt to make a name seem more pronounceable to the average English speaker? Or something? I can't understand it. Not at all.
Second, and this is both easier and harder for me to understand, is that some names are translated...into Latin. The city of the gods is being called Urbs Caelestia, and late in the book a character is mentioned who is called Rex Spiritus. This...this is just insanely bizarre to me. I find it roughly impossible to believe that those terms were in Latin (or any other European language) in the original Chinese text of the novel. It reminds me of the Netflix subtitles on The Untamed: a few things got weird, classical antiquity term replacements, leading to the "Stygian Tiger Tally" (instead of "Yin Tiger Tally") or Lan Clan musical pieces being called "Resquiat" and "Absterge" ("Rest" and "Cleansing" in the Seven Seas translation of the novel) and so on. These subtitles were, I believe, following the lead of an earlier fan translation of the novel, which is both and explanation and a total lack of an explanation at the same time. It's just...it's a localization choice, so it's hard to say "that's wrong!" with any justification, but it's certainly distracting. And I think I'd be happier with the translation as a whole if the translator hadn't made that odd choice. But as long as "minor translation oddities" remains my only complaint, I'll be overall very satisfied with the novel as a whole!
Anyway.
Original language: Chinese
And in the November Writing Challenge that I keep forgetting to post about...things have been weird.
When I last posted, my word count for the month was 19558.
That was Sunday morning, before I had written for the day. That was a good writing day, in which I got to one of the scenes I had most been looking forward to writing in this crazy new fanfic. My total went all the way up to 24185, making for 4,627 words written that day.
Then on Monday, I only got up to 25594, counting the big paragraph of planning that I jotted down right before bed. A measly 1758 words. 😭 (Before those notes, it was only 1339!)
But thanks to those notes, I had a much better day today, and got up to 33379! That means I wrote 7436 words today! 😆 (Would have done even better, since I didn't finish getting through those new notes today, only I had to stop to go see a movie. Wildwood. Very excellent! Strongly recommend!)
And that's me caught up on my daily word count! Time to start winding my brain down so I can eventually get to sleep.
