A Look Back

When I first started translating back in 2010/2011, I began with old chuanqi stories from the Tang dynasty. It was pretty tough, not least because they were written in Literary Chinese 文言文, which at the time I didn’t even know was a thing. I ended up translating the entire collection known as the Jianxia zhuan 劍俠傳 after finding vernacular Chinese translations of the stories, 33 in all if I remember correctly. I never published it because I wanted to retranslate all the stories from their original Literary Chinese, which I still have not done, except for a few of them.

Soon after that I found online a repository of stories from a wuxia magazine in China, almost ten years’ worth, and I set about translating some of the shorter stories. I selected the stories based on their length, just wanting to get some translations finished so I could post them to my wuxia forum, Among the Rivers and Lakes. Most of the short story translations I have recently posted here I originally translated back then. I have just done some minor editing on them.

In 2020 I plan to translate and post more stories from that repository. One new story is already translated and ready to post. So in a way, then, I plan for 2020 to be a year of going back to my roots, back to the mindset I was in when I first began translating.

My time in the Chinese webnovel scene from 2017-2019 was not a pleasant one, on the whole. Picked up some bad translation habits/techniques that I have only recently begun to shake off. It was weird looking back at old translations and thinking, wow, I’ve actually regressed! I felt my current translating was inferior to what I had done years before. You’re supposed to get better the more you do something, right? Not worse!

Had I picked up bad habits from fellow translators? Or was it just the faster pace expected of webnovel translation making me succumb to what I call “autopilot” translating? Where you just plug in the same translation every time you come across a certain word or phrase rather than take the time to come up with a good sentence that fits the scene you are translating.

Autopilot translating is why you see (especially if you read a lot of Generic Cultivation Novels) so many instances of “definitely”, “whole body”, “completely”, “somewhat”, “a bit”, “although”, “actually”, “extremely”, “only”, “just”, “seem/seems/seem to be”, “fresh blood”, “hearing this”, “begin/began/started to”, “moreover”, “at this moment”, and my favorite, the nonsensical “This…” (Hey translators, no one says “This…” when they are stammering for something to say. We just say “uh…” or “er…”)

Sentences read very “Chinesey”, just Chinese syntax rendered in English. You can browse Wuxiaworld for countless examples. It gets to the point where you can reconstruct the original Chinese sentence just from reading the translation. Even the so-called greats do it. I think part of it is due to the poor source material—Chinese webnovels are, by and large, atrociously written. There’s only so much you can do with it. Like polishing a turd, in the end, it’s still shit.

The other thing, though, I think is the speed at which translators in the scene nowadays are expected to translate. Even one chapter a day is high output, and the norm now is 2/day. It takes time to construct good sentences, all the more so when the original Chinese is so terrible and repetitive.

I fell into the trap too and am only now digging myself out, taking my time, going back to the way I used to do it, when I was on my own, before I knew any other translators. The webnovel scene, for me, sucked all the fun out of it. In 2020, I’m going to have fun translating again.

I’ve already begun. In October I began translating a short webnovel under a different name, just for fun, and to take my mind off real life which was and is not that great right now. I finished that novel just under a month later. It’s out there, somewhere. Song of Exile is a dead project for the time being. Indefinitely. I don’t even want to get into that.

Going Forward

There is a tentative plan for me to translate a short wuxia novel on this site, an author I have never translated before. I’m not going to announce it yet in case I change my mind, but I have translated the first chapter already. The chapters are about 10,000 Chinese characters each, pretty standard for print wuxia novels.

As for articles, I want to focus on looking at aspects of wuxia that might be of interest to those wanting to write wuxia themselves. There’s scant information about wuxia in English, and barely any novels translated, aside from Jin Yong and Gu Long. (To be honest, if you really want to get into wuxia you’re going to have to learn Chinese. These old novels I talk about all the time are just not going to be translated to English, in all likelihood.)

The first article, which I have almost finished, is about the use of travel permits as a plot device in Yun Zhongyue’s novels. I want to translate more excerpts, give people a taste of the range and scope of wuxia literature. It goes far beyond Jin Yong and Gu Long. I also want to write more about weapons and martial arts, with excerpts from a wide range of novels, to see how different authors implement and describe weapons and martial arts in their work.

Not sure what else. It’s kind of nice that nobody really reads this site, that way I can just do what I want without any pressure.

I’m toying with the idea of producing and publishing a wuxia fanzine, called The Jianghu: Chinese Fiction and Culture. It would feature original fiction of my own, as well as longform articles. One idea is an in-depth look at what the jianghu is and how various authors construct and use the jianghu in their work.

Another idea is a comparison between wuxia and the American Western genre. There are many striking similarities between the two genres. In fact, although wuxia often gets lumped in with fantasy, it really is more closely related to the western, and most wuxia is about as “fantasy” as the average western.

I don’t know, we’ll see. I have the logo made for it already. It would be an ebook (mobi and epub), maybe a print-on-demand print version as well. No specific publication schedule, just an issue whenever one is ready. I’ve done something similar before, a magazine called Kunlun Journal of Chinese Historical Fiction, so I know it’s a lot of work. So that’s a maybe.

Other than that, I plan to focus a lot on my own fiction writing in 2020. I have a lot of projects to work on there. I plan to focus more on myself overall. No more making graphics for others, no more webnovel covers other than ones I may make for my own amusement. I don’t want to do any more guest chapter translations. Just gonna focus on my own interests.

2019 was a pretty bad year for me. One of the worst, actually. Battling OCD, anxiety, depression, on and off medication all year long. With mixed results. Many other life struggles that all seemed to crop up at the same time, as if they were in cahoots. Will be moving to a new place in a few months. I hate moving, hate change of any kind, really. I don’t adapt well to it. So really, I’m not looking toward 2020 optimistically. But then I’ve never been an optimist.

In any case, I plan to be around this site a lot more in 2020. Still have a lot of work to do on the Wuxia Wiki. And probably that short novel.

But plans. You know how that goes. As Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”

Well, hindsight is 2020. So we’ll see.

— Lone Crane/GZ
Dec. 31st, 2019