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.
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