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baihe_mediaIt's been slightly over a year since I started translating To Embers We Return, so I thought it might be a good time to take stock of my progress.
The plan, when I started, was to translate about 20% of the novel per year. I didn't quite hit that mark, but I feel I got close enough given the hell that my day job has turned into, so I'm going to consider that a win.
As of the end of December 2025, I'd translated 32 chapters. This works out as 148,018 words in Chinese in total, 136,376 words in English translation. The main text of the novel is 173 chapters long; there are 182 chapters in total if you add the extras. So, by chapter count, 32 chapters is 18.50% of the main text of the novel, and 17.58% of the main text plus extras.
148,018 words in Chinese works out at an average of 405 words per day (a figure that includes first draft, second draft and revisions). In this article, a bunch of professional translators agree that an average of 800 to 1,000 words (in languages more adjacent to English) make sense. Considering that I'm doing this in the interstices of day job, social life, life admin and other hobbies, I'm also going to count this as a win.
Translating To Embers We Return presented several different challenges compared to my last book-length project, Purely by Accident. Purely by Accident is from a fairly (almost shockingly, by the lax standards of c-webnovels) tight first-person POV, which meant there were a whole host of things I didn't have to even think about. To Embers We Return is in (mostly) limited third-person POV, but as is the case with c-novels, the POV can shift multiple times within a chapter, and the shifts are not always marked. I'm not really convinced I'm rendering this very well; I need to do a more focused read of English-language books that do this with POV. Because of the third-person POV, To Embers We Return also requires me to deal with the dreaded double pronoun problem that has haunted so many fic writers. There are also challenges like integrating high-tech terms into a Tang Dynasty base setting.
One thing I had to do pretty frequently when translating Purely by Accident, which I've barely gotten to do in To Embers We Return, is translate poetry. Zisong quotes it a lot (x_los voice: probably because she's not very good at anything else), Shen Ni and Bian Jin and their little found family/found frenemy group rarely do. I find myself missing it, even though I used to groan and whinge whenever I bumped up against a section of poetry in Purely by Accident. Turning shi poetry into iambic pentameter (mostly) and ci poetry into common/ballad meter (mostly) was challenging, and often resulted in me wandering around the house muttering different permutations of sentences and counting stresses, but it was very satisfying when I hit upon a combination that worked. To Embers We Return has also so far not required me to do anything like this, and I do kind of miss that particular form of puzzle-solving/showing-off.
And finally, to anyone thinking of checking out the translation but not wanting to be stuck on too much of a cliffhanger, Chapter 36 (which is coming up soon) is something of a natural stopping point for what I've started thinking of as 'volume one' of the novel. It's been surprisingly tricky to identify stopping points because Ning Yuan is a very good serial writer and therefore puts little hooks in at the end of each chapter to compel you to come back to the next one, but I think this more-or-less works. By chapter count, it's also about 20% of the main text of the novel (19.78% if you add the extras) so I feel that's a nice chunk of book, and you'll get the next chunk about this time next year, kind of like traditional series publishing (that's the hope, anyway).
The plan, when I started, was to translate about 20% of the novel per year. I didn't quite hit that mark, but I feel I got close enough given the hell that my day job has turned into, so I'm going to consider that a win.
As of the end of December 2025, I'd translated 32 chapters. This works out as 148,018 words in Chinese in total, 136,376 words in English translation. The main text of the novel is 173 chapters long; there are 182 chapters in total if you add the extras. So, by chapter count, 32 chapters is 18.50% of the main text of the novel, and 17.58% of the main text plus extras.
148,018 words in Chinese works out at an average of 405 words per day (a figure that includes first draft, second draft and revisions). In this article, a bunch of professional translators agree that an average of 800 to 1,000 words (in languages more adjacent to English) make sense. Considering that I'm doing this in the interstices of day job, social life, life admin and other hobbies, I'm also going to count this as a win.
Translating To Embers We Return presented several different challenges compared to my last book-length project, Purely by Accident. Purely by Accident is from a fairly (almost shockingly, by the lax standards of c-webnovels) tight first-person POV, which meant there were a whole host of things I didn't have to even think about. To Embers We Return is in (mostly) limited third-person POV, but as is the case with c-novels, the POV can shift multiple times within a chapter, and the shifts are not always marked. I'm not really convinced I'm rendering this very well; I need to do a more focused read of English-language books that do this with POV. Because of the third-person POV, To Embers We Return also requires me to deal with the dreaded double pronoun problem that has haunted so many fic writers. There are also challenges like integrating high-tech terms into a Tang Dynasty base setting.
One thing I had to do pretty frequently when translating Purely by Accident, which I've barely gotten to do in To Embers We Return, is translate poetry. Zisong quotes it a lot (
x_los voice: probably because she's not very good at anything else), Shen Ni and Bian Jin and their little found family/found frenemy group rarely do. I find myself missing it, even though I used to groan and whinge whenever I bumped up against a section of poetry in Purely by Accident. Turning shi poetry into iambic pentameter (mostly) and ci poetry into common/ballad meter (mostly) was challenging, and often resulted in me wandering around the house muttering different permutations of sentences and counting stresses, but it was very satisfying when I hit upon a combination that worked. To Embers We Return has also so far not required me to do anything like this, and I do kind of miss that particular form of puzzle-solving/showing-off. And finally, to anyone thinking of checking out the translation but not wanting to be stuck on too much of a cliffhanger, Chapter 36 (which is coming up soon) is something of a natural stopping point for what I've started thinking of as 'volume one' of the novel. It's been surprisingly tricky to identify stopping points because Ning Yuan is a very good serial writer and therefore puts little hooks in at the end of each chapter to compel you to come back to the next one, but I think this more-or-less works. By chapter count, it's also about 20% of the main text of the novel (19.78% if you add the extras) so I feel that's a nice chunk of book, and you'll get the next chunk about this time next year, kind of like traditional series publishing (that's the hope, anyway).
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Date: 2026-02-11 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 06:42 pm (UTC)