baihe_media | Entries tagged with novels: at the world's mercy 我为鱼肉

Rosmei has revealed the covers for all planned eight volumes of Ning Yuan's court intrigue baihe novel At Her Mercy/At the World's Merch (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou). Per previous practice, they did not provide any further information about the novel in their cover reveal tweet, so once again I resigned myself to doing some free marketing and promotional work for a commercial entity. The cover designs are as follows:

douqi

Somewhat overshadowed by the kerfuffle over the lack of a basic plot summary over At Her Mercy/At the World's Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) was the fact that Rosmei also released a translation preview (the translator is Shigure) for the first chapter of their other licensed baihe title, near-future sci-fi thriller The Creator's Grace (造物的恩宠, pinyin: zaowu de enchong). I read the preview, mainly to see if they seemed likely to do my favourite baihe novel to date justice. On present performance, I don't think they will.

Overall, the chapter to me reads rather stiff and stilted. This is sub-optimal (to say the least) for a fast-paced thriller. The translator also has a tendency to go for convoluted sentence structures and wannabe-ornate language where the author relies mainly on simple, forceful, effective language: think Patricia Highsmith; This is especially evident for the most emotionally significant lines (as an aside, translators often don't seem to recognise that some lines are particularly load-bearing, and to treat them with the extra care they deserve).

Below, I will set out a fairly detailed analysis of the first quarter of the translation preview. I will attempt to be a generous reader and to give the translator the benefit of the doubt, being all too aware of the challenges of translating long-form genre prose. I will try not to be overly nitpicky. However, I find many of the choices quite puzzling, and there are some that really negatively affect the reading experience and the overall dynamic the novel is attempting to convey. As we'll see as we go along, the translator has a tendency to deviate from the literal meaning of the original text for reasons that are not clear to me and don't improve the final translated text at all. I would be in favour of deviating from the strict, absolutely literal approach on the word level if that helps convey the overall meaning of the passage or sentence more effectively, or improves the flow substantially.

x_los can certainly provide testimony as to how unwedded I am to a strict, literal word-by-literal word approach to translation. But I deviate for good reasons (mostly), and I don't think that's the case with most of the deviations I'm seeing in this translation preview. There are also at least a couple of things that appear to be outright mistakes. If you would like to refer to the Chinese source text for this chapter, it's here.

( Read more... )

I think this sufficiently illustrates my overall point about what I consider to be the main weaknesses in the translation. I'm not going to repeat this exercise for the second part of the analysis (again, otherwise we'd be here until 2025) but will focus instead on the mistakes and infelicities that strike me as particularly glaring.

douqi

Today, Rosmei released via Twitter the cover art for its upcoming print-only English language translation of At Her Mercy/At the World's Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) as well as a link to a preview of the first chapter. In accordance with its past practice, Rosmei provided no further information about the novel or the author. When quizzed by concerned Twitter users as to why they had not even provided a simple plot summary, Rosmei responded with a long post that began with the rhetorical flourish: 'Do people need to know the summary of a book before deciding to read it?'

I, as a reader and purchaser of too many books of many decades' standing, consider the answer to be an obvious yes, as did many, many other people giving feedback and/or pouring derision on Rosmei's incomprehensible business decision. As

x_los pithily put it: 'This is like going "Thanks for asking us what our crackers contain. There's ingredients. Some people like to share those. Not everyone though!"'At the time of writing, Rosmei has produced no plot summary. Once again breaking my long-standing rule against providing free labour to corporations, I took it upon myself to do it.

(As an aside, I note that while international fandom seems pleased with the cover art, mainland baihe fans are decidedly less enamoured of it. The overwhelming response from mainland fans is that it looks more like the cover of a danmei novel than a baihe novel. See the replies to this post and this post on Weibo.)

One Twitter user (that I saw) felt the need to defend Rosmei by arguing that these 'aren't new novels' and that people could 'find plenty of summaries and reviews online before purchasing'. This is, technically speaking, correct. It is just that these summaries and reviews are present on the CHINESE internet and therefore practically inaccessible to non-Chinese-speaking international fans. Any existing information available on this novel that I could find online in English has been put up by me and other Chinese-speaking baihe fandom friends. Considering that this novel is so unknown to international fans that it doesn't even have a novelupdates page, I fail to understand how non-Chinese-speaking international fandom was supposed to find out any further information about it.

This has only deepened my misgivings about the whole venture. Rosmei appear to be adopting a marketing/PR strategy which is exactly the same as the one they use for marketing their danmei titles, and similar to how mainland Chinese publishers market print versions of already-popular webnovels. However, there's a huge flaw in that their danmei titles are, by and large, already known to international fandom with existing, mostly complete fan translations. At Her Mercy/At the World's Mercy, by contrast, is virtually unknown to international fandom. That they have failed to recognise this very basic fact and acknowledge that it requires a shift in marketing strategy is making me feel even more pessimistic about this whole business than I already was. As a baihe reader who holds Ning Yuan in high regard, I'm also frustrated that her work is being introduced to an English-speaking public for the first time in such a slapdash manner. It also makes me very pessimistic about the future of English licences for baihe more generally.

Update: As noted by

halfcactus here, Rosmei has posted another long statement basically saying they were previously unaware that 'readers outside Asia' have the odd quirk of wanting plot summaries for books they're thinking of buying. Rather than asking their translators, editors or marketing team to provide quick three-sentence summaries (which would take an hour at most for someone who has read the book in its entirety), Rosmei has taken the incomprehensible decision to hire Yilin Wang, a professional Chinese -> English translator best known for poetry translation, to produce summaries for their novels. For some reason, Rosmei hints darkly in its post that this will be a long and arduous process, stating that 'the initial batch of summaries may not be completed until the end of this year'. The trainwreck continues. At moments like these, I'm always reminded of these words of wisdom:

“go to hell” is pathetic. it’s boring. “i hope your favourite novels get licensed by a disaster pub" is terrifying. it’s real, it could happen to you.

Update to the update: Yilin Wang has stated that Rosmei will be providing them with Chinese summaries of the novels. This makes it even more mystifying why Rosmei did not simply provide the same summaries to their already-hired translators. My concerns that no one in this entire process has actually finished reading the book intensify.

douqi

Today Rosmei 'officially' 'announced' on Twitter that they would be publishing English translations of two baihe novels by Ning Yuan, as detailed in this post. The announcement was accompanied by what I hope are two placeholder graphics for the novels (and not the actual covers). Rosmei provided no further details about the genre or general plot of either novel, and no information about the author herself. I therefore took it upon myself to do it, and graciously refrained from sending Rosmei an invoice for my marketing services, notwithstanding my long-standing principles about not working for corporations for free.

(As an aside: I'm fully aware that I'm being very snarky about Rosmei and this whole situation. I would prefer not to be snarky. I would prefer to be happy and enthusiastic about announcements of this kind. I enjoy feeling positive emotions, which are in short supply at the moment! However, for the reasons detailed here, as well as this latest failure on Rosmei's part to provide basic information about the books it is planning to sell us, and for which more promotional efforts are needed in the absence of a large and established fan base, I have very little confidence in them at the moment.)

The books are due to start releasing in 2025, according to the announcement. Rosmei has not said whether they will be available as ebooks as well as print books. However, in response to a query about whether several danmei titles announced at the same time would be available as ebooks, Rosmei replied that: 'For books licensed from jjwxc, there is no ebooks licensed'. As both of these Ning Yuan titles were initially published on JJWXC, chances of ebook versions being available seem dim. The translator for The Creator's Grace (造物的恩宠, pinyin: zaowu de enchong) has been named as Shigure, whose work I am not familiar with (a very cursory search of her Twitter timeline reveals no previous mentions of 'baihe' or 'GL', though that in itself doesn't necessarily mean anything). The translator for At Her Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou), which Rosmei have chosen to title At the World's Mercy (so I guess I'll have to start using that now), has not been named at the time of writing, apparently because... they're currently on vacation?

One thing I am curious about is how they will handle the sex scenes in The Creator's Grace. As far as I'm aware, these were never published on JJWXC, being far too explicit for the platform. Instead, the JJWXC version of the novel fades to black and ambiguity at crucial moments. Ning Yuan posted the sex scenes to the smut-focused platform PO18. She appears to have taken them down, but my pack rat instincts mean that I have a copy saved.

Edited to add: Rosmei has now confirmed that these two titles will not be available as ebooks.

Edited again to add: This artist has posted some (mainland) fan-commissioned art pieces for At Her Mercy!