Chinese GL

It's Ning Yuan's birthday today (30 April), so I decided to mark it by inaugurating the Ning Yuan's Smut Smorgasbord project. This is planned as a compilation of translations of sex scenes from several of her novels. Not being JJWXC-compliant, these scenes were posted off-site, and so are not in the JJWXC version of the novels.

The first chapter I've translated for this project is the sex scene from Chapter 93 of The Creator's Grace (造物的恩宠, pinyin: zaowu de enchong), which is one of my favourites from that novel (it's also the shortest of these scenes, and since I decided to do this only three days ago, that was a bonus). Inevitably, though, a lot of its weight is lost because you don't have the thematic context and build-up around it. I've added a bit of context to the start of the chapter in order to give some idea of the emotional through line. You can read it here.

The rest of the chapters will be translated sporadically as the spirit moves me (or to mark other important occasions).

Fanjiao, the specialist platform for baihe audio content, celebrated its sixth anniversary a couple of weeks ago with a video featuring congratulatory messages from 49 baihe voice actresses. As I did with last year's video, here's a quick rundown of the voice actresses and their notable roles (I'll link back to the post about the fifth anniversary video for those voice actresses who were also featured in that).

I've uploaded the video to YouTube for ease of embedding; the original video can be viewed here on Weibo. Again, there are currently no English subtitles, but if anyone is interested in subtitling it, I'm happy to provide support!



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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.

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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.

Today at around 1145 GMT, baihe author Ning Yuan posted on Weibo that two of her novels, historical court intrigue epic At Her Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) and sci-fi thriller The Creator's Grace (造物的恩宠, pinyin: zaowu de enchong) had been licensed for publication in English. I saw this about 17 minutes after it was posted (I took note of the posting time), so naturally I proceeded to toss the news post-haste into the roiling mass of Twitter fandom. Ning Yuan's post did not specify the publisher, but speculation was rife.

At about 1600 GMT, Singapore-based publisher Rosmei (who have licensed a number of danmei novels for publication in English), posted a hasty tweet essentially confirming that they were the publisher in question. The tweet is so hasty that they didn't even remember to state in it that the two licensed novels are baihe titles. No further information (identity of the translator(s), whether a digital edition will be available) has been provided by Rosmei at the time of writing.

My thoughts on this generally

I am delighted that Ning Yuan's novels will be available to a wider audience. She is one of the genre's most popular and longest-established authors, and it's practically criminal that international fandom hasn't, to date, heard much about her. The Creator's Grace is one of the best baihe novels I've read so far. In fact, I was planning to translate it myself after I finished working on Purely by Accident, so I'm both rather relieved that I won't have to be the one to tackle a 520K-word behemoth while also feeling faintly downcast about putting it aside. At Her Mercy is also one of the most popular court intrigue novels of the present generation, so I'm pleased that more people will be able to read it.

However, I have serious reservations about Rosmei as a publisher. Not only is their reach very limited — to date, most of their licences are confined to print books (they have managed to get ebook rights only for a few titles), and to Singapore (plus possibly Malaysia) only — but so far, they have not released or shipped any actual product yet. They also appear to pay translators an appallingly low rate, which is a poor guarantee of good work. The bits and pieces of their translation previews (for other novels) I have read do not, so far, inspire great confidence. The fact that this baihe licensing announcement is something they were clearly building up to (based on this tweet, it seems they were originally planning to announce it on 20 February), only to be pre-empted by the author herself, strongly indicates that they did not ask the author to sign an NDA or even strongly emphasise to her that the news should be kept under wraps — which one would imagine to be extremely standard business practice. I also have doubts about the choice of At Her Mercy as a first baihe licence. While the novel is extremely well-known among baihe readers in mainland China, it is also nearly 1.25 million words long in Chinese, and so makes for a very resource-intensive project, particularly for an untested publisher in an untested market.

My other vague thoughts on baihe publishing in English that no one asked for

For me, honestly, the ideal scenario would be to have a baihe English translation published either by a Big Five publisher, via a solid SFF imprint if it's genre fiction, and/or one of the highly-regarded small presses that specialises in works in translation, such as Tilted Axis. I would like to see the process of translation and editing being approached in a genuinely careful and thoughtful way, with an eye to popularising and marketing the work to a much wider audience than — as is the case at present — existing webnovel aficionados. One of my extremely long-term goals is to possibly work towards that, with support from like-minded people.

In the meantime, if anyone has a spare hundred thousand pounds or so for starting a small press focused on good translations of good/key baihe novels, let me know and we can work something out :)

Having previously finished (and quite liked) a historical novel by Liu Yuan Chang Ning, I decided to give this wuxia novel of hers a go. The premise is fairly straightforward, and basically runs as follows:

Years ago, Shen Yi's entire family was slaughtered before her eyes, and she barely escaped with her life. Now a disciple of the prestigious Tianfo Sect, she vows she'll never rest until she has avenged her family. Things take an unexpected turn when she encounters Ye Lique, the notorious 'witch' who has been terrorising both the orthodox and unorthodox sections of the jianghu, and discovers that their pasts (and fates) might be more closely intertwined than anyone imagined.

( I've tried to avoid spoilers, but I still do need to be able to say something about the book )

I read the Chinese original of the novel on JJWXC. There is, as far as I know, no English fan translation available.