Started reading Unseen Immortal of 300 Years, and I'm already amused and intrigued. Mu Su Li's sense of humor, love it.
#NeonReads
@geraineon are you reading the fan translation?
@geraineon oh I guess you are, because the 7S title is different. 😅 nvm
@geraineon No Thank You. (I think that translation technique is interesting in principle—but wow, the end result is a NOPE.)
@villainousfriend@federatedfandom.net it's an interesting technique I wish would die 💀
@villainousfriend @geraineon okay what is going on with latin in this translation because I've now heard several people mention it and I was planning to buy but I *do* have access to the fan tl so 🤔
@ehyde @geraineon https://tofufei.tumblr.com/post/804857160073920512/hi-foxghost-i-dont-know-if-youre-open-to here's a post about it by the translator! There was a conversation about it in the Teahouse discord, which I kind of skimmed through because I'm blocking myself from social media a lot of the time at the moment. 😓
Imo it sounds okay when the translator puts it this way in the post—but when they put their money where their mouth is, you get the city name 天都 Tiandu being translated not as, for example, 'Heavenly Capital', but as 'Urbs Caelestia'. wtffff
@ehyde @geraineon I am reasonably literate in the western cultural canon for, you know, someone who had to pick between arts and sciences in their education and chose sciences, and I would *not* have understood Urbs Caelestia :(
@villainousfriend @ehyde @geraineon I guess I see the argument for it, and Urbs Caelestia did read to me as "Heavenly City" but also it feels like I'm being kicked out a window and straight into the seventeenth century and landing in the lap of a Jesuit orientalist
@Betty @ehyde @geraineon if I had to make a list of "who should not be translating this gay Chinese web novel", 17th century Jesuit orientalists would not be in the top ten, but they would indeed be on the list.
@villainousfriend @ehyde @geraineon like, latin just carries so much baggage! And I guess they choose it on purpose, because they could have used, say, Sanskrit, but.
@Betty @villainousfriend @geraineon "Urbs Caelestia" does ping as "heavenly city" but I'm still not sure it works because like - did ancient roman cities actually have "Urbs" as part of the city name? I'm not at all a classicist but I feel like no? So the vibes are more "I see what you're doing" than "ah yes, a heavenly city" if that makes sense
@Betty @villainousfriend @geraineon I'm just like, didn't we go through this already with "Stygian"?
@villainousfriend @Betty @geraineon on the opposite side of things, I was amused by a translator's note in Stray where the translator mentioned that they'd revised their transliteration of a character's name because of an author's note explaining it was latin in origin
which made sense because Stray has a western fantasy setting!
if your setting is "generic fantasy" (...I am not sure this actually exists, but I haven't read shangxian yet so ok) then I am not sure you can really argue that latin is less marked than chinese.
@geraineon @villainousfriend @ehyde @Betty i THINK given the other points noted in the post, that the translator isn’t trying to say latin is less marked but more easier for the average reader to remember: «No pinyin unless it has made it as a dictionary word (aiyah, aiyoh,yin-yang, kowtow) or I cannot translate around it. Pinyin (toneless) is easily forgotten even to ppl who are native Chinese and takes a long time to stick.»
which. 1) is definitely not intrinsically true but may or may not be currently true due to the fact that we’ve already gone thru a “just throw tons of latin into english texts” phase thanks to the catholic church 2) if it is true it seems to be memorable in part because ppl found it so tonally jarring? which is not what i would personally be aiming for??
@Satsuma @geraineon @villainousfriend @ehyde well, there was a thousand years where Latin was the generic language of education, science, and talking to someone from outside your dialect, so like. It's not /just/ the church