I am going to protest

You are ignoring the elephant in the room.
Kilogram or the historic equivalent are all in the same language.
Mu,li,zhang is a different language from the translation
I used Shakespearean language as an example

 

Ah, what I meant was that even if the translation is still in english, and the unit is converted over to the english translation, I still feel like it flows better to use the original unit instead. I do understand that the words might make some people uncomfortable but I feel like that may be more because of the culture that they're used to.
You mentioned that you used Shakespearean language for an example and I would like to point out that while a few people might stumble on the wording they are still able to understand what they mean from the context (and also, shakespeare is just hard to understand in general- i mean, he made up over 1700 words). If I see a phrase saying that a girl ran 2 li everyday for training I understand that li must be a measurement of length. I might not understand the exact length but if I really care that much I can look it up (it's around 2/3 of a mile if you do care), or the translator can put it in footnotes/author notes/comments.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I like it better when the more technical terms are kept in the original language so as to not lose the meaning in translation. And even if it can be translated perfectly it helps add to the time period/culture of the novel when it is kept. Of course, this is just my opinion and you don't have to agree with it, I just think that it makes more sense.

 

I started reading CN cultivation novels, so I just disregard measurements as a whole. It will just stress me out to fully understand that the MC's courtyard is as big as the surface area of the Sun.


What I would prefer is to put all T/N & E/N on the footnote. It disrupts my immersion to have a paragraph-long explanation, for a phrase like Doraemon's bag. Like who tf doesn't know Doraemon?

 

You are speaking from the perspective of a person is understands both languages.
It means squat if all you do is confuse readers.
I used French as an example.
Pick a language that you do not understand eg Zulu and tell me if leaving behind units of measurement or time in the foreign language is justifiable.
I am sure
isilinganiso, ubukhulu, ukulinganiswa, ukulinganisa
will make you just as confused.
The culture excuse does not hold as I already pointed out
Translating measurements is not the same as translating names/dress
I am not asking to do a John Minford

 

Aye that's an interesting take and I do agree with you.
Probably just a bias on my side, but cun, mu, chi, and all of these transliterated measurements that are searchable on the internet, making them more 'conventional' than any other translated versions of those words, which is why I'm more inclined to use them. You can consider it translation-dodging, but these terms do have much more English pages on them on the internet compared to other options, and it's more well-used by the other translators in our webnovel community too. I simply think that there's a higher rate of adoption for those phrases.

That being said, if I'm translating for an audience that's completely new to Chinese measurements, then I'd fully agree with your suggestions since it's much friendlier and makes more context.

I don't view all anachronisms as wrong. It's more of a personal bias, but 'meters' and 'kilograms' in a historical Chinese novel simply look jarring to me. If your historical novel goes hardcore to emulate the Tang Dynasty's pronunciation and stuff, then yes, go ahead to go to that extent then. Otherwise, it would probably be good to take readability into account.

I mentioned above that I believe translation requires preserving the contextual clues in the setting while making it readable, and I'm perfectly fine if such terms are translated to meters and kilograms in a generic Xianxia or Xuanhuan novel that doesn't dig deep into the historical theme for the sake of readability too. It's a choice a translator has to make based on what he deems to be more important in a specific novel

As for 龙 as dragon and 皇帝 as emperor, it's the same as what I've mentioned above too.
If you feel that the essence of 龙 in the novel is so great that you don't want it to be associated with the connotations that come with 'dragon' even at the expense of readability, I do think that it's fine if you specifically want to transliterate that word so as to accord it with a brand-new understanding.
For me, I just think that cun, mu, chi etc shouldn't be translated into meters and kilograms even if it affects the readability, and I think that your take provides good options for other translators too.

 

No, I agree that that would make me confused. I just think that when some words are mixed in with context, and the author defines them somewhere else (such as the footnotes/author notes/comments) people can understand what is being said. Yes, I think anyone who doesn't know the language being spoken/written in and sees a spew of words from that language will be confused but that's not what translators do usually. They leave some words untranslated and translate the majority.
And you're right, this is just my opinion and I do understand both languages, but again, this is my opinion. I don't expect everyone to agree with me I just wanted to say that I thought it made more sense to leave some more technical terms untranslated. I do think that dresses should be translated but if the character is wearing a traditional kimono then it makes more sense to leave the name as kimono and not just simply write dress, that's all.

 

An explanation by the translator when the first time the term is used is reasonable. But I do feel that some terms need to be left as they are despite the fact that I do not know Mandarin. The novel would feel terrible if the translators got rid of all the defining factors of them being a different language. The point of it being a random language is definitely not valid here. You are going in with the expectations of reading a translated Chinese novel and that is what you get. Completely eliminating all the traditional components will make the novel lose it's flavour.

 

You are missing the point of a discussion.
No one is stopping you from having an opinion, I am pointing out that your opinion is formed by your circumstances ie you speak both languages.
If you did not understand both languages then your opinion would be different.
Therein lies my point.
Translators know both languages, expecting the thinking of readers who only know one language to be the same as theirs is just ridiculous.
At the end of the day, translations are for readers not for translators.
Those who know both languages usually just read the raw and are not the target audience for translations
This is something some seem to miss.

 

I remember that one transmigration romance web novel which title I couldn't remember that almost has an entire Chinese dictionary in the site's footnotes. Que horror.

Edit: Found it. It's To Be A Virtuous Wife. I'd love to see you @Wujigege react to that

Edit^2: Also instead of Wujigege, just use Big Bro Wuji

 

easy~ ignore those wreck called honorific term of title and social strata just put NPC A, NPC B go to hell with Beng, Gong, Wang, Nucai, Nubi and those what knot~ similarly with how you try to remember chemists formula or science term such H2O~
it remind this cat with shixiong, shimei, shifu, shinai shishishishishishi and bunch of those~ you will get used to it~
this cat read that one and remind this cat with Javanese 3 grades of speaking~ bothersome but that part of culture which kinda interesting to learn~ but bothersome and annoying~

oh btw try read Dragon of Tang Dynasty, a wuxia with plenty of footnotes for various history character, event, places and some random trivia~

 

World of Cultivation comes to mind as a difficult read.
Also, translations are not soup. The whole obsession with "flavor" is asinine.
I will end with this and stop replying.
Translator Musings: Who is Ben, and why does he have a gong and a wang?
https://forum.novelupdates.com/thre...and-why-does-he-have-a-gong-and-a-wang.58780/

 

I'm with you about meters and kilograms. They sound too modern too me and so I avoid them. On the other hand, I mainly use inches, feet, miles, etc. because to me they are pretty much invisible, I assume because as an American I'm just used to them. They don't sound too modern to me like metric/SI units do. But this thread is making me question if I have not been taking that for granted. Translating units of measurement is an issue that periodically gives me pause, which is why I have in the past used span for 尺. It's a thorny issue I have not yet really resolved. I would like to use something other than foot or inches, but I also don't like using pinyin if I can help it.

I don't agree with the popular notion that pinyin somehow preserves the "flavor" of the original because the only ones it serves are those who know the language already and therefore don't need a translation anyway. To the general reader, pinyin is unhelpful. They don't know what it means without outside explication like through a footnote or looking it up on Wikipedia, and they don't know the pinyin system and so cannot pronounce the word. So what flavor are they tasting? It's like here's a jar of cinnamon, but don't open it. You can look at it, but you can't taste or smell it. Unless you take the lid off and eat it, which would be like reading a footnote or something.

Though using pinyin is en vogue even among celebrated professional translators, such as Howard Goldblatt using niang for 娘 instead of mother/mom. For me, there's no flavor really to be had there either way. But in other cases, with words pregnant with meaning, pinyin actually denies the reader the flavor of the original.

For example, 朱雀門. If you leave it in pinyin you get Zhuque Gate, which is surely more bland than Vermilion Bird Gate or Gate of the Vermilion Bird. But proper nouns get left in pinyin like that all the time. I'm not saying it's wrong to do so, but I would really like to hear someone defend Zhuque Gate as being more "Chinese" than Vermilion Bird Gate. Because let's remember: pinyin is not Chinese. It is a transcription of the sounds of one of the Chinese languages (Mandarin). What about Cantonese (which is closer in pronunciation to Middle Chinese than Mandarin, significant here because Vermilion Bird Gate is a famous gate in the Tang capital of Chang'an).

But then again, it's complicated. Because why not translate Chang'an then, based on that logic? It's a good question, but I am not going to translate Chang'an and I can't really defend why except that Chang'an is established usage, which is sort of what you were saying with mu, li, zhang, etc. So it's a complicated issue that is very difficult to remain consistent on.

Also, there are some key terms that I insist on keeping in pinyin because they are unique and no English word I have found is adequate, such as jianghu 江湖 and xia 俠. In cases like these, the term is so different from anything else in English that no matter what you do, whether you translate 江湖 as "rivers and lakes", which I have done in the past, or render it jianghu, which I do now, the reader is still going to have to learn what the term means, either through a footnote explication, looking it up elsewhere, or forging ahead with the text and picking up the meaning gradually through context. "Rivers and lakes" does not tell the reader anything about what the word actually means.

Same with xia. Knight-errant is perhaps the closest, but it's not near good enough, and hero even worse. Although hero works in some select contexts, as a blanket term for xia it is simply wrong. A xia was often not considered a hero and sometimes did not act heroically.

So for me, xia and jianghu are akin to samurai, in that they are different enough that I think they need to enter the English lexicon as their own words. So I keep them in pinyin.

For the record, I have no problem with dragon or emperor, I was just using those as obvious examples to make a point. Those are words that have taken on another meaning in English, so that when a reader is reading a story set in China, they know dragon refers to the Chinese dragon and not the European one, though in any case a first-time reader will still have to learn what a Chinese dragon is. Point is, it is not necessary to say "Chinese dragon"; the reader knows. So then what about mile for 里 instead of "Chinese mile"? Can we assume the reader will understand that "mile" in that context refers to a unique Chinese measurement and not the British Imperial unit? I honestly don't know. Though I do tend to use mile in that sense, even though I have used li in the past as well. Now I am questioning it all again, lol.

Even if we did want to either use long for dragon or even come up with a new word, it wouldn't take. Dragon is too firmly entrenched to ever be changed, I think, along with phoenix. Though I do refuse to use "simurgh" for 鸞, which has gained considerable traction in the field of Sinology (coined by the outstanding scholar, Edward H. Schafer). Even though his logic for using it fits with the logic for using phoenix for 鳳凰, I still don't like it. But on the other hand, that means right now I just use luan bird, which I also don't like.

I will be chewing on these matters for some time.

wyhcwe, the translator of that novel and World of Cultivation and Sword Dynasty, deserves more attention in the translation community. She is one of the most serious and capable translators, as evidenced by her extensive footnotes and even supplement pages to chapters. I do find the overuse of pinyin annoying, but her notes are extensive and nuanced such as pointing out the differences in eunuch titles.

FUN FACT: World of Cultivation was actually supposed to come to Wuxiaworld back in the day. An editor was hired to help change the pinyin terms to translations, which wyhcwe translated (pinyin terms were not allowed on WW as a kind of rule then. Dunno if that still holds now). The reason it never appeared on WW had someting to do with acquiring the rights. IIRC, it was something like Zongheng wasn't sure if they acutally have the rights to give/sell to WW. The author was mostly a Qidian author and there might have been something to do with that? Can't remember. I only know about this secondhand from RWX. Anyway, it was something like the author needed to be consulted, and at that point WoC was already 2/3 done anyway. I don't know what happened after that, but it never came out so clearly it was cancelled. But the takeaway is that there exists somewhere (unless it's been deleted), on a hard drive or in the cloud, a version of ~2/3 of WoC with translated terms instead of pinyin.

 

USA inches, feet, pound, gallon, mile and so on do have SI equivalent convertion which not so much used outside country that used SI standard currently USA imperial system based on SI so yeah pretty modern system it just seem people not realize that? maybe cuz it just troublesome converting imperial to metric so not even bother beside only few use it although it have huge influence on international relationship

 

To be honest, when I mentioned 'flavor', I am well aware that readers won't get the connotations behind transliterated hanyu pinyin words. What I'm more into is the feeling of incongruence from the terms that tells the reader 'it's a different world'.

It's honestly a personal preference from this point onward. I don't think that Chinese novels should be clunky, but neither do I think that they should be too Westernized and read extremely smoothly. I feel that it should sound a little quirky yet graceful in its own way, well, I can't really find a good adjective for it, but Chinese-y.

It's usually for that reason that I'd want to avoid terms commonly used in real life in a historical novel or fantasy novel. Take acres for example, I don't think it's absolutely wrong to use it, but my mind automatically thinks of it as a unit of measurement in the U.S., which somewhat breaks the Chinese-y feeling for me. Yes, it's definitely easier to read and interpret, but that's not what I want to go for here.

But while I'm saying that, I recognize that I'm double standard-ing it in the sense that I just go with what sounds right to me. Take 时辰 for example, I somehow just loathe the idea of keeping it as 'shi chen' instead of translating it as 'hours'.

Overall, I do agree that retaining words in hanyu pinyin tends to lose meaning instead of gain meaning, but I feel that units of measurement are a special ground because there's no particular special meaning to it such that keeping it as hanyu pinyin doesn't really lose you much meaning. In return, you get another element of oddness that gives it a Chinese-y feeling. On that aspect, I like your suggestions because they are unconventional terms that people can somewhat imagine them to be Chinese-y.

Well, I also recognize that everyone has their own conception of how Chinese novels should sound in English, and that's my take on it for historical ones. (And on the thing about Red Vermilion Gate, I think Red Vermilion is already so tied into Chinese culture that not translating it is just not a wise decision in terms of readability and conveying meaning.)

I'm still on the ground that words that can be translated should be translated unless there's a compelling reason behind why readability + conveyance of the meaning of the term should be compromised.

PS: I know I argued about culture and stuff in my earlier posts, but the point I wanted to bring across is really just that I don't think a translator should just westernize Chinese elements to the point where you can't get a feel of what was originally there anymore, even if it makes it does more new reader friendly

 

i disagree because of immersion. “The time it takes for a incense stick to burn” is more immersive than 15 minutes. “10 catties” is more immersive than 13.33 pounds or 600 grams. Imagine if some dude walked into a guild and wanted 13.33 pounds of tea.

 

Both are good. It helped me learn some Chinese terms which made my MTL reading smoother.

 

Good point, but at the same time it wouldn't make any sense to render "天安门" as the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The name "Tiananmen" is just so well established that it's sort of painful to see it as anything else. I don't think that it's necessary to be super consistent about it. If just using pinyin works better for immersion and flavor without sacrificing too much in terms of the reader's special vocabulary budget, then it makes sense to use it. If not, then a translated term will work better.

I think that the difference here is that hours are a very simple conversion to make and that "shi chen" a pretty clunky term. If a term can be cleanly translated then the difference won't feel so incongruent. And so I think terms like "emperor" or "dragon" are fine. Sure they're exactly equivalent, but they're close enough.

One pointed exception to this is that I often see "女皇" rendered as "empress" and I don't like it one bit. By itself, "皇后" and "empress" are already pretty different but at least they're within shouting distance from one another. In comparison "皇后" and "女皇" are completely different concepts so using the same translation for both feels all sorts of wrong. As far as a solution goes I think that "empress regnant" is overly clunky, so a direct translation to "female emperor" makes the most sense to me.

I like this a lot. It's always a delicate balance between readability and keeping the flavor of the original. Using the original work's units of measurement is a good way of using that special vocabulary budget to bring out the latter.

 

Shouldn't context play a big role here though?, using Tiananmen seem perfectly fine for historical fiction linking it to real life usage.
But the same word used for a fictional setting could have cases where it actually have a more descriptive importance for the story, so properly translating it then could make more sense.

 

Ultimately, context is all important. Even dealing with the real world, translators should be sticking with terms like "Yangtze River" and "China" as opposed to the more technically accurate "Chang Jiang" and "Zhongguo". At the end of the day if the term is super established it would take an incredibly good reason to use a different one. As usual, what approach to take is very much case by case question. That's one of the reasons why translating is hard!

 

To be honest, measurements are complicated even within the same language, and for mile you also have loads of other variations, scandinavian miles for example is 10 kilometres.
I may consider myself fluent in english even if not natively, but if anyone were to ask me to explain any of the the non-SI units I would generally not be able to do so without looking them up, other than recognizing the words themselves.
And I would assume a lot of native speakers might have similar confusion depending on where they live.
As far as translation goes, I guess it would depend on how exact you actually need to be, sometimes a story might require to measure something exactly for plot reasons, but a lot of other times it is mostly just there to give a general sense of things and might just be more important that the sentence flows well.
But well, I'm not a translator myself so I could be talking out of my ass. lol