I came across this forum and became a new member yesterday, because I wanted to make a suggestion to translators, or perhaps the authors. Before I do, I would like to say that this site and the community that supports it is wonderful and amazing. Now my suggestion (or rant?) is to do with an expression I have seen in many light novels I have read. “The tips of the lips go up.” “The lips rise…” “The ends of the lips rise…” When the ends of your mouth go up, you can have at least three different expressions: smiling, smirking, frowning, etc. You can be happy, unhappy, angry, etc. I know that author wants to say that the character smiles. But why not just say that directly? “He smiles…” The meaning is clear, no ambiguity. Clear and simple writing makes for better writing.
Clear and simple writing doesn't always make for better writing or how word you explain allegory. Just saying that some someone smiled could ruin the mood or not truly get the character expression across. 'The tips of her lips rows as she cackled menacingly down at the scene before her' vs ' she smiled and laughed menacingly down at the scene before her' the first paints a picture of the character expression fore the reader to experience the story
The more descriptive phrase does a much better job of evoking the imagery of what actually happened, and can get the reader into the head of the character. This kind of thing is sort of the point of creative fiction, so in a vacuum, it's a superior piece of writing than "He smiled".
Trying not to be rude but, descriptive writing is way harder than it seems. A simple smile doesnt cut it. It could be a genuine smile, a fake smile or simply a mocking smile. Not to mention smiles have degrees of tenacity. Like how a theres a huge grin type of smile like how Luffy in One piece does, a smile like Yoh Asakura does and those meek smile from females. Its not like anime or drama that you could see their face. The more detailed it is, the better to imagine how it looks for the readers.
That's where the linguistic differences between English and Chinese come in. They've had centuries to develop their writing style, and it isn't remotely similar. If you ever get the chance to ask a Chinese native speaker about any classic love song translated into English, you'll get to hear how beautiful it is in Chinese, and how the translation butchered it. It can only get the main meaning across... In that case, I'd rather get a literal translation and let my brain do the work (reconcile the wonky English) than lose half the intent in translation. Well, not counting MTL translators who don't even bother going through the Chinese sentences and only count on translation software + editing. So much loss of info and errors and they don't even realize. Anyway.
Not to mention, why are YOU suggesting this to US? first off, we arent the "authors" of the story. Most are readers and fan translators. So wrong site to be suggesting things since theres nothing anyone here could do to how the author writes things
have you heard of “show, not tell”? children learn this in elementary school. describing an action allows the reader to make connections between actions and emotions and imagine what happens, instead of passively being told what is happening. and as someone above said, there are different types of smiling, and the description of raising the tip of one’s lips connote more of a smirk than other types of smiles and readers can actively imagine this vividly. i’ll use another common example of a description for smiling ‘eyes curved/turned into crescents”; this connotes more of a happy and wide smile, such that the person is happy to the extent of beaming. (of course, there are varying exceptions based on context) ^in both cases, the person can be simply described as smiling but that word does not have enough connotations to evoke a more vivid reading experience. (and don’t say ‘just add an adverb!’, boo that’s boring. or u might say ‘just say the person smirked, beamed etc’, which is possible but east asian writers are accustomed to describing it and there are cultural-lingual differences across countries)
Just saying, if you want a simple and clear writing better to read News or Science Journal than Literature...
I would not have even brought this point up, except that this sort of “lips” description repeats across many chapters of the same novel. It’s like repeating a joke over and over again until it becomes annoying instead of funny. Why did da Vinci paint only one Mona Liisa? Would it still be classed as a masterpiece, if he had made twenty copies instead?
The Mona Lisa wasn't considered a masterpiece until after it was stolen and the media publicised it. If I remember correctly it even took them several days to notice it was missing
Also, just for a fun art fact, there's a lot of evidence to point that da Vinci did, in fact, paint multiple versions of the Mona Lisa, not to mention the known fact that he and his students worked on painting the same subject, so there are actually dozens of copies of the Mona Lisa from the same time period, we just consider the one at the Louvre as more important for arbitrary reasons.