I’ve been reading a lot of Chinese novels lately, and I finally have to ask about the numbering system. All translations tend to have some number irregularities (10000 becomes 1000 becomes 100000 within one or two chapters). I’m sure some of those are author errors and some are mtl errors. But my current question is what number of zeros do the Chinese put after 1 billion? I ask this because of the sheer number of times a character clearly got 100 million and is called a billionaire, and how often 100 million and 1 billion get mixed up by mtl. When they list the zeros, 1000000000 is always a billion and 100000000 is often called a billion. That factor of ten should matter! Okay, as I am on this rant already, why are all restaurants called hotels even when they are not attached to a hotel? And all dining rooms are restaurants even if they are in a private home? And why oh why can someone have a ‘lightly fatal injury’? Or survive being assassinated? You can survive an assassination attempt but not being assassinated. Just like it would take a miracle to survive a real fatal injury (not to say some novels don’t have miracles, but 99% of the time I see it used to describe pretty much any serious injury, even the ones that could not kill you without extenuating circumstances (like infection)). …alright, rant over. But seriously, any ideas about these? Is it just really bad mtl or are there real language issues causing these problems?
author. Most authors who take these as their earning don't give 2 fucks about what happened two chapters ago, they churn words like its money...cause it literally is for them. Logic and consistency could kiss their sweaty steamy ass for all they care.
One 一, Two 二, Three 三, Four 四, Five 五, Six 六, Seven 七, Eight 八, Nine 九, Zero 零, Ten 十, Hundred 百, Thousand 千, Ten Thousand 万, Hundred Million 亿 and some more characters (might've been some character between 10k and 100 mil as well) Note that there's 2 variants of all the 0 to 9 numbers. For whatever reason 1 to 9 characters use the characters from one set while Zero specifically uses the variant from another set, so sometimes you'll see 〇 instead of 零 to mean Zero (According to Dictionary it has something to do with Banking to do but I've got no clue.) Then for 2 you can also use 两 but it's sometimes a unit of weight or classifier and this can really throw of MTL. Anyway they don't really use zeros, instead they have specific characters with certain number of digits. Well of course they do have 0 but they don't use it except when a number is literally 0. so this is how it works: they have characters for every number from 0 to 9, a character for the number 10, number 100, 1 000, 10 000, 100 000 000, then I don't remember. Then when writing the number the do it like this, you take one of the 2~9 digits (if it's 1 when ignore this step), then the character for how many Zeroes there are, e.g. 100, so 2 100 -> 200. If there's no character with the specified amount of 0s, like 100 000, then you take 10 * 10 000 = 100 000 i.e. ten ten thousand = a hundred thousand And if it were 300k, three ten ten thousand (3 * 10 * 10k = 300k) 五十二万四百 five ten two ten thousand four hundred -> 520 400 百八千四十四 -> hundred eight ten thousand four ten four -> 1 million 80 thousand and 44 Basically they just write numbers in the same way they (and we) say it After all to say 200, you don't say Two Zero Zero, you say Two Hundred. Five Thousand Three Hundred Forty (Four Ten) Five, not Five Three Four Five (5345) Well yeah many Authors can't count for shit but often enough it's also just shitty translation tbh Also keep in mind that RAWs TLs use are usually from aggregators, and those raws are often incomplete or slightly wrong. Especially if there's some math going on like it will say 15 * 20 or whatever in the real RAW, but then on the aggregator it will say 1520. And often times the TLs just don't care if it doesn't make sense and won't double check Bad translations. And yeah I've seen "assassinated" a lot in particular while reading MTL (I read Chinese RAW with dictionary). That's just how it says in the RAW. Basically any assassination attempt is an assassination if you translate it literally to English. It never says "tried to assassinate" in the Chinese RAW, it just says assassinate. So clearly either all these Chinese writers don't know how to write or speak their own language, or what's being translated as assassinate actually means assassination attempt Similarly they will shout "Kill" when attacking, but it just means Attack/Charge into battle
Thank you so much!!! That makes a whole lot of the bad mtl numbers make a lot more sense! As for the rest, I can’t really complain as a lot of English authors don’t use the English words correctly either….
Oh, yeah, there are special ways to write the numbers used only for banking (to prevent fraud and stuff). You don't usually see this in general CN webnovels, though, unless they're trying to be extra fancy/actually talking about banking. But I think most people get numbers wrong because, unlike English, Chinese actually tends to count more by 10k than 1k. (10k = 1萬 btw) And so they also do like... 10mil (千萬) instead of 1mil, etc. etc. Which is probably what trips a lot of MTLers or speed translators up, since English groups big numbers differently. A lot of big numbers in Chinese are just fluff though. Like they use it to just mean "countless" or "there's a really large number of people" sometimes, so that might also be tripping people up -- they're translating something literally when it should be translated euphemistically. Oh, as for your other question... So restaurants = hotels in Chinese because in the past, all restaurants also included a place to stay (so they were essentially inns). Nowadays, a lot of fancy restaurants are still located in hotels, so sometimes translating a restaurant as a "hotel" is right because the restaurant is a hotel restaurant. But also sometimes it's just bad MTL. So, yeah, in short, the word for fancy restaurants in Chinese is literally "hotel" -- this can mean it's actually attached to a hotel, or it's just a fancy restaurant on its own. You'd have to read the context, which machines can't do, so...
Numbers aside, most of them are either bad MTL or the TL doesn't know what they are translating so they took the machine's suggestions.
It's actually a quirk in the English language wherein the word "assassinate" only applies if the target is successfully killed. The Chinese word doesn't have that distinction so it can be used more liberally. The difference turns something that looks like a straight one-to-one translation into what is often a mistranslation. Things like this are why it's really important for a translator to understand his craft, and another reason why MTL is worse than you think it is.