How Do You Translate a Fight When The Attack is Done Using Chinese Writing?
Hi everyone! I am GTea and I translate The Overlord of Puluo on Wuxiaworld. I just thought it would be interesting to share about this translation problem I encountered. You can skip the background info and go straight to how this localization was done. I think this would be interesting if you are learning Mandarin.
Background Info: The novel has like a thousand cultivation paths, but Martial Arts and Literary Cultivation are considered two of the mainstream paths. Literary Cultivation is seen as a respectable, proper path that major families would want their children to follow. I understood why Martial Cultivators were powerful, but it was hard to understand why Literary Cultivators were the preferred path. It turns out Literary Cultivators can literally weaponize written language.
A lot of the Literary Cultivator abilities in this chapter depend on how written Chinese works. In the raws, individual Chinese characters can manifest and attack on their own. They can split into strokes, break apart into smaller character components, or have individual strokes pulled out and used as weapons. The problem is that English words are built completely differently, so translating those mechanics literally would make some of the fights very difficult to follow.
SOLUTION:
After some creative juice, I solved this issue by localizing the wordplay instead. I tried to preserve the original meaning, the four-part structure of the phrases, and which part of each phrase attacked which person. However, the English words don't always correspond one-to-one with the Chinese characters because the two writing systems work very differently.
The Chinese version builds these attacks out of characters, strokes, and character components, so I recreated that idea using words, letters, letter shapes, and compound words in English.
Roughly, this is how I mapped the localization:
- More strokes or greater visual complexity in a Chinese character = more letters in the English word
- Individual strokes separating from a character = individual letters breaking away from a word
- The shape or direction of a Chinese stroke = the shape of an English letter
- A Chinese character splitting into smaller characters = an English word splitting into smaller words
- One Chinese character acting independently = one complete English word acting as an attack unit
- Four Chinese characters in an expression = four independently acting English words
- Differences in the power of manifested words = capitalization and visual emphasis
For example, when 量 (liang) pulls out a vertical stroke as a weapon or removes a horizontal stroke as a projectile, the English version can have part of a letter separate or change shape instead. The stem of a "Y" can stand in for a 竖, basically a vertical stroke (丨), while another part of a letter can represent a 横, a horizontal stroke (一), or another type of stroke.
The trickiest cases were Chinese characters that could split into smaller components that were also characters themselves.
EXAMPLE: The word tree (树) can be split into three characters -> 木 + 又 + 寸
In English, I localized that as: HOPHORNBEAM -> HOP + HORN + BEAM
This is why "Hophornbeam" was chosen so specifically. I needed a word that could break into several smaller words, just as the Chinese character could break into smaller character components.
Similarly, when one Chinese character acted independently, I used one complete English word as an attack unit. EXAMPLE: STRENGTH could stand in for 力 (li, meaning "strength"), even if the full English phrase was not a word-for-word translation of the Chinese expression.
There were also four-character expressions such as 自不量力 (zi bu liang li), meaning roughly "overestimating one's own strength," and 蚍蜉撼树 (pi fu han shu), referring to someone weak trying to challenge someone far stronger. Because both expressions contain four Chinese characters, I tried to preserve four independently acting units in English as well.
Capitalization was another tool I added specifically for the English version. Chinese does not have uppercase and lowercase letters, so this was not in the raws. I used ALL CAPS as a visual way to show when the Literary Cultivator was putting greater force into a manifested word.
TLDR:
So the Chinese version of Literary Cultivator attacks uses characters, strokes, and character components, while the English version uses words, letters, letter shapes, capitalization, and compound words to recreate the same kind of effect.
This definitely required a bit of creative juice. It was one of those cases where I was not just translating the meaning, but to rebuild the mechanics of the original writing system in English. I was proud of the result, so I thought I would share it with anyone who's interested to learn about localization.
Link to the chapter in which this localization was done.
Let me know what you think about it!
