r/noveltranslations

Hey fellow Redditors! It’s Aaron McLarren here, translator of The Sorcerer’s Handbook, Planet Pulverizer: A Mortal’s Ascent, and Divine Medallion of Seven Lifetimes.

Today, I’m discussing whether Chinese idioms can be translated directly into English, or whether we lose something along the way.

I’ll be using 一见钟情 (yī jiàn zhōng qíng) and 倾国倾城 (qīng guó qīng chéng) as examples and exploring how their meanings and nuances can change when we bring them into English.

What do you think? Yay or nay? 👀

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!

Hi everyone, I’m the developer of a Windows and Android app for collecting, translating, and reading web novels.

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Update: Android tester recruitment is now closed. The Android version is currently in Google Play closed testing.

Hello fellow Daoists, Salps here (one of the translators of Top-Tier Perception Starts From Basic Fist Techniques).

I wanted to kick off a broader discussion on something every translator runs into: how to handle Chinese-specific idioms, idioms with cultural allusions (chengyu), and figurative phrasing.

The trickiest lines often aren't single terms: they're compact four-character idioms that pack a massive cultural/historical punch into just a few characters. As a translator, I find myself constantly having to choose between preserving the original imagery or translating the core meaning for immediate impact.

Take the classic example of describing overwhelming force using "the weight of Mount Tai" (泰山压顶 / tài shān yā dǐng):

• Go literal: "like Mount Tai bearing down on him" (preserves the original flavor, relies on context and footnote for the reader to understand).
• Translate the meaning: "an immense, crushing pressure" (drops the cultural reference, but the emotional weight lands instantly).
• Middle ground: "a pressure as heavy as a mountain" (keeps the general imagery, but strips out the specific proper noun).

The same dilemma pops up with larger historical or mythological allusions, like "力拔山兮" (lì bá shān xī / strength to uproot mountains). Should I keep the literal phrasing and let readers absorb the flavor over time, swap in an equivalent Western idiom, or just paraphrase the sentiment?

It is always a trade-off between cultural immersion and seamless readability, and I suspect preferences vary depending on how long someone has been reading the genre.

I would love to know where you stand as a reader:

• Do you prefer a novel to keep the literal imagery (even if it takes a moment to click), or would you rather have the direct meaning so the scene hits without interruption?
• Does your preference change based on how common the reference is?
• Are there any specific examples where a translation choice worked brilliantly (or totally fell flat)?

Curious to hear your thoughts!

One of the best 'isekai' cultivation story that I read so far.

Although it's presented as a harem-like novel, with a wish-fulfillment image, it's more of a Horror due to what's happening behind the scene.

It’s a novel full of conspiracies, and one of my favorite conspiracy right now is that there was never actually a “past life.” All of the protagonist’s memories about having read the novel is fake, fabricated.

The male protagonist has no memories of his supposed past life other than reading the novel, and there are a lot of things that confuse him because they never appeared in the “original” story. Which would actually make sense if whoever created his fake memories also didn’t know those things existed.

And it goes even deeper than that. Every stroke of 'lucky' incident, every convenient encounter with some jade beauties that are conveniently in high places, and every treasure he obtains have been deliberately arranged for some hidden purpose.

Someone is essentially creating situations where the MC is guaranteed to find certain treasures, then creating circumstances where he has to use them. Eventually, those treasures allow him to save some influential person who just happens to be in danger, where the person behind the scenes is also the one who caused that danger in the first place.

It’s basically like someone is artificially creating a “Child of Destiny” around him, manipulating events so that he appears to be incredibly lucky in life, cultivation, and romance, when in reality, everything has been carefully orchestrated for some hidden purpose.

He's more of an empty doll that are stuffed with fake 'I'm in a novel world!' memories.

Edit: The first sign that there's something odd is around chapter 12, every chapter before that painted the story as a generic wish-fulfillment xianxia story

Here's an example of what I mean:

The hand behind the scene created a fake 'Young Master' via mind control and make him pick a fight with the mc to fulfill the 'slapping the arrogant Young Master face' cliche and allow the mc faction to gain a huge amount of fame.

The image is above.

Novel Link:

https://brightnovels.com/series/stealing-the-yuri-protagonist-harem-xianxia