Read on Twitter
In light of recent events, a thread
(this is about the tl drama, there will be mentions of danmei, baihe and het smut, please mute thread accordingly!)
(this is about the tl drama, there will be mentions of danmei, baihe and het smut, please mute thread accordingly!)
Disclaimer 1: Due to the fact that I read like 2 wpm or smth, I have not read 2ha. That said, I am uncomfortable enough with the situation and familiar enough with the Chinese language to want to speak up about this.
Disclaimer 2: While English is my first language and Mandarin is my mother tongue, I prefer reading CN novels in Mandarin. I do not think I am good enough to take on a whole novel yet, and I prefer translating song lyrics, so the bulk of my fan TLs are song translations.
With all that in mind, here’s why I have a problem with this specific incident.
About a month ago I saw this tweet on my timeline, and I thought it was pretty well done (March 21):
About a month ago I saw this tweet on my timeline, and I thought it was pretty well done (March 21):
I appreciated her explanation of what a translation process could look like, so I followed this translator. But there were subsequently a bunch of red flags I couldn’t really ignore. I’ll explain what the timeline was for me in the later part of the thread.
Because I haven’t read 2ha, I cannot say specifically if her translations are accurate. I can, however, point out the phrases she had trouble with and offer my perspectives. List of examples:
1. 温柔乡 (lit. gentle hometown) - this phrase itself describes a comfortable place, but in smut it is commonly used to describe what "entering" feels like. This is more or less gender neutral too, so there’s no issue with "literally talking about a man’s ass".
2. 触手 (lit. touch hand) - 触手 is just touch. I…??? I understand that the purpose of posting these were to express the "translator struggles", but giving people the impression that you’re good at a language and then sharing about & #39;struggles& #39; of this level? personally a no.
3. 腥臊 (lit. fishy foul, smell) – in context of smut, this can only mean musky.
4. 操射 (lit. fuck, cum) - the focus here is actually on 射，so you really only need to say "cum". The CN phrase is “我的好师尊，可以让我操射你吗？” which can simply be “my good shizun, may I cum inside you?” (I’d need to actually read 2ha first to know how correct this is tho)
Intuitively you just say 操射 even though the emphasis is on 射, bc the 操 gives you contextual indication. It’s objectively not a difficult term to translate, there’s just a clear lack of experience and a gap in knowledge.
5. Describing sex organs in general - For example, 阳物 (lit. yang item), as in the yang in yin-yang (which represents male), and the male item represents… yeah. If you were trying to describe boobs, a common one is 两团柔软 (lit. two balls of softness).
6. Personifying body parts and using adjectives (?) - "fierce", "brutal", "horrible", "aggressive" etc. are all very common. Aside from danmei, here’s an example from a het novel.
7. 隔靴搔痒 (lit. to scratch an itch over a boot) – this is a euphemism to say that there is a desire but you can’t fully fulfil it even though you’re trying. In smut context this is seeking relief through other means but never really achieving release. Here’s a baihe example:
There are a lot of euphemisms in CN novels, for many reasons. Sometimes it’s for aesthetic reasons, sometimes it’s a word choice from the author to provide variety. Most times it’s just because the language itself is full of euphemisms.
So at this point my question is: If she doesn’t like translating smut, why pick up 2ha? And why translate those specific chapters?
List of key (?) events below:
21 March – The tl process post went viral, and it appeared on my timeline. I really liked it at the time, so I followed her. I assumed since she was using smth from ch 200+ she must have been working on the project for a long time. I… clearly did not know what was going on.
25 March - I saw on my timeline that she was having trouble understanding a livestream, which made me start to doubt her level of understanding? but I gave the benefit of doubt bc sometimes mainland accents can be quite hard to decipher
27 March - actl surprised that she had only been learning for a less than a year. Bc of the various indicators from previously I assumed she had been learning Mandarin for a long while. Even if she did not explicitly call herself an expert, I was misled.
13 April - This tweet (p1) was lowkey my last straw, because of this specific reply (p2).
I think we can agree that it’s actl rly easy to mistake one word for another. In spoken, even more so. It’s really the whole “I learned Mandarin for less than a year but tbh it’s quite easy” for me. I learned Mandarin for 20 years and I still don’t have confidence to say this lol
I subsequently unfollowed her, because after thinking about how this makes me feel I came to the conclusion that I don’t need to engage with this
22 April - This discourse blew up last night, and at first I was confused because no one was directly mentioning the @. As the discourse progressed over the night, I started remembering the stuff that bothered me.
Other things that bothered me:
I think what bugged me the most is a combo of (1) how a bulk of tl readers rely on the tls and won’t be able to tell the diff and (2) while repeatedly saying that translating is hard, she also walked in the other direction and tried to show that her understanding is the best.
From what I’ve seen on my timeline, her reaction when corrected is defensive. So… as a Mandarin learner, where is the learning?
I mean, the numbers are right there… people follow for the 2ha tls, which are actually neither accurate nor done by someone who is familiar with the language. Despite never claiming to be an expert, all other signs show otherwise “high quality translations”… I don’t… think so?
All of these are just thoughts I’ve had over the last month, so they might be incomplete and lacking in terms of the full context. I’m unequipped with the proper academic terms to explain the grammatical rules in Mandarin and a lot of this is written based on intuition.
I think this community is very precious and I applaud all language learners for exploring new ways to learn and experience a language. But please be transparent with what you are capable of.
Also, support comes in many forms, and that includes letting someone know when they’ve made a mistake. Part of learning is acknowledging that there is room for growth.
a correction about the mistranslation earlier! thank you for pointing it out 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😅" title="Lächelndes Gesicht mit offenem Mund und Angstschweiß" aria-label="Emoji: Lächelndes Gesicht mit offenem Mund und Angstschweiß"> sorry about this! hope i didn’t mislead anyone https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🥺" title="Pleading face" aria-label="Emoji: Pleading face"> https://twitter.com/congeebrain/status/1385680653954412545">https://twitter.com/congeebra...
