!!!!!!! Now, Can Anybody Tell Me About The Quality Of The Translation Before I Buy Copies For All My

Links are updated!

I finally connected and updated links between my Notes pages for Stars of Chaos!

Stars of Chaos - All The Notes List

All The Seven Seas Books Masterlist

I hope you enjoy them and find them useful.

And let me know if anyone wants an Audio Guide to the names, like I did for Erha.

:)

A music box cover of Saye / Run Wild (撒野) by 凱瑟喵, theme song of the novel of the same name

MDZS Vol 2 Annotations, part 3

Here is Part 3 of my annotations of MDZS Volume 2, pages 163 - 198.

MDZS Vol 5 Annotations 2

Part 2 of 6, pages 53 - 131

More annotations to help reading-flow! And another useless comment about another beautiful illustration.

JC is being disrespectful again, referring to LWJ as something akin to “that Lan guy.”

He is not talking to LWJ, but is instead complaining at Jin Ling.

More under the cut.

(Really? A GRE-vocab word here, where everything else is common-usage words?)

Yah… JGY isn’t supposed to have a right hand anymore by the time of this illustration…

As if LWJ would ever “call out” to anyone under less-than dire circumstances.

MDZS Masterlist.

All the Books I'm Annotating Masterlist.

Who does this picture belong to, please? I found it in my early MDZS searches, and it’s brought me joy every day so far 🥰

Shino’s meta is making me emotional again

(find the full meta here)

Stars of Chaos 杀破狼

Volume 4

I finally finished Volume 4! It was great. I love Chang Geng and Gu Yun. And poor Shen Yi and awesome Chen QingXu.

I have a a bunch of little Interesting Cultural Tidbits; maybe two alternative translations; and two places where retaining the webnovel's paragraph breaks would have been very helpful. Here we go:

Yah, so -- they were not planning on visiting friends over the next few days while they were busy infiltrating the rebels; rather, they had, over the last few days, made some good friends and built relations strong enough to make "come over for dinner" seem like a reasonable next step.

No, Gu Yun is not about to eat an American Hamburger; rather, he says that he wants "车大的烧饼把拉车的活驴夹成火烧" which is, roughly, a northern Chinese flatbread sandwich (meat layered between two pieces of flatbread). Word-by-word, this "donkey burger the size of a horse cart is

车大的烧饼flatbread as big as a horse cart

把拉车的活驴 take the live donkey pulling the cart

夹成火烧 and put it in between, to make it into a hot sandwich.

Donkey burger!

Here, Fake Prince Yan is calling his companion, the Fake Xu Ling, "少东家 Young Master" because that's a polite way to refer to your boss's son (or any big boss's son?) when you are talking to him. In normal English, this would read like "Even you have gotten embroiled in this mess."

I think the grammatical tense on this might be off. He hasn't had his birthday yet, so I think it might read more smoothly as "...noodles on his birthday, and he would also have to publicly confess his errors in governance that day." ... 过个生日连碗面都没人给下，还要当着天下痛陈自己执政过错。

Three-headed and six-armed god of war! It's a Nezha reference. You all know Nezha, right? Nezha 哪吒 is my favorite god <3

“Fish in muddy waters" is 浑水摸鱼, which means "to take advantage of a crisis for personal gain" (www.mdbg.net)

This is one my favorite idioms: 瓜田李下， which is short for 瓜田不纳履，李下不整冠, which means "don't fix your shoes in a melon field; and don't adjust your hat/hair-crown in a plum orchard," which we can summarize as "Don't act suspicious."

top: 睁眼说瞎话 eyes open, speak blind words. Blatantly lie. It sounds really cool in Chinese.

bottom: “千金之子，坐不垂堂” I had to look this up. It's a saying from the Han Dynasty. The situation is that roof tiles would sometimes fall and hit anyone sitting below, so they discouraged rich kids from sitting under the eaves where the tiles could fall.

"... and behave yourself!" is a very good translation for the meaning of this sentence.

But it's so much cooler in Chinese: 不准作妖！ which means "don't be a 妖," and 妖 means (mbdg.net again) "goblin / witch / devil / bewitching / enchanting / monster / phantom / demon"

Here's another place where the translation is perfectly good, but 下毒手 is so much cooler. By itself,

毒 = poison, 手 = hand,

下毒手 = to attack murderously / to strike treacherously

You all know the idiom 螳螂捕蝉，黄雀在后, yah? Here comes mdbg.net again: "the mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind (idiom, from Daoist classic Zhuangzi 莊子｜庄子); to pursue a narrow gain while neglecting a greater danger."

把腰扭到胯上。 "...undulating his hips until they were level with this waist..." which I guess means that he was walking with a prominent sway to his hips?

This is the perfect translation for this idiom. The idiom, in Chinese, is 一朝被蛇咬，十年怕井绳 = (modified mdbg.net)  once bitten by a snake, scared for ten years at the sight of the rope used for drawing water out of the well.

大人有大人的道，小人有小人的路。

大人 here is (mdbg.net) "title of respect toward superiors"

小人， in contrast to 大人, means （mdbg.net) "person of low social status (old) / I, me (used to refer humbly to oneself) / nasty person / vile character"

I think it makes a little more sense if it reads "Lords and ministers have their bright open boulevards; small petty people have their own paths."

Never had Fang Qin 碰过这么硬的钉子 since the day he'd left his mother's womb.

碰钉子 literally means "hit nail"; figuratively, it means (mdbg.net) "to meet with a rebuff."

这么硬的钉子 = such a hard nail.

So 碰过这么硬的钉子 gives the image of Fang Qin running into a fence or something with a long, hard nail sticking out of it. :)

Pg 241. 侧耳过去听 just means "turned/leaned his ear (head) closer to listen (better)". No one was putting their ear on Gu Yun's lips here.

发作 means "to lose one's temper". I feel like "bite his head off" is a bit extreme for anyone to except of Prince Yan -- Prince Yan is too refined to bite anyone's head off.

In English, I feel like "what's the matter with you" is very confrontational and accusatory.

The Chinese here is 你到底怎么回事？, which I feel translates better as "What is actually going on with you?" or, more awkwardly, "What is the full situation of what is going on with you?"

This is so cute: "little bastard" is 兔崽子 which literally "bunny-rabbit child" and figuratively (mdbg.net) "brat / bastard". So...

Gu Yun: Which baby bunny was standing guard and ratted me out!?

Chang Geng: I am that baby bunny.

The "pawn" here is a not pejorative. 马前卒 is "lackey / errand boy / lit. runner before a carriage" (mdbg.net).

In the online version I read, there is a paragraph break and a time frame here that really helps with understanding what's going on.

"....civil official who could barely ride a horse.

One year ago, survivors of the navy...."

"In less than a month..." (just showing that they have been there for a few weeks.)

"Silver tongue" in Chinese is 见人说人话、见鬼说鬼话的三寸不烂之舌。

见人说人话、See people, speak people language.

见鬼说鬼话 的 See monsters, speak monster language.

三寸不烂之舌。 three inches not <soft / rotten /worn out> tongue.

Cool way to say "silver tongue," yah?

I think the grammatical tense should be brought forward. The ship is falling apart right now, in book-time.

Another paragraph break that I feel should have been retained to show that we are moving from outside the temple, where we can see the flames, to inside the temple, where Chen QingXu is suffering from the smoke.

__________________________

And that's it! Volume 4. I love you, Chang Geng. You have my heart, Gu Yun!

Stars of Chaos - All Notes Links

My DanMei Literary Adventure Masterpost

THE UNTAMED SUMMARIZED