Read-in-Progress Wednesday

[geraineon]

This is your weekly read-in-progress post for you to talk about what you're currently reading and reactions and feelings (if any)!

For spoilers:
<b>Highlight for spoilers!</b>*<span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

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<summary>Write a non-spoilery summary of what's hidden under the arrow here.</summary>
Write your spoilery text here.
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Comments

[geraineon]

As usual my plan never works out!

I ended up reading a whole lot of essays in English but not any books, haha.

My plan this week: catch up on the Legend of Condor Heroes read-along

That's it. I'm not making any extra plans because clearly it doesn't work

[anehan]

XD

[halfcactus]

LOL same. Literally every time I plan to do X I end up doing Y... The brain wants what it wants. XD

Man, I need to go back to reading essays and articles. The ones you recently linked to are so relevant to my interests and yet... brains. XD

[geraineon]

Why are brains? *shakes fists at them*

They are long, so def take your time (when you have a good chunk of time!)

[anehan]

I read How to Survive as a Villain, vol. 1. Finished it today, actually. For the first half, I was a bit bored by it. It was fine, but I felt it didn't have enough substance. It started picking up later on, but I think it only really got into its swing towards the end, after Highlight for spoilers!*Yan Heqing left when the whole thing with the war and people dying and That Ending happened. It felt like now things were finally starting to get interesting.* And then the volume ended and I was left wailing because I wanted more. It was the perfect place to end it. It just was also very, very cruel to me personally. *g*

What's next? No idea. I've got Remnants of Filth, vol. 3 as well as Case File Compendium, vols 1 & 2 in my TBR pile. Or I could finally finish Seasonal Chill or Lord Seventh, both of which have been RIPs for far too long.

[geraineon]

I read How to Survive as a Villain when the fan TL was still up and I really enjoyed it overall.

Spoilers here

I like that the MC told the ML that he's not actually the emperor. I feel that revealing it so early in the story is actually quite rare. But even with the reveal, it just messes things up more and there's no foolproof plan to fix things because of their identities. I really like that

[anehan]

Absolutely agreed!

[duckprintspress]

Are you reading the Rosmei translation? How is the translation reading? I've got my copy on my tbr mostly cause I want to see how well the translation goes, to help me better determine how much I should kill my wallet to get the other Rosmei titles (like, if the translation(s) are really good, I want them all, whereas if the translations aren't maybe quite as high quality, I'd stick to the titles I'm most interested/want most. If they're disastrous I might not even get those but lbr I can't imagine not buying Global Examination at least...)

[anehan]

Yes, I read the Rosmei translation. It seemed good to me. I don't read Chinese myself, nor have I read any fan translations, so I've no point of comparison, but purely as English-language prose, it seemed fine to me. Certainly better than, say, Seven Seas' early releases.

It definitely isn't disastrous, so there's no need to worry about that, at least not for this particular novel. I don't know if I'd call it really good, either, but I think that's more to do with the fact that, at least to my knowledge, danmei writers are typically amateurs. I'm not sure how many of the danmei translators are amateurs, too, but based on the way their names are written (i.e., pseudonyms rather than full names), I'd say the translators for this one probably are. They seem competent amateurs, though, so I've no complaints.

(Using amateur translators is my pet peeve. Danmei as a genre and we as readers deserve competent translations, and far too many English danmei translations are clumsily translated. *shakes fist*)

[duckprintspress]

that is all good to know, thank you!

I have decidedly mixed feelings about the amateur translators thing. I've seen how professional translators who don't know the source material butcher Chinese novels in the name of bad localization and simplifying things (like, I've read the official translation of Daomu Biji, and I gather that the official translation of Legend of the Condor Heroes is, amazingly, even worse). Fandom translators who transition have the benefit of knowing and loving the source material, and they bring that love and it also ensures that, usually, the translation choices mirror what fandom has already adopted (with notable exceptions, most of which I approve of, coughcoughihatedstygiantigersealimgladitsgonecoughcough.) But the flip side is they don't always have the language chops and sometimes miss things a professional would catch. I personally think the ideal would be a team working in combo, one who is tip-top on both languages, the other of whom knows the fandom.

anyway. thanks for sharing all this, it's reassuring. :D I'm feeling more relaxed about reading it myself, feeling odds are good it'll read well.

[anehan]

Very much agreed!

I remember the official Prince of Tennis translation, which was overly enthusiastic about localization. When you have a 13-year-old boy calling a 14-year-old boy "sir" unironically, you've gone wrong.

OTOH, the amateur translators frequently produce bad translations, and I don't mean just mistranslations (which I wouldn't even catch myself). It often seems like they get stuck in the Chinese sentence structure, going for too literal a translation, which results in English that is either awkward and clumsy or plain grammatically wrong. I'm not a translator myself, but I did take some courses in translation at uni, and I remember this same thing from my own attempts. It was really difficult to make the switch to the target language's sentence structure. A professional translator would know to pay attention to pitfalls like these.

I agree with you that a professional translator + a fandom consultant would be the best option.

ETA: The Rosmei translation of How to Survive as a Villain is largely free of the sort of clumsiness that I describe above, which is a credit to the translators, the proofreader and/or the editor.

橋頭樓上 chapter 9

[halfcactus]

Omfg I totally intended to read 2 chapters this week but thought check-in wasn't until tomorrow orz

I'm still fixated on a new game and was gonna try only playing on weekends or after finishing my weekly reading goals (2 chapters) but obviously I have failed lol

Chapter 9

Sisters!!! ;_____;

I hope Miao Miao is just expecting the worst and that the actual prognosis is treatable. D: I love that she's this cool chain-smoking captain who's functionally an awkward parent.

I hope Bulbasaur/Daylily also recovers from her ED. D:

I love all the different suspicions about who the author might be, through different personal PoVs!

I'm SO glad that they 1) confirmed that "Meimei" is, in fact, the doll; and 2) recap all the relevant scenes; there is more handholding in this novel than I expected, which I suppose is a relief since I don't have to worry so much about forgetting important details anymore.

The doll violence is surprisingly so much more alarming in Miao Miao's real-world PoV than in the diary PoV, which was mostly creepy because you weren't sure what was happening. I think it's also because half the time I was visualizing the doll to be tiny and squishy, or just creepy and obviously fake....

I wonder if we're ever going to return to the individual 樓上 PoVs or if we're just going to keep being introduced to a new one? It feels like we should get some closure for these storylines in the second half. Otherwise, I'm enjoying the experience of "getting to know" each of the commenters and also seeing the real-world PoV of webnovel events.

Re: 橋頭樓上 chapter 9

[geraineon]

Haha, well. Time is elastic, you can check in any time~!

As of Thursday, I still haven't read anything new, so it's all good XD

Re: 橋頭樓上 chapter 9

[dayadhvam_triad]

Soon! By Ch. 11 the 楼上 POVs start interacting with each other. Reader groupchat! \o/

Miao Miao ;_; Her relationship with her little sister is so very human in its complicated everything, I love her a lot.

Re: 橋頭樓上 chapter 9

[halfcactus]

Wah I’m so excited!!! Especially that hopefully means I won’t have to learn anyone’s ~lore~ from scratch anymore 😂

Miao Miao is my fav PoV so far bc I love sister relationships, especially complex ones 😭 She’s also the least online among them and it
makes her PoV and comments funnier, in a way. Maybe to offset how worse off she presently is compared to all the previous commenters. 😭

[douqi]

I've caught up on a bunch of the newly-released chapters for To Embers We Return, which continues to be excellent. There's an amped-up action section with body horror followed by an absolutely hilarious one where they have to Highlight for spoilers! *pretend for the benefit of the emperor's spies that they've been having a lot of loving conjugal sex, and the sex toy box makes a return.*

I also read a bit more of I, Qinghuan which is moving towards a standard 'young disciple in training' arc now, which I'm hoping won't be too long. Highlight for spoilers! *It also annoys me slightly that most of the major sects are all depicted as either evil or evil-with-a-veneer-of-righteousness. It was a subversion with Jin Yong wrote it, and even then he was a lot more subtle about the whole thing (not all sects are evil, some sects have bad people in them but also good, like life), but now it's just a tired trope. Someone needs to do a subversion of the subversion, stat.*

[geraineon]

How often does To Embers We Return update? lmao the sex toy box.

Re: I, Qinghuan spoiler text
Highlight for spoilers!*Yeah, tell me about it. I kinda feel like it just gets recycled so much now my immediate assumption when I see "orthodox/good" sect is "yep, they are gonna do Bad Shit later". Would love a subversion so I can be pleasantly surprised, instead of guessing plots from a mile away*

[douqi]

It updates daily, I'm pretty sure the author has written a big chunk of it and is just releasing them day by day. I'm kind of letting them build up a bit before binging a string of chapters in one go.

[geraineon]

A good idea, in case of cliffhangers!

[sam_gardener]

I finished Tai Sui yesterday (and immediately started on the first extra, of seven). I liked it a lot, but I'm not sure what to say about it. It will be in my brain for awhile.

Now I need to stop reading extras and catch up on the Legend of Condor Heroes so that I don't have to avoid spoilers.

[geraineon]

Yay! I continued Tai Sui but realized I've forgotten some stuff so I had to go back to some earlier chapters to reread... So, still slow going.

Love books that linger in the brain!

[duckprintspress]

I'm a couple days late, oops.

I finished Thousand Autumns vol. 5. It was very nice to read all this NOT in a mtl, and I still love these idiots and kinda want to immediately reread the whole thing without the waits between volumes, but I'm restraining myself.

My next physical novel read is not a c-novel, but after this read, I'm planning to at least glance at the Rosmei translation of How to Survive as a Villain vol. 1, to see how I like their translating and editing, and if it ends up grabbing me I wouldn't be surprised if I jump to the fantranslation I have to finish the book.

I'm also reading LOCH, of course. I finished chapter 4 today! I like it a lot so far.

[geraineon]

Would love to hear your thoughts about How to Survive as a Villain when you get to it!

[duckprintspress]

*thumbs up* you betcha I'll be sharing those!

the non-c-novel I'm reading is decidedly not grabbing me, though I haven't given up yet. I just keep getting distracted and reading other stuff instead so after like five days I've only read 50 (out of 400+) pages. oops.