Here Comes Chapter 6!

Last time we baked it, this time we stir-fried it.

I was just thinking, this space is so huge. It’s not like we have nothing to say!  So maybe we’ll make some random posts each time, maybe about the story, or translating it…anything. The chapter will always be on top for those who don’t care for this, so everyone wins, right? :3

Well, to it all off, might as well start from the beginning. We ran into problems immediately when we started translating!

妖孽兵王, is literally Evil-doer soldier king. We heard YaoNie and were like, well that’s ‘evil’, but based off hearing it alone isn’t enough to know how it’s used except that particular context. Chinese can be a bitch like that sometimes. So we punched it into various translators to see, and we kept getting “evil-doer”. Man, that does not sound good. Evil-doer Soldier King.  Well what does evil shit? We were gonna go with ‘sinister’ but the connotation was really dark. In the end, we decided to go with equivalent connotation, an evil-doer is someone who is wicked, who does evil things. Done. Don’t hate the circular logic!

As for the author, I wish we could just punch in something simple. 笔仙在梦游 BiXian Zai MengYou is…full of uncertainties. Our knowledge of nuances in Chinese is too low to figure out how to properly do this. The first two characters are BiXian, you know, like the Xian in Xian Ni!? So it’s ‘brush’ and ‘god’  … So who is the god of writing? Not that simple. Xian can also mean immortal, which are gods but not exactly… So there is a Daoist origin for god of writing/literature, which we’re not sure stacks perfectly on the 神 ‘shen’ character, and then there may be one of Buddhist origin, since we keep seeing Bunshinsaba, which we’re guessing is possibly Hindi, and if it’s not, well, we don’t know anyways :B Then he might just be calling himself one of many gods of writing…who the hell knows??

MengYou 梦游 we know as sleep-walking. Some translators also say it can be figurative, but anything can be right? So it’s something like ‘Brush God is sleep walking’. We will probably just stick with BiXian for short unless we know for sure, cuz BXZMY is a really shitty acronym.

BTW if you’re squeamish, don’t google BiXian, for some reason there is quite the marriage between it and Asian horror films, further confounding our connotative search for WTF it means.