About Us

We are a group of 2 primary team members (DragonTurtle/Cordicepticon) and 2 part-time members/advisers (friends who wish to remain anonymous), working in our free-time, though currently 99% of the work is done by DT/Cordi, owing to the busy lives of our other members.

We work on rotation, where translators and editors switch roles about every other day usually. We each translate a little differently. One of us purely listens to read text, and others read characters and pinyin. Translating is pretty helpful in practicing less colloquial Chinese and is also quite helpful in purely verbal translation as well, though it is pretty time-consuming.

We are composed of overseas Cantonese speakers, who have backgrounds in Mandarin through media (music, TV) and have conversational levels. We certainly do not claim we have the best Chinese skills. Some have also taken university classes, but if you look at any textbook, it sure doesn’t have a lot of the expressions in these stories!

Our primary goal is to translate the flow and connotation of text. Since Chinese is an ancient language, it has a lot of very deep connotations that take more than a few extra English words to express. Additionally, many expressions have good equivalents in English, but they are rarely used words that many people may be unfamiliar with. To us, this would decrease enjoyment of any literary work and so we do our best to preserve connotation while staying as true as we can to the literature.

Being overseas Cantonese speakers, we have to do a lot of research about Mandarin slang. Additionally, the author likes to use a lot of expressions that require a great deal of familiarity with Chinese culture, both past and present. It hasn’t been too difficult to figure out or ask about so far, but if we have made any mistakes we welcome correction. Being right is always better!

We can be reached with emails at: Cordicepticon@gmail.com

13 thoughts on “About Us”

  1. You wanted to take up Jiang Ye and our answer is go for it. My group and I are very sad that we were not able to do much for it… The story is great and probably (in my group and I’s) opinion better than ze tian ji. Well anyways go ahead. You might want to re translate 49 and 50 maybe or you can just take ours and use as format for better versions. Up to you ^.^ If you do translate i will be reading it here from now on then LOL

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    1. you guys are doing a great job with Ze Tian Ji and Jiang Ye! truthfully, Jiang Ye and Mao Ni were some of our first introductions to chinese novels and we totally got sucked in because of your work :3 49 and 50 are still your credit, a bit nervous about posting them >.< and they look just fine :). we'll start at 51, and welcome you here to read it!

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      1. You know we started the translations as a joke didn’t know we would be having this much difficulty balancing it out in college and didn’t think people would enjoy them this much.

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        1. ah yeah. when i heard you guys were starting school, it made me remember how exciting and time consuming school started out – definitely not easy. eventually some terms work out nicer and once you get the hang you’ll have more free time…but no telling when that might happen xD depends on the profs, your school etc etc. school is important though, for me personally i absolutely don’t mind it being your priority :3

          i think the novels are just awesome compared to the typical stuff we’ve been exposed to lately. i got bored of so many mangas and these novels head in a really different direction that’s new and exciting. got a lil guilty of being a leecher and figured it would be good practice for chinese and so that’s why i started. definitely not easy but i do enjoy it :3

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        2. well yea. enjoy it and don’t make it into homework or a chore. Because of this reason my translators have very irrational translation schedule LOL… when i try to make them do it in a set schedule they are like nahhh it becomes a chore than fun XD… and along with translating it is kinda creativity too in how you express the stuffs =)

          Well for me i got a job and volunteering at a hospital for hours. but my other friend is learning Matlab and the debugging for that took him 12 hours…. RIP my friend

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  3. Being an overseas Cantonese speaker that cannot read anymore Chinese than a 3 year old, I respect you guys! thanks for your good work! yes, and i do agree with you that keeping the chinese connotations makes its any times more enjoyable, it is truly difficult to translate meanings of certain chinese idioms or even phrases from a casual chinese conversation into english sometimes.

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    1. Thanks! Means a lot to have effort acknowledged, and even more for reading this little info page about us :3

      If reading characters is the problem, but you already have a lot of speaking skills, actually the characters aren’t nearly as hard at that point. So if you ever wanna give it a go, I totally encourage it! I thought it was going to be really daunting at first too when I took my first Chinese class, but in the end I was just attaching a Mandarin sound to something I already knew :3 but writing is another story…I would readily get an F right now xD

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