Chinese Novel Categories

Epithetic

I wrote a full translation of the novel categories on 17K, you can see it here on my drive: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Xgckm29GJQdmnhsJXvaecQYdA10eoWhbpmpQtnROss

If anyone would like to comment, I would appreciate some fresh eyes, but I am pretty confident in it. You will notice I went with Immortal Epic and Martial Epic for Xianxia and Wuxia respectively, since I was trying to get the category names across in as meaningful a way as possible.

Most of you might have already seen Flowerbridgetoo's hasty translation; however, that one did not cover all the categories and it seems he had trouble with some of the descriptions according to his notes. Anyway, I did mine from scratch and spent quite a bit of time on it. If you (admins) decide you want it, feel free to post it directly minus the Chinese with just a 'Translated by Epithetic' line somewhere.

Edit: I have now uploaded it to my WordPress in case anyone is interested. If not, well, it was good translating practice for me. Here's the link: https://epithetic.wordpress.com/story-categories/

douniwan

I'm thinking of Chinese absurdist fictions.

Deathblade

My personal take is that wuxia and xianxia have been ingrained enough to the point where they can hold their own as transliterations. However, if you're going to change them, it would make more sense to go with a direct translation, in my opinion. Immortal Heroes and Martial Heroes.

For 玄幻 and 奇幻, I would consider "Mythic Fantasy" and "Epic Fantasy." I definitely don't like "folkore," it just doesn't carry the right feeling to me.

Just a couple thoughts. Nice job on putting this together!

Zen

Very nicely done!

Could be useful to compile a list of

1. Works being Translated
2. works to be translated - i see quite a few posts asking for recommendations on what to pick up & translate

Epithetic

Deathblade said:

My personal take is that wuxia and xianxia have been ingrained enough to the point where they can hold their own as transliterations. However, if you're going to change them, it would make more sense to go with a direct translation, in my opinion. Immortal Heroes and Martial Heroes.

For 玄幻 and 奇幻, I would consider "Mythic Fantasy" and "Epic Fantasy." I definitely don't like "folklore," it just doesn't carry the right feeling to me.

Just a couple thoughts. Nice job on putting this together!

Thank you for your thoughts Deathblade! Your insights always tend to be a cut above.

I agree with Wuxia and Xianxia to some extent, but I still feel that they are not quite household names outside of the fan community. The kicker for me was that it does not show up in most spelling dictionaries. I felt it was enough to show the transliteration beside since the correct section will be found if you search for xianxia or wuxia on the page. As for Epic vs. Hero, I decided on Epic because it felt more like a 'category' to me. It also made several sentences easier to translate. However, I've decided to change it back to hero after your comment reminded me that we already have a category in English called 'superhero', so why not 'immortal hero' and 'martial hero'?

As for the two fantasy genres, I've gone back and forth so many times that I lost count. I actually had called the first one 'mystic' for a while before settling on folklore. The problem, as I'm sure you know, is that both xuanhuan and qihuan essentially mean the same thing: fantasy. The difference is simply that xuanhuan refers to Eastern style fantasy and qihuan to Western—the east with its good dragons and the west with its bad ones. I was tempted to just throw the two together, but didn't want to break the format. I've decided to go with Mystic Fantasy for the first one since, as you say, it's more accurate. The second one is trickier though. I don't really like 'Epic Fantasy' since I don't consider everything under it 'epic' (esp. 'magic campus'). I've decided to go with 'foreign fantasy' instead, both because 'qi' means foreign/strange/exotic and to indicate how Chinese people would view those stories. If you have some more good thoughts on that, please let me know! :-c

Epithetic

khelvaster said:

Very nicely done!

Could be useful to compile a list of

1. Works being Translated
2. works to be translated - i see quite a few posts asking for recommendations on what to pick up & translate

That will take some time, but I feel like it would make sense to put some top-ten lists in there under the main categories, and then maybe top-three or so under each sub-category. Then I can check if any of them are being translated and link them.

Epithetic

And, checking the 17K site again, they've finally updated everything (I think I remember seeing them testing it out on mobile before).

It would seem they have a new 2015 outline of their much simplified novel categories (http://cms.17k.com/news/1021.html), so I'm going to work on that. Should I post it as a new page, or update the one I've already got up when I'm done?

Edit: sorry for the triple post. It seems I forgot my forum etiquette. If you're a mod, feel free to combine.

Edit 2: It looks like they took pity on me and combined the fantasy genre for me! (fist-pump) They also added a section in addition to main and for young girls. I've decided to just update the page when done, since most of the sub-categories at least are the same if shuffled around some.

Edit 3: Okay, there are several new categories on the young female side that I'm having to add in. Looks like it might take some time to align. I'm no speed demon either when it comes to translating. I should have it done by tomorrow though.

Edit 4: So, There are a lot of new categories under the general heading, and quite a few of the old categories are no more. Especially notable is that they have removed the entire 'fan fiction' section. I've got everything else put in place but I'll need to spend some time looking over the new categories before I can have them up. That in mind, does anyone know exactly what 二次元 means? The categories under it are all over the place.

Edit 5: Turns out it means the type of world you can only find in cartoons and comics. 三次元 refers to realistic worlds.