Hi Foxghost, I don’t know if you’re open to discussing the translation for the official version of Shangxian, but I’ve seen some confusion with choices made like “Rex Spiritus” and other titles that some people say feels out of place. As someone who can’t read the original raws, I’m curious about your thought process.
My approach to localization is based on a few principles:
it is fantasy, and so far removed from culture (it is actually very far from the xianxia genre and resembles a jrpg in structure) that it should not need footnotes. Eventually there was an unavoidable one but even that can be skipped. But there should never be a point where you read a word (pinyin), not understand what it means, break immersion by reading the footnote, and come back.
a general reader new to the genre can pick it up and understand it without looking anything up. Even the glossary that explains extended concepts isn't really necessary unless you want to dive into the concepts further. This is doable in fantasy since all of it is explained in narrative anyway.
All the titles that are made up are designed to stick in your brain.
They are also unified for plot/memory reasons. spoiler: if the tree is written latin, the god related to the tree? also Latin. (why no spoiler tag for chunks of text tumblr)
No pinyin unless it has made it as a dictionary word (aiyah, aiyoh,yin-yang, kowtow) or I cannot translate around it. Pinyin (toneless) is easily forgotten even to ppl who are native Chinese and takes a long time to stick.
tl-dr: you can put this through a screen reader and it will be perfectly accessible. That's the general principle.
Now onto the current convention in Chinese to English fantasy translation:
Latin is great for things that humans didn't name. (Like Rex Lapis being Zhongli's title in Genshin Impact's Liyue region)
it is no longer the norm to transliterate a lot of things. (it was more than 10 years ago but we've moved on.) Now the only things transliterated are actual names and actual places.
Which is why all the cities in this novel got a new name -- the original were made up (they also sounded made up) and easily readable as having "meanings" and therefore so does the English counterpart.
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