Episode 4 is now out. One of my favorite episodes in the entire series! 10/10. The Kabu angst arc is just *chef's kiss* and the characterization of our main trio is so strong.
I put this as a Translator's note, but I need to rant about it here too. Hainasi in the intro says "斗龙战士与斗龙战士" aka "Dragon Warriors and Dragon Warriors". But I could have sworn that the episode was titled "斗龙战士与斗龙宝贝" aka "Dragon Warriors and Dragonlings". At least that's what Baidu says. But like, did the voice actor say it wrong but they went with the first take anyways??? Did no one check the recording before releasing it???
Every episode I find a tiny problem that sends me down a rabbit hole for a month 😭. I swear I can get these out faster, I'm just a perfectionist.
For a while I had the idea to make the scene of Aries and Cancer playing Rock Paper Scissors and I finally did it!
Featuring a rotating arm in both characters so they can actually play! (Although I did mess up on the size of Aries’s arm so you can see it poking out of their head oops)
I made them using some thick paper, alcohol markers, a toothpick as the axle for the arm, and hot glue.
I have finished the first drafts of the translation up to episode 10! 1/6 of the way there! Well... not exactly. Each episode takes about 3 drafts, First: watching the episode and translating as I go. Second: revising and coming up with proper nouns ie. places and attacks. Third: Typesetting, where I may adjust the dialogue again make it better fit the screen/scene.
Here's some fun statistics:
The first draft of each episode takes about 5 hours to translate if I am completely focused. (Often takes me up to 7 or 8 hours considering breaks and distractions)
I've written 20,267 words so far, and each episode is about 2000 words (total is subject to change, wow that's a lot of words)
The longest word count so far was episode 5, with a word count of 2330, and the shortest episode was episode 3, with a world count of 1645.
Typesetting used to take me almost double the amount of time to translate the first draft! Thankfully, I have streamlined my time down to about 3-4 hours per episode, phew! (episode 1&2 were done with the old process, while 3&4 were done much faster with the new process.)
It's been a bumpy road, but I've learned a lot and had some great eureka moments finding the right synonyms haha.
Muladuo defeated someone called 拉拉多龙 in the competition. This implies that another species of dragon, other than the firebirds, live on the islands??? My headcanon is that the cities we are shown have more species than we see, and that we just don't see them because we don't have the budget. But this is the first (and probably only) time that we actually get a dragon who's mentioned but never actually shows up. That's pretty cool. That means the world is much more expansive than we know from the show. But also,
Libra has the exact opposite problem where their attacks are super cool sounding and interesting, but they're only used ONCE in the entire series(Ep 32).
镜魄流 is such a cool name but nooooooo it's just a generic beam attack that is used once and it doesn't do anything ugh, the wasted potential.
There's another background character who's wearing a plain green shirt, so they're pretty boring. But I think this character is a little too suspiciously detailed? I would love to turn this character into a fandom oc or something haha.
Shoutout to this post by encyav for inspiring this idea!
I've been tinkering around with the idea of giving English names to the main six kids. (This is NOT affecting the youtube translations, those will stay as pinyin). This is just a hypothetical what if there was like a English 4kids dub of the show? What would they change the names to? I took the character's full names into account, and localized them based on what English name sounds the closest. Also I'm not giving them last names.
安小达 An Xiaoda -> Andrew
天乐 Tianle -> Tyler
王美含 Wang Meihan -> Megan
欧阳零 Ouyang Ling -> Lynn
欧阳坤 Ouyang Kun -> Quinn
路子园 Lu Ziyuan -> Lucy
路子涛 Lu Zitao -> Luka
Explanations below:
Tianle is a fairly common name and I've seen it translated into Joy, but Joy is a very common female name. Also, I just don't think it fits him very well. Tianle's not a very joyous character, and he's not the typical happy-go-lucky protagonist like other shows. Tianle is a very self-centered character with moments of humility, and I just don't think a simple name like Joy fits him.
For 00, Lynn is a gender-neutral name, although it skews quite a lot towards being used for girls. I debated between Lynn and Lin, but technically Lin is a Chinese name and this is a hypothetical what-if-English localization so Lynn it is.
On the Baidu wiki, some person gave the six kids English names that I'm 80% sure is not canon, but whoever came up with Lucius for Ziyuan is awesome. Lucius is a three syllable name that pretty much matches with the pronunciation of Lu Ziyuan as well as meaning "light", it's just such a perfect match! The only problem is that it's a typically masculine name, but I think it sounds pretty gender-neutral. And if she is hypothetically named Lucius, then Zitao can match with Lucas, which stems from Lucius! But ultimately I think Lucius is too fancy of a name and doesn't match with the others, who have more modern names, so I've chosen Lucy for her (which still stems from Lucius!), and Luka for Zitao to match.
Oh my god it's so detailed... I love you whoever made this wiki 🥹
I made my own wiki back in 2024 but never got around to adding much to it since I started focusing on translating the show. I'm not a coder so I had a really hard time learning wikitext. I also tried to add things for the other 5 seasons, but it seems like this wiki is just focusing on season 1, which I completely understand. The seasons are so district that we can make three separate wikis LOL
Episode 3 is finally out, much later than I anticipated haha. I learn as I go, so I had to rewrite the lines for this one a few times. Moving forward I'm going to be less literal in my translations. That means changing adjective order around to better fit proper English grammar, and getting rid of "嗯"s and replacing them with appropriate English translation. (although the occasional "en" will stay, I quite like them).
As always, translation notes in the video description and improvement form here: https://forms.gle/LcABtEKnjC15V7sj7
