#necro rambles

[romance-of-three-memes]

Luo Guanzhong's opinions of:

Liu Bei

Cao Cao

Sun Quan (and the Sun family in general)

[necromancy-enthusiast]

How are you guys doing, me? I'm low-key losing my mind over this Chinese historian who not only got every single relative of his you could think of and then plenty more executed for high treason, but also couldn't keep his mouth shut and tried to be a smart ass about it, thus dragging in even more people.

[prosthetics-to-pieces]

my favourite slipknot songs are iowa, prosthetics, dead memories, and gehenna and idk what thats says about me but it cant be fucking good

[romance-of-three-memes]

I looked up Chinese memes on the search engine I usually use and went to the image search option hoping to find memes that are popular on the Chinese side of the internet, but of course I mostly found a bunch of racist bullshit. How silly of me to expect otherwise. That, and some memes about learning Chinese that were harmless, but objectively not funny. Like, painfully unfunny.

But I found a decent archive website, and can always check Baidu. I haven't used it a whole lot in the past, but oh well.

[necromancy-enthusiast]

I'm never going to forgive Hades the game for trying to make me think Thanatos is cool or hot, or for treating Hypnos like shit and having almost everyone hate him basically because he's autistic, even if some of them come to realize they were wrong to do so. Like. It's a really fun game and I want to play it again but uggghhhhhhh.

Huh weird, this was supposed to be a funny joke post but then Hypnos came up. Anyway I should've been able to romance Hypnos but the devs are cowards.

[necromancy-enthusiast]

I've been noticing for some time now that a lot of the time, people who translate Japanese and Chinese into English tend not to be averse to unnecessarily changing the text source. I've seen it in video games and anime, like. I have so many gripes with the official localization of Danganronoa because it arbitrarily changes things and smooths out a lot of the characters' rougher, more unsavory aspects. And I very much don't like that.

Recently I've been doing more of my own translation in Chinese and have found a good bit of the same trend, albeit mostly in books and historical sources and whatnot since China doesn't have as much of a video game and anime industry as Japan. So I was reading about one particular historical figure in China whose family was reluctant to let her marry this certain guy, and the English translation put it as

'Why bring disaster upon yourselves just because of your love for me? If this turns out to be a bad marriage, I'll accept it as my fate.'

Anyway I looked up the original Chinese, which is this:

为什么要因为吝惜我这个小女子而招惹祸事呢？如果孙坚待我不好，也是我命该如此.

And uh. The feeling is very different. The way I'd translate it would be:

'Why would you invoke disaster by begrudging me, unimportant woman that I am? If he (Sun Jian) treats me poorly, then such is my fate.'

Yeah, sure, it *basically* means the same thing, but nuance is extremely important, especially with languages that are very different from one another. I dunno, I just feel like when you're translating you should stay as true to the meaning of the source as possible, but apparently that sentiment isn't as common as I'd assumed. Funny.

[littlenecromancer]

God i fucking love being gay

[necromancy-enthusiast]

When I read Spanish after having gotten a lot more used to reading Chinese I'm always kinda like wow, this is so similar to English by comparison... Which is to be expected given geography and history and all that. But how you can often do direct translations from Spanish to English and it would mostly sound alright with a few major exceptions, where if you tried that with Spanish or English and Chinese, it would sound like a hideous garbled mess in both directions because the grammar and order of information is so different. I'm just very :-0 about the whole thing. Like wow haha I didn't *forget* about it, but I sure haven't thought about it much in a long while.

I really need to catch up on my Spanish. It's a pretty language, but my interest in it is mostly practical whereas for Chinese it's a bit more... Personal? If it weren't for Spanish being so widespread especially in places I want to work someday, there's a pretty good chance I'd never take much interest in learning it. But I've been deeply fascinated by Chinese since I was a little kid. So yeah, Spanish feels more like a necessity or at least a strong recommendation whereas Chinese intrinsically captures my interest.

That said, I have very little respect for English because it's an absolute abomination of a language. Horrible. -10/10. What the hell is even going on. I appreciate that it doesn't feel the need to gender basically everything like Spanish, but that's about all it's got going for it. And Chinese doesn't do that either so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯