Announcement: next translation project!

There are only a few chapters of Entertainment Industry Acting Emperor left and I have already decided on my next translation project. It’s another BL novel. It’s called “Your Majesty, Be at Ease” by Jué Jué (决绝). Other novels by the author include “Beloved Husband”, “A Guide to Raising Your Natural Enemy”, “Stone Age Husband Raising Journal” and many more. Here’s the translated synopsis:

In the throne room, Jian Jin was named the Tanhua. When he looked up, he found that the man on the dragon throne was his own wife who he had been looking for for a long time and who had “abandoned his husband and son”.

The wife who he had managed to fatten up had lost weight again.

A certain emperor coveted his own Tanhua everyday, thinking about him like crazy, but this Tanhua had a beloved lost wife.

He especially wanted to get rid of that woman!

****

One day, the emperor bumped into the child being raised by his Tanhua.

Jian Jin: This is your son! Come on, give him a hug!

Emperor: This child looks like me. The child’s mother must also look like me. Does he take me as a stand-in for his wife?!!!

Reading guide.

1. A short story about freeing yourself. Jian Jin is the gong, the emperor is the shou. It is written from both perspectives.

2. Unorthodox ancient BL, the gong came from a future world and transmigrated to ancient times with a big golden finger. There is an abnormal birth plot.

How I Translate

Quick note, I decided to give my page a better title. Night Owl Translations. It’s catchier than just using my own nickname (K Chandra). I also added some free graphics to spruce it up a little. It might seem a bit misleading to call it “Translations” plural since I’m only doing Entertainment Industry Acting Emperor, but at some point I want to take on a new project once I’m done with this one.

Onto an explanation about my translation process – since quality of MTL translations varies a lot, I want to let you know that you can trust the quality. I translate the chapters using DeepL, with some help from Google Translate if I’m having a hard time translating it with DeepL, checking any confusing bits with a Chinese-English dictionary (I like Yabla), and online research, to get the translation as accurate as possible. I don’t know Chinese so I’m also reading the chapter for the first time while doing that. So, I haven’t finished reading the novel yet.

If you don’t know what DeepL is, it’s not the same as a simple auto translator like google translate. You could call it an “intelligent” machine translator. It gives multiple options for every word, so you can select the best option, and it retranslates the sentences accordingly. I translate the chapters line-by-line. It takes a while to do this, to make sure I’m selecting the best translation for each sentence. Several hours. On weekdays I can translate one or two chapters a night after work. The chapters of this novel are kind of long, with the shortest being around 3500 characters and the longest around 6000.

Once I’m done with the initial chapter translation, you can consider that the “rough draft”. I still have to edit them, fixing up some grammar, or parts that still sound a bit awkward, without changing the meaning of the translation. My goal is to make it very readable in English. If I focused only on editing and posting the chapters I already translated I could do 5 chapters a day, but if I did that, I would soon run out of translated chapters and the rate at which I posted new chapters would slow way down. Right now I have 62 translated chapters. There are 100 chapters total in the novel. I’ll try to find a good balance of alternating between translating chapters, and editing and posting the chapters I’ve already translated.