#given the translation? definitely not!

[perilegs]

You often leave tags worrying about your English spelling and typos, which is ridiculous because you have better English grammar and correct spelling more than most first language English speakers

ahdjdk i know but ty, i appreciate hearing it!

[svsss-fanon-exposed]

About your response re: Gongyi Xiao's name, if the given name is one syllable, how would he be referred casually? I've only just started learning more about how chinese names work, and from what I've been told names should preferably have two syllables. I've seen additives such as A- and -er, but I don't exactly know how they work and don't want to make assumptions.

This obviously doesn't relate to canon facts like this blog intended, so apologies if the question is unwelcome! Hope your day is lovely either way 💕💕

Tbh I'm open to answering as many questions as I can, even if it's not this blog's main intention-- even if I can't answer or don't answer correctly, at least then it's out there before a bunch of eyes that can peer-review!

Whether a given name in Chinese has one or two characters, that can depend a lot on generation. For example, I believe for a long time it was two-character names that were customary, then more recently one-character names, and the current generation has gone back to favoring two-character names again. Sometimes, a given name will have three characters, maybe even four, but I have only heard of this and haven't seen it so it's very uncommon.

Either way, you're hardly ever going to call someone by a single-character name without a modifier. Usually names aren't used without modifiers at all, but it's especially so for single-character names. To call someone by a single-character name with no modifier is not unheard of in literature, but it is very intimate, and also very uncommon-- so I wouldn't suggest using it that way.

Anyway, for Gongyi Xiao in particular, one could very, very informally call him 萧儿Xiao'er/Xiao'r，or 阿萧 A-Xiao. However, this is very familiar and would only be used by people older than him, especially when he is young, or people who are very, very close to him like parents or older siblings and other relatives, or by a romantic partner-- not casually between friends. Both of these are intimate and affectionate, with a "cutesy" sort of feeling, though to my own interpretation Xiao'er is slightly more so than A-Xiao.

For his peers, 公议师兄 Gongyi-shixiong would be standard, even for those peers from other sects as cultivators of the same generation call one another Shixiongdi/Shijiemei even when they are not from the same sect in SV.

As for general close friends, Calling him 公议兄 Gongyi-xiong would be appropriate (with "xiong" here as roughly equivalent of "bro") or perhaps 萧哥 Xiao-ge as something even less formal but not as intimate as Xiao'er/A-Xiao.

So, someone of the same generation could call him inorder of formal to least formal, Gongyi-shixiong > Gongyi-xiong > Xiao-ge, and a partner of his could say A-Xiao or Xiao'er.

[raposarealm]

Here are the quest victory quotes for Tatsuki Asuka (New Year Dragon God ver.)! Credit to @muffinrecord for the screenshots.

Top: This year seems like it will be a good one! Middle: Now then, when you come back, let’s train again! Bottom: A promising first step into the new year!

As always, friendly disclaimer that my Japanese isn’t the best, as I’m still learning. If you spot a mistake, please let me know, and I’ll fix it!

[rotzaprachim]

Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti - Māori language "merchant of venice"- you are SO much

[rxttenfish]

i keep going through and reading more and more of and unintentionally "getting into" delta green lately, less because of a genuine interest in the game (or the modern iteration of it, anyways), and moreso because it's such a horrible trainwreck that it really does capture for me all of the problems encased by modern cosmic horror media.

like, i hate when people start any conversation of cosmic horror or eldritch horror with stating "lovecraft was a huge racist!" which i guess gives the wrong impression of me. its not that he wasnt, of course not. but rather people so often just parrot the same sentiment over and over without really analyzing what that really means or understanding what was racist about him and the writings of the lovecraft mythos.

because, like. lovecraft wasnt the only one at the table, you understand? the lovecraft mythos is the way that it is because it was effectively a group of weird horror writers playing with each others ocs and being encouraged to do so by the people who created those ocs. thats why the king in yellow is here. thats why the hounds of tindalos are here. lovecraft had contemporaries, he was not just doing this alone, which is where you start getting into the problem.

lovecraft was only just one guy. he was one guy who never found success in his life and never had very much influence in that life either. he was writing with his contemporaries and being influenced by them, and you'll see this if you actually go back and look at his influences. the shadow over innsmouth was influenced by a short story called "fishhead", which by far was more racist and hateful than the shadow over innsmouth.

it's not a closed damn system. the racism exists without lovecraft. he certainly contributed to it, but even in doing so, i feel like a lot of people forget that he also gradually got better towards his later life. not to say that he was perfect, god no, not by any measure, but i think thats also an unrealistic expectation for people to immediately be perfect and wonderful and "unproblematic" in coming out of hate too.

and delta green feels like the perfect encapsulation of this. i feel like a lot of people dont see this, because if they come into delta green they are expecting to come into it as players and not as the person running the game, and so much of this information is only really accessible on the handler's side of things. but it tries very hard to be progressive in its ideals and to set itself apart from lovecraft and the older writings of the cosmic horror genre, only to immediately include some things that feel so racist and vitriolic that i dont feel like i can outright share them.

like, these sourcebooks SAY they dont hate minorities, but then they have minorities that are literally human-eating monsters and have a group focused on bringing to light all the hate crimes that they face, framed as a farce to make people okay with them being human-eating monsters. there's a plot point in one of the scenarios where the only option is to kill a bunch of abused immigrant children, because they have already been tainted by the eldritch forces at play, and if allowed to grow up they will kill people and set up more scenarios to abuse other children. i tried to make it through the early history included in the handler's guide but couldnt due to how much racist pseudoscience and pseudohistory was just treated as fact within these games.

there's no case where encountering something from beyond the stars should not be immediately killed! they are all fundamentally evil and beyond redemption! the fish people that everyone said were horrifically racist are real in this game and there is no possible way they are not ontologically evil every time and their "deep one ancestry" will win out every time! ignore the fact that in the original shadow over innsmouth, our narrator who got the town of innsmouth raided and was targeted by said fish people, was also a fish person!! why do the stories of lovecraft with their accepted knowledge that they are racist, have greater agency and complexity within their "evil forces" than the entirety of a modern ttrpg!

its like the authors have their own intentions, but then just dont bother checking to make sure they actually come through in the worldbuilding or the actual content contained within these scenarios. theyre saying lovecraft was a racist, but they arent actually bothering to make sure they arent also racist.

[couldbebetterforsure]

Man, getting into Enstars after being a part of Idolish7 for so long is so funny to me. Because I realized Kotaro Nishiyama voices both Kanata in Enstars and Minami in Idolish7. And hearing the difference in the type of songs they sing is something else 😂

Because on the one hand you got a guy singing about friendship and bonds and dreams and protecting the smiles of people. And on the other hand you got a guy singing about how typical love is dumb and actually being in a codependent relationship is awesome!

[moonsidesong]

played the fangame danganronpa another with a friend and i didn't really like the ending but i very much enjoyed mekaru bc she's just woman byakuya togami. i'm going to talk a lot in the tags now

[nin-nyan-ve]

सात.

! WARNING कच्ची मिट्टी !

"you're not it"

:)

[coquelicoq]

Just curious, which dictionary are you using for your lecture du dico project?

le robert de poche (1995)! at the time that i bought it it was only 12 years old instead of nearly 30 lol. on the cover it boasts "39 000 mots de la langue et 6 000 noms propres" and tbh i wish they'd left out the noms propres. they add heft (~120 pages out of a total ~900) and i'm not gonna read them lol.

some of the words and phrases that i'm putting in the letter-specific posts don't actually come from this dictionary, they come from wordreference afterward when i'm confirming the english translation of something i want to add to my vocab spreadsheet. for instance, couille is in le robert, but ma couille was all WR. et mon cul, c'est du poulet ? and avoir du cul were definitely from WR, but i think casse-cul, comme cul et chemise, le cul entre deux chaises, avoir la tête dans le cul, and en avoir plein le cul were all in my dico. WR crossreferences all other entries that contain the word you looked up, so it's very easy to just go down the list and learn a bunch of additional idioms.

[tyrantwombat]

*deep sigh of frustration*

MTL

[croakings]

SO. sorry this is going to be deranged i'm not proofreading this

so i've been writing a lot recently, and this particular project involves a language and culture i'm making up. and it's got me thinking about language, and communication, and lying.

and this is probably a very autistic realization, but it's hit me that usually when people lie, what they are trying to convey— and like, we're ignoring the ethics of it, this post is devoid of judgement one way or another, i'm just examining this thought— is a request for an emotional response from someone that the truth is less or unlikely to get across as effectively or as easily.

like, normal example, totally excusable: "my wife is in the hospital," when it's your girlfriend in the hospital. factually untrue! but what one wants people to hear is "someone i love and want to spend the rest of my life with is in dire straits and therefore so am i, please excuse anything in my behavior that may be caused by this," essentially. or like you can swap wife/girlfriend with sibling/best friend or aunt/neighbor or whatever. what you're trying to get across is the magnitude of the relationship rather than communicating the nature of the relationship itself.

we have words for that! like, yes, it's lying to use the wrong words, technically, to "trick" someone into understanding how close whatever given person is to you, and how much their condition is affecting you, but! also, i do have to say, in that particular instance i do have to say that, the primary goal of language being communication...... it's interesting! the facts are untrue. but the gravity of the circumstance was conveyed clearly with intention, which is to say, the emotional impact was increased by sacrificing literal clarity. this is basically what hyperbole does!!!!

most lying does that, doesn't it? most lies that i can think of are in some way in service to emotion above like, anything else. someone wanting to spare themselves someone else's emotion ("i'm fine", "i didn't do that", "i don't want this, you take it") and this is....... in a way, strictly speaking, effective communication. it's. hm.

like, for the record, i'm not pro-lying, and also, to reiterate, it's also ineffective communication, because it's factually untrue, which means again that however much an aim was achieved or a meaning conveyed you do it at the expense of one whole half of the venture. but it's interesting, isn't it? how much lying is usually angling for a specific impact, or to gain some form of ease and/or expediency.

i feel like i'm probably getting this across poorly which is also like, really funny, but what prompted this is like......... language is an imperfect tool! we know this. speaking (or whatever) is always an act of translation, and in translation something is always lost. like, even if that thing is only time. one is never able to express anything exactly as quickly as the original; thoughts take time to parcel up and deliver, or come out poorly if not mangled if at all recognizably. when going from one literal language to another, you have to decide whether you want to be more accurate literally, in impact, or in delivery, so respectively and with the simplest example you have to decide if when you translate an idiom you do so verbatim, or with an equivalent, and then whether or not you explain your choice and/or its value. because like, in an unattainable "perfect" translation, you could communicate both the meaning and the trappings of its delivery seamlessly and simply in about the same space as it was originally given more or less immediately. instead, because we can't do that, you can sacrifice to some degree either the original words, their original impact, or the original delivery, by again respectively changing the words altogether, losing the impact (generally also altogether), or losing the directness/straight forward nature of the communication by inserting an info blurb. and of course any kind of translation needs some extra degree of time, even just in its delivery. you lose things! you have to decide which things are most valuable to you to allow you to be "truest". like, which part of any given sentence is most important ? it varies, right? and sometimes one can effect another, like, what if brevity is important to the impact? or conversely, what if something specific has to be communicated in a long-winded and round-about way to have the same impact, but it's tricky to manage doing so without losing the clarity? what do you sacrifice? the meaning, the impact, or the delivery? does that make sense? and you're probably always going to lose time.

so, lying!!!!! it's sacrificing meaning for the other two, is what i was trying to say earlier. it's an imperfect translation!!!!! in one sense!!! but it is a translation!!!!! isn't that interesting?? actually no, sorry, most ethically speaking it's 2 sacrifices; meaning and delivery. like, as i kept saying, the facts are untrue (meaning), and at some point for the sake of clarity it'll be necessary to be like "oh no, sorry, actually it was [the factual truth], i just said [x] because [some form of expected expediency/ease], [explanation of that choice]." (<- delivery.) but y’know with lying with ill intentions you do get to skip that part, and in that case the lack of correcting by revisiting/extending the delivery is part of the communication, whereby you are implicitly saying something like "fuck you, also". or possibly "fuck me," idk, lying can contain multitudes. which!!!!!!!! isn't that interesting??? talking!!!!!!!!!!!! communication!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how and why and in what ways we say things........... the choices we make and the reasons we make those choices....... the sacrifices that are and are not acceptable to make, and in which contexts, in order to come across as you intend to...........

idk i'm just turning this around like a shiny rock in my hands. like, also, i do know that lying is done with the intent to deceive, and also that lying (derogatory) is done maliciously, with either the intent to harm or at least a lack of intent of care, but. hm. isn't it interesting, what you can learn when you look at how people lie, and how those things can change based on why you think they were lying? they still communicated effectively!!!!!!! they did it on purpose!!!!!!!!!!!!! they made those choices for a reason. that still..... tells something!!!!

even imperfect communication can, in its flaws, tell us something!!!!!!!! does someone sacrifice time, meaning, impact, delivery? why? in what contexts? with intent? for what purpose? isn't it interesting????????????????

[claire-starsword]

Shining Force Country Guide Translation - Part 3

The usual pie chart legend:

Shade

Population: 20 inhabitants GNP: Unknown

Species ratio:

Shade is more of a village than a country. It consists of only a church and associated buildings. So its population is only 20 people. Besides the humans who work at the church, the other species there are elves. They work as guides in the mountain paths. ____

The decline of royalty casts a shadow in the holy land?

A small region at the Sarastone peninsula northeast of Rindo. Back when Guardiana was founded, the Order of the Knights would be frequently sent in expeditions to expand their territory, and this peninsula was the northernmost point they reached, and thus Shade became a holy land directly under the royal family's control. After the wyvern raid from the time of Arissort von Guardiana II's rule, a church was built in this region to appease the souls of the knights fallen in that battle, and the third prince at the time entered priesthood and became its priest. After that it became a place which disseminated Guardiana's ways to all of the western continent, and little by little a town grew around it, thus around 500 years ago it was recognized as a holy city with the priest as sovereign, under the protection of Guardiana's royal family.

Shade's population, including the priest, is a mere twenty people. They are all clergyman who work on proselytizing and studying ancient texts. When it comes to politics, the executive power is Guardiana's, while the judiciary and legislative powers are under the priest's authority. It is generally a neutral state, but takes measures to protect the church against oppressive forces.

Throughout history, the priests have gathered previously lost records about the Castle of the Ancients, decoded ancient texts from all over the continent, thus getting closer to the truth on the Ancients and their civilization with their research. The current priest, Kahn, is in the middle of editing a compilation of this research of the past, named "Prehistory of Rune", and it has gathered attention all across Rune as it might shine a light on the mysteries surrounding the Castle of the Ancients. Unfortunately he's already very old, and many lament that there's aren't enough people to continue his research.

-The church is the highlight of Shade, but behind it is a small village, with some cabins offering guidance to travelers in exchange for payment. People heading to Bustoke should pay for the guides here, or they'll get lost in their way.

-Shade's bell rings once in the morning and once in the evening. The morning time is at 6am, and the evening at 6pm. This bell announcing the start and end of the days is of course heard from Rindo, but some claim to hear it all the way back in Alterone some days.

Priest Kern versus Darksol

Darksol disguises himself as the priest, and appear to the protagonist for the first time. Why did he kill the real priest? The current priest, Kahn, knew a man named Darksol was planning to revive Dark Dragon. He intended to tell Guardiana along with all the information the priests had gathered through the ages, but Darksol became aware of this as well.

Around the time the protagonist got the Orb of Light in the Cave of Darkness, Darksol arrived at the church of Shade, and attacked the priest. Kern might have lost, but inflicted deep wounds on Darksol. That's why he fled from the protagonist that time.

Romanization of the priest's name is my own, as Arthur decides to be unhelpful for this one.

also, I`m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that Darksol fighting the priest and getting wounded, plus the priest’s connection to Guardiana’s royal family, are mentioned in the original game and poofed in the translation, only brought back in the GBA version. I have never pointed out such things before.

Bustoke

Population: 800 inhabitants GNP: 2900 gold

Species Ratio:

The territory isn't big, yet the population is bigger than you would imagine. As for the species distribution, since the terrain is all forest, there's a lot of elves. Among the 18% percent of humans, many have mixed blood. ____

A critical point of modernization arrives to the people in the heights

A diverse country at the north of West Rune. Hunters settled mostly in the forest region among the mountains. As the territory was split between many different tribes, small scale conflicts happened time and time again. In the past, many magical beasts lived in the area, making it an extremely dangerous place, but around 500 years ago, a wolfling hero knows as the Young Wolf King (Zylo's ancestor) suppressed the beasts, and founded the country, unifying the tribes.

As the country has many different races, is crucial to have a strong leadership, and the current king Zylo Dunn Munster (meaning "Zylo, king of the mountains" in the region's dialect) rules fiercely, despite allowing his people many freedoms.

Self-suficient hunting is their main economic activity, so there's not much trading, but the marble and obsidian extracted from the southwest are highly valued as construction materials. However their mining skills are low and haven't been very efficient with these extractions, and thus there's a joint venture with the merchant guild of Rindo to develop modern excavation tools. Also, Bustoke strawberries, which were once eaten even by the magical beasts, and are said to taste great in juice, had their numbers dropped drastically due to overconsumption, and nowadays can only be harvested by the royal family, the exportation to other countries being forbidden as well.

The most distinct point of their livelihood is definitely the unique habitations built in the mountain walls. The natives' faith worship the forest, thus it is forbidden to cut tree for lumber, and on top of that there's little plain terrain, so this kind of dwelling naturally came to be. Since they are on great heights, the temperatures are low. Their designs work well for keeping them cool during the summer and warm through the winter, but in other countries some will still badmouth them as "hole people" or "primitives".

-Bustoke is built among the towering cliffs. It is surrounded by forest and quarries, but that environment doesn't seem to bother them at all. From the tallest point of the country, seeing the Pao bridge is a given, but on clear days with no clouds one can see all the way to the Pao plains.

-The famous bungee jumping of Bustoke. When coming of age, one must jump off a precipice held by nothing but a single rope. Is it a ritual done since long ago for boys born in Bustoke. In recent years, tourists have come to enjoy it as well.

Zylo's full name romanization is from the GBA version. Dunn seems to be a real Irish surname, while Munster is a province in Ireland.

Also, the part about Zylo's leadership seems to be describing his as an enlightened despot, which contradicts his bio describing him as merely as overseer. The bio makes more sense to me given how he is free to leave the country for a good while to fight.

Given this series’ obsession with young heroes I figured the title for Zylo’s ancestor is young wolf hero, however! 青 can also mean blue/green, so technically there’s nothing stopping you from picturing a technicolor furry family for Zylo. Do what you will with this information.

[mishkakagehishka]

Next time i decide to translate enstars lines btw, it'll be unrecognisable, because the amount of shit that i've learnt.

[lieutenant-amuel]

I remember some time ago you mentioned you're going to introduce new characters in the next chapter of your Gabe fic. If that's not a spoiler, can you tell us who they are? Btw I'm excited for the update!

Thank you for this question and keeping your interest in it ❤

That's a bit spoiler-y, actually, but I'll give you some general information.

I'm going to introduce three new characters: one of them is related to Valerio, as she (yes, that's a woman) knew him before he got to Gabe's school (which means she knows about his scars and his past~); two other characters are related to each other, they're sort of a duet and will be very important for the main plot. They're also women because I need more important female characters who are not dead in my fic, lol.

Thank you again!

[arolesbianism]

I am building so many hcs for Moon in my mind I love her so much enough so to think abt ancient politics girlie better consider herself lucky (I say, as if fictional politics becoming to long dead societies isn't my favorite shit to explore)

[bugsongs]

okay damn i've finished all the official us-release volumes of mp100 so now i gotta swap to the unofficial translations 😓