English Translation

Oct 28, 4:07 PM

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Sep 2018

5282

It's downright terrible, the sheer amount of grammatical mistakes is ridiculous, you seemingly can't go one page without something immersion breaking.

I'm not talking about the Korean idioms either, literal spelling mistakes, sentences structured poorly or not even making any sense, there's a ton of it.

The writing of ORV is already fairly informal, this just makes it feel almost amateur. If the story itself wasn't intriguing, I would dropped this ages ago.

Interesting, I just came across this post from reddit, at least it supposedly gets better after chapter 300 lol

It seems Yen Press is going to release the first novel in mid 2025.

There are two aspects of this, but what you are commenting on, you are right, the translation is poor. The grammar is poor, it has numerous inaccuracies, and overall barely passes as readable. As others have said, the translation relied heavily on MTL (which was even worse back then than today) and while editing clearly happened (pronouns are way more consistent than MTL alone would produce), it still filled with many mistakes both small and large.

That said, Korean web novels also do not flow like one written in native English. Stylistically ORV makes heavy use of sentence fragments, and short choppy sentences for dramatic effect. Korean as a language also omits a lot of things when they can be inferred from context, so a literal translation can appear to be missing key words in English. Dialog can also sound very unnatural in English due to the heavy use of people's full names in place of pronouns ("Can Dokja-ssi do this?" Rather than "Dokja-ssi, can you do this?"). Korean's also often use '그' (gu) as sort of a filler word, like 'um', but when translated literally to 'that' it can make someone's train of thought seem muddled or confused. Korean web novels specifically also make heavy use of onomatopoeia and other things you wouldn't normally see in an English novel. Finally, Korean uses Subject Object Verb, rather than Subject Verb Object, so literal translations that don't account for this can sound odd even if they form valid sentences in English.

Most web novel translations I've seen make no effort to change the overall flow of sentences, with 'better' translations largely being low on inaccuracies and well-proofread, rather than having highly-readable English prose.

All that said, and as stated at the start, ORV TL isn't poor just because of the above stylisms. Simple grammatical mistakes are everywhere ("Then I fell sleep." instead of "Then I fell asleep."). Pivotal lines quoted by the community are often misunderstandings/mistranslations (eg "companions separated by life and death"). Terms are inconsistently translated (Ellain Forest Essence appears as three different items).

Further, entire paragraphs make incorrect word choices that make things significantly harder to parse/understand than necessary:

"I anticipated how the situation would roughly occur. The woman noticed my presence, perhaps because the influence of Fourth Wall temporarily weakened. If Fourth Wall was really the skill I thought it was…"

vs something like:

"If my rough guess was accurate, she probably noticed my existence due to the temporary weakening of the [Fourth Wall]. That is, if the [Fourth Wall] was what I thought it was."

You can roughly piece together what is happening in the original, but barely being able to piece together what is happening is not a stylistic choice in the original Korean.

I personally think people are so used to reading terrible translations online (and people are so used to reading terrible writing in general on chat and Reddit etc), that people don't realise that reading a book shouldn't feel like decoding a research paper.

This isn't intended to hate on the translator, but simply because I hate whenever someone points out this book is very awkwardly translated and everyone just says "that's how web novels are". Rewording to sound good in English while remaining faithful to the source is a lot of work, and TLs do not get paid well enough to do so in most cases. Further, it requires extreme mastery of both languages to do well, and the translators doing most of these stories are usually only good at one, if either, of the languages and are just trying to help the community or make a meager living.

RainbowTurtle (first translator) has gone on record saying they didn't even like or want to TL ORV (hence why it switches midway), so the fact they made it through 300 chapters is a miracle in itself.

GakutoDeathGlareOct 28, 4:12 PM

Nov 3, 2:06 AM

_cjessop19_

Offline

Nov 2018

5803

I'm hoping to read this once the manhwa has finished adapting it, but if the translations is bad as you say, then perhaps waiting for the official Yen Press volumes would be best.

I guess depending on the series, it may be a hit or miss depending on who translates it. The only good example I can think of the top of my head of translations done right would have to be the DxD LNs. I saw virtually no issues with the grammar, and a lot of terms were left untranslated (like calling Issei "Sekiryuutei" and Vali "Hakuryukou" - which sounds a lot better imo), or they left in the honorifics and added in a bunch of translation notes at the end of each chapter.

_cjessop19_Nov 3, 2:14 AM

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Nov 3, 2:24 AM

GakutoDeathGlare

Offline

Sep 2018

5282

Reply to _cjessop19_

@_cjessop19_ I don't know when, I'm about 1300 pages (of about 6000) into the series, but I think I've gotten more or less used to it, or the mistakes have dwindled down a bit, probably a mixture of both but with more reason to the former. The sentence fragments and short choppy sentences were also something I had to get used to as well, which definitely played a part in my initial enjoyment/frustration with this novel. But if you want the best experience you can get, I would wait for sure.

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English Translation

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» Do the 105 chapters adapt all of the chapters of the web novel?

» Question about Yu junghyeok's constellation (novel spoilers)

» Side Stories on MAL

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