Oh boy, for an episode I didn't translate I sure have a lot of notes for this one.
So this is basically the official translation of this episode, transcribed by yours truly, with minor edits and additions - mostly tenses or that one time where Yi Zhihua's name was translated as flower.
Ministry of Justice is what I used to translate as Ministry of Punishments; it would seem that the justice translation is more accurate for the Tang time period - sorry for the confusion and not checking more thoroughly earlier.
On the other hand, Bodyguard was translated in the official subs as Captain which I don't think fits the established translations of the word or Qiu Shenji's actual duties. Still, it's going to be in the future episodes, so I begrudgingly went with Captain.
Similarly, Aide to the Imperial Secretary was translated by them as Grand Chancellor. This one's a tad dodgy, since I haven't been able to find a lot of information on the title, especially in Tang dynasty, and things get muddy with the Han dynasty Secretariat becoming the Department of State Affairs and all, but I'm pretty sure this is neither the Grand Chancellor nor the Minister (or even Vice Minister) of the department. After a lot of thinking and reading, I believe something like Aide to the Chancellor might be an appropriate translation, but again, I just haven't been able to find enough information on what the title entailed to say for sure... I don't think this title appears anywhere else in the future, so Aide it is.
They also tactfully translated eunuch as chamberlain and like. I have zero idea why, but it will also be in episode 12, so chamberlain stayed.
Didn't edit the OP or ED at all, because they'll be hardcoded in ep10-12.
Also, there were some lines that were missing/timed really weirdly in the version of the video I have, so I'm sorry the English and the Chinese are out of sync there.
There is also one line which I'm having a lot of trouble with, because it's supposed to be the same here and in a future episode, but the future episode which I can't change has a really weird translation, so. I dunno. I ended up going with a translation that makes sense, will think what to do with episode 12 later.
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The plan for the future is: do the same thing for episode 9 next week, then make all the additions for episodes 10-12 - that will hopefully take less time and I might manage more than one episode in a week, but we'll see - and then finally reconcile what I've done for episodes 1-7 with the official versions (I'll also check for any mistakes and missed lines). I have also finally figured out how to hard-code subs, so I'll do a prettified hard-subbed release of the whole season at some later point (probably a week or two after posting the last episode). I promise to actually figure out all the continuity then.