#tgcf translations

[sapphicteadragon]

TGCF Revised Edition Translation

Greetings, friends!

Since April 2024, I've been working on a full translation of the newest 2024 revised edition of TGCF, since it has so thoroughly taken over my life and well, since nobody has done a full translation of the revised edition yet, I thought I'd do it myself.

Since Chinese isn't my native language, translating takes me a long time, and I have to fit it around other life commitments. But, rest assured, I do not use MTL for any of my work!

The revised edition has a lot of changes from the original, and content is both added and removed. This is the final version of the story that MXTX wanted to write, and it really shows - I hope you all will enjoy it as much as I am!

Happy reading!

天官赐福，百无禁忌！

[buried-in-stardust]

I came across another video about straight guys getting tricked into reading danmei by the title/plot etc. and the comments have some anecdotes that I had to share lol (original Chinese comments under cut):

Tian Guan Ci Fu [facepalm] [thumbsup] I always thought it was about an entanglement between ghost repaying a kindness and a two-faced god. My female classmates saw this novel on my desk at the time and giggled at me [facepalm] [facepalm] [facepalm] (109k likes)

Once, I saw my 45 year old male coworker reading Mo Dao Zu Shi, I even told him, you have this broad a taste in books? In the end he read half of it and suddenly asked me why it hadn't revealed that the main character was a woman disguised as a man yet [laughcrying] (80k likes)

"I Became a God in a Horror Game" This novel I never thought would be a dual male lead [i.e. BL] novel, after I found out I dropped it. At the time, I searched all the big websites to prove it wasn't dual male lead and prove that their relationship is brotherly, but every piece of information, every person refuted me. Do you guys know how helpless I felt at the time?!!! After I found out it was danmei, there was no way of going back to how it was before and I couldn't read any more!!! Do you guys know, in the end I switched to "Lord of Mysteries" [fantasy webnovel] (115k likes)

Do you know when you project yourself onto the protagonist conquering everyone, and right when you're feeling satisfied, you suddenly find out you now have an additional boyfriend, that feeling... (35k likes)

Who would've thought, the first time I saw "Kaleidoscope of Death" I thought it was Naruto fanfiction so I read a bit of it, then I found out it was a horror novel, but the male and female leads really suit my taste, so I read some more, then I found out later [the ML] was a man disguised as a woman, and the sky fell down [crying] [crying] [crying] In the end I forced myself to finish reading it, the instances were just too well-written [crying] [crying] [crying] (11k likes)

Seriously, straight guys can even misunderstand kissing as provocation between bros (30k likes)

[eng by me]

[fluff-crt]

TGCF Donghua: "Countdown: 5 days~"

Source: https://weibo.com/7329722575/5131459727724721

[alliumms]

I'm translating the entire TGCF audio drama!! (Masterlist)

🌸 Hello everyone! ~ ♡

I'm pretty new to the community but completely fell into the TGCF hole. This is gonna be a pretty big ongoing project for me: 1) To share the wonderful work and story that is TGCF 2) To improve my Chinese along the way, so my TLs will have Chinese subs, as well as English 3) Contribute a lil something to the community 🦋

This list will be updated !! Let me know if you want to be added to the taglist

Links !

You don't need POP for now and I'll see how that goes. But please buy the drama if you enjoy it (´。• ◡ •。`) ♡

Please keep in mind that the AD is based on the Revised edition, not the Original!!!

music/production related | mini theatres/extras | new uploads!

Season One

S1 Theme "Bestow Me" (Ci Wo): youtube | mega S1E01: youtube | mega S1E02: youtube | mega new! [MT] Attacking: youtube | mega Production Talk BTS: youtube | mega

Season Three new!

[MT] New Year's Eve: Once Upon a Restaurant: youtube | mega [EX] New Year's Day: Posting Rhyming Couplets: youtube | mega [EX] Second Day: Meeting Relatives: youtube | mega [EX] Third Day: Gu Zi's Birthday: youtube | mega [EX] Fourth Day: Kitchen God Festival: youtube | mega [EX] Fifth Day: Receiving Wealth: youtube | mega [EX] Sixth Day: Send Away Bad Luck: youtube | mega [EX] Seventh Day: Seven Treasure Soup: youtube | mega [MT] Fifteenth Day: Festive Lanterns: youtube | mega

Donghua

New OP Theme "Lian Cheng Ci": youtube Short Film 1: youtube new!

I've worked quite hard on this so plsplspls DO NOT steal my work !!!! It's a solo ship for now so I'd appreciate any feedback that I can get ✨ When in doubt, I referenced the translation from the official TGCF novels from Seven Seas.

How to view !

I'm trying to upload on Youtube to see how it works out for the new uploads!

Use headphones for the best viewing experience 🎧

TGCF Audio Drama

☆S1 ☆S2 ☆S3

Purchasing TGCF AD (@withhualian on X)

Support MissEvan 猫耳FM

The audio drama team worked really hard on this, they deserve all the support they can get, so we can also have S3! Please buy the AD on MissEvan if you can, it’s really cheap. I've linked below some resources that are helpful and easy to get started ☆

Guide to MissEvan (@dimsumplingg and co. on X)

Video Guide to MissEvan (Wei Su Jen on YT)

Completing daily tasks on MaoEr app (WBOY)

art from TGCF AD's official Weibo

[mxtxfanatic]

While flipping through mdzs to verify some stray thoughts of mine, I happened to fall into a translation discrepancy that I feel really, really emphasizes how important it is to have a proper grasp on the language you are translating before translating for a public audience.

Now before we get too deep into this, I want to reiterate that I am someone who does not understand Mandarin in any form but has been reading translations (both by humans and machines) for a few years now. However, because I have been reading translations that tend to follow the Mandarin more closely in grammar and because I haven't shied away from reading machine-made or bad human translations, I have noticed some places where mistranslations from Mandarin to English are common: pronouns, verb-subject matching, negatives, prepositions, and conjunctions. For this post, we will be focusing on the latter two.

In the lead-up to the Wen invasion of Lotus Pier, we are given a scene where Madam Yu whips Wei Wuxian, and in this scene, we are given a glimpse as to Madam Yu's average punishments towards the young ward.

While Madam Yu always pelted him with hostile words, she’d never really hit him hard before—two or three lashes at most, or being made to kneel or confined indoors, and it never took Jiang Fengmian long to release him from that.

—Vol. 3, Chapt. 12: Sandu: The Three Poisons, 7seas

In the past, although Madam Yu had always come at him with harsh words, she had never truly been cruel to him. The most that he’d been through were two or three strikes and being grounded. He’d also be let out by Jiang FengMian soon later.

—Chapt. 57: Poisons, exr

Reading these back-to-back, it should be very clear that though the same section is being translated from the same exact source, these translations do not say the same thing. The official stresses that Madam Yu had never hit Wei Wuxian "that hard" before, as well as saying that his punishments were a few lashes OR being made to kneel OR being confined, three separate punishments never taken together according to this diction. The exr translation, however, states that Madam Yu had "never truly been cruel to him" (emphasis mine) and that him being whipped was in addition to being confined. The emphasis on the strength of her lashings is absent, but an emphasis on the intent behind her actions—that she never meant to be honestly cruel to her ward—is established in its stead. (While this section as translated by exr does not mention kneeling, later scenes reflecting on Wei Wuxian's childhood in Lotus Pier do.)

Both of these translations... are wrong.

If we give exr the benefit of the doubt by virtue of being the original completed English translation of mdzs, then the official 7seas release should automatically raise red flags for the ways it seems to directly contradict the narrative that has existed for a few years before the novel was licensed. It doesn't help that the official has been riddled with many mistranslations and omissions from the very first volume, lowering any credibility it would otherwise have to stand on. But if we were to examine the rest of the exr translation, then the emphasis on Madam Yu's intent also rings false given the fact that we are told over and over again in this same translation that 1) Madam Yu is, in fact, unnecessarily, illogically, and erratically mean-spirited and cruel, and 2) Wei Wuxian knows this even at this time in his life (shoutout to the Lotus Pod Seeds extra) and understands her actions as targeted cruelty. What does the actual text say, then?

Although Madam Yu always spoke ill of him before, her hand had never been this viciously cruel. At most, she whipped him two or three times and ordered him to kneel down and be confined to his room, and he would be released by Jiang Fengmian sometime later.

—@jiangwanyinscatmom (emphasis mine)

Madam Yu has never been "as cruel" as in that moment when whipping Wei Wuxian, because normally she only whips him 2-3 times. She would whip him a few times and send him to the ancestral hall to kneel and be in confinement, which matches up to the memories that Wei Wuxian reflects on in other parts of the novel. This translation gets rid of the character inconsistencies that the other two translations create. So how did we get here? Remember how I pointed out those common Mandarin-to-English translation mistakes? Well, both the exr and 7seas translations fall into the trap of confusing conjunctions and prepositions. That's how we get a list of punishments rather than an order of events for a singular punishment type. That's how we get "not truly cruel" instead of "not as cruel." That's how we get these sections contradicting what we know about Madam Yu's personality and behavior from the rest of the novel through those two translations. Unfortunately, both translation teams just happened to flub in the same area in slightly different ways, and while I'm willing to give a multi-lingual grade-school student translating in their spare time the benefit of the doubt, a paid translator with a translation team hired by a professional publishing house should have better quality control than a spare-time hobbyist.

Also, just in case anyone wants more proof on what mxtx meant for us to take away about Madam Yu's treatment of Wei Wuxian from this scene, it was also apparently so important to mxtx for readers to know that Madam Yu was truly cruel to Wei Wuxian during his childhood that the act of her routinely whipping him whenever he was in her presence was something that was added into the revised mdzs. It was not in the original unedited version of the novel.

In the past, although Lady Yu always insulted or patronized him, she never laid a hand on him. At worst, she’d make him kneel for prolonged periods of time, but he’d always get bailed out by Jiang FengMian after a while.

—Chapt. 57. Act 12: Sandu/Three Poisons, Part 2, qinghe-nie

[incorrectly-quoting-mxtx]

The amount of dick jokes in MXTX novels is really something to behold because a lot of them are pretty subtle…..

And then there’s General Dick Yang

[maikecho]

Day 2 - first snow

[birdaquiver]

tgcf revised—mu qing & xie lian's reconciliation, chapters 192-193, translated by me

note: i'm not a translation professional, i did this for fun to give a rough idea of what happened in the revised version of this scene. it's also inevitable for subtleties to get lost in translation so do be aware. i know the english prose sounds a little awkward because chinese prose works differently but i wanted to translate it as directly as possible & any attempts at making it sound "smoother" or nicer would demand biased input from me which i wanted to minimize

edit; found a typo in the first slide. mu qing should say "even thought" not "even though"

[scarletlich]

thinking back on it some of those names in tgcf were really pointedly chosen

Yin Yu's name is the second half of 抛砖引玉 throwing out a brick to lure jade, a saying often used humbly to mean something like "i'm putting out my inferior work in the hopes of inspiring someone more skilled" (you actually see this a lot in fandom circles with people being humble about their fanart or fanfic)

Xie Lian's sword Fangxin 芳心 literally meaning fragrant heart, but metaphorically meaning a young girl's heart and especially her first love as in the saying 芳心暗许 a girl secretly pledging her heart (first crush).

I was confused about Ruoye 若邪 in the past, it's possible mxtx is going for a slightly more meta layer here because 邪 is normally read as xie2 and when read xie it means evil, essentially, but here it is read ye and when read ye (Classical Chinese only) it is generally just a tone particle. However there is a famous historical sword 莫邪 Moye (the "female" sword in the pair of swords 干将莫邪 gan jiang and mo ye) from the Spring and Autumn Period (770 BCE to 221 BCE) so perhaps that is the reference. However if read as Ruoxie then the meaning of this name is "like/as if/resembling evil" which is why I suspect its possible mxtx was going for a double meaning there from the "visual" first instinct interpretation when a reader sees 若邪 and hasn't gotten to the author's note clarifying its read as ruoye and not ruoxie.

[sanlangkiss]

i just feel so safe when i think about hua cheng. i think this is partially because when reading tgcf, everything is ok when hua cheng is there. even if things aren't going that well, knowing hua cheng is there by xie lian's side makes me feel better and at ease.. there's a constant sense of safety and also this feeling that things will work out

it's such a nice little thing and makes hualian all the more special because after so long, it's just right for xie lian to have someone that makes him feel so happy and safe (⁠ ⁠◜⁠‿⁠◝⁠ )

[sapphicteadragon]

Chapters 16-18 are now live!

Hello friends! Chapters 16-18 of the TGCF Revised Edition are now available to read on my website.

Bonus preview of hualian being sassy:

Happy reading!

天官赐福，百无禁忌！

[qifreyplushie]

i heard this audio and immediately knew what i had to do

[fluff-crt]

TGCF Donghua: "Happy Chinese New Year!"

Source: https://x.com/TGCF_Official/status/1883907893260640317

[starry-eyed-psychopomp]

Wait stop!! That’s my emotional support non-canon lesbian ship from a danmei series!!!

[alliumms]

TGCF Short Film English subs by me ! 🏮

So I stayed up trying to finish this before Lantern Festival is actually over for me (failed lol) But here it is!! I translated the opening song as well (using references from radishtears)

I hope you guys enjoy :) Almost cried tl-ing this one icl

Also check out my Youtube for the Lantern Festival extra from the audio drama!!

[mxtxfanatic]

Reasons Why the 7seas MDZS is the Inferior Translation

I recently had the misfortune to get my hands on all the 7seas mdzs volumes, so I wanted to make a list of some reasons why I will not be using this translation for any meta unless it is in comparison:

Reason 1: whoever tf's idea it was to translate "rogue cultivator" as "knight-errant":

The founding father of the Jiang Clan of Yunmeng, Jiang Chi, came from a knight-errant background.

—Vol. 3, Chapt. 12: Sandu: The Three Poisons

Reason 2: the fact that I was made to read French with my own two eyeballs in an English translation when the word "title" was perfectly serviceable as a translation:

But recently, he’d gotten used to using his venerated sobriquet every day.

—Vol. 1, Chapt. 7: Morning Dew, 7seas

Reason 3: this reason has been paywalled due to my personal belief that the compensation for inflicting this kind of psyche damage onto myself should be monetary