And when I first got into Guardian fandom I was so frustrated that there seemed to be no established translation conventions for these things. Now that you mention it, this is true. I was a little bit used to that from short forays into manga-based fic writing, but in Japanese I'm confident enough to pick and choose my own translation conventions, not so in Chinese, God knows.
Also, the many times the subtitles just entirely gloss over what the characters call each other, like ever time someone says "Xiaoge" and it's subtitled as "Kylin" I chattered at marycrawford above a LOT about nicknames in the Lost Tomb thing, but basically everyone has one, don't they? Sometimes three (six! nine!). Definitely a subtitler's headache, although that said they could have done so much better, especially because the wealth of nicknames is part of the fun and a lot of the characterization of the relationships. (Bai Haotian = Xiao Bai, Bai-jingli, si-mei and so on depending on who's talking to her, just for one, plus once when Wu Xie gets annoyed and says "Haotian-tongzhi!").
and when you get to things like "shijie" it becomes totally hopeless. As you say--it looks like most fics just say "shijie" and people know what it means, and I can't imagine a translation that would be both effective and natural; I feel like that applies to a lot of the xianxia stuff.
my first instinct would be to go for something more archaic in this case (Ihr rather than Sie, maybe a mocking "Euer Gnaden"), but then you introduce another element that's not present in the original. still, it would be closer than you can get in English, I think--translating the spirit of the thing. That one is particularly tough because he has to be saying something specific there for Shen Wei to react to in his next line. I might do something like "After you, honored Professor," which is not great either... Interesting to hear how German and other languages might cope.
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Now that you mention it, this is true. I was a little bit used to that from short forays into manga-based fic writing, but in Japanese I'm confident enough to pick and choose my own translation conventions, not so in Chinese, God knows.
Also, the many times the subtitles just entirely gloss over what the characters call each other, like ever time someone says "Xiaoge" and it's subtitled as "Kylin"
I chattered at marycrawford above a LOT about nicknames in the Lost Tomb thing, but basically everyone has one, don't they? Sometimes three (six! nine!). Definitely a subtitler's headache, although that said they could have done so much better, especially because the wealth of nicknames is part of the fun and a lot of the characterization of the relationships. (Bai Haotian = Xiao Bai, Bai-jingli, si-mei and so on depending on who's talking to her, just for one, plus once when Wu Xie gets annoyed and says "Haotian-tongzhi!").
and when you get to things like "shijie" it becomes totally hopeless.
As you say--it looks like most fics just say "shijie" and people know what it means, and I can't imagine a translation that would be both effective and natural; I feel like that applies to a lot of the xianxia stuff.
my first instinct would be to go for something more archaic in this case (Ihr rather than Sie, maybe a mocking "Euer Gnaden"), but then you introduce another element that's not present in the original.
still, it would be closer than you can get in English, I think--translating the spirit of the thing. That one is particularly tough because he has to be saying something specific there for Shen Wei to react to in his next line. I might do something like "After you, honored Professor," which is not great either... Interesting to hear how German and other languages might cope.