Experience On Different Language Novels

[Deleted member 148356]

To save you the headache this topic is quite difficult because of how preference, genre, translation and sample effects the writing but regardless just share what you think.

Chinese is easy to comprehend since my taste is figurative language and imagination wise its free from precise details meaning I get to see the scenery of a pond being described and small details are filled by my head. The characters are alive because of how versatile their body type, tone, imperfection exist. Descriptionwise I enjoy long action fighting and even a single chapter describing jade beauties is very funny. Book cover, title and description are extremely entertaining. Dungeon they do on the surface if my memory is correct, white and black fits yao and mo. Lots of males and females are present, each with their own role.

Japanese are the first-person infodump which the current me cannot withstand as I know how most system works already and how can you think that in a minute? Their title is long... people this days with their short attention span(including me). They have the boring and enjoying part which makes pacing further into the end worth the journey. Emotionwise they like to exagerate their tone, say a Japanese man exercising leg day, he puffs and breaths extremely loud in a quiet room... very inappropriately uncomfortable. Dungeon they do it underground as deeper means difficult, black are the evil colour. Little male and more female are present because harem(lenny face).

Korean is a complex to read and my brain melts with so many difficult wording structure of theirs. Their cover may look realistic but on the inside it is lifeless because of their surface level dialogue. I'm stuck there listening to their info of this and that and cannot wonder off to sleep. They have a tower reaching up sky to conquer this time white colour because they want to beat the 'strongest' "on their own." There is some element of beauty and macho muscle in detail but it feels like stalking them detail.

 

[Rezcore]

Ngl, I have come to hate how repetitive Chinese novels are. I'm strong, someone underestimates me, I prevail... rinse repeat.
I've read a few food Japanese novels... Mei
I read Korean Novels in Hangul, so the dialog seems to be ok. A lot of the time translators aren't able to translate context easily due cultural norms. Similar to how we never say Chicken Eggs when calling for eggs in a recipe, we all basically know that's what is needed.

Admittedly my disdain for Chinese novels may also stem form my disdain for China, except I watch some British shows and I fucking hate the English in particular.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

When I was little, I read a few comic books in French and one other language - Spanish maybe. Couldn't do that now - too rusty. One of the French books was a translation FROM English (Always loved the irony of reading "Captain America and The Falcon" in French...), the other was French native (Ooum Le Dolfin Blanc). Recently my only experiences with non-English-language novels are the translations on PocketFM - some of those are great, some hilariously bad, and some are just ... tedious. A lot of them, apparently, are translated from one of the languages of India into English, though most of them were originally Manga, Manha or Manwha adapted into novel form.

 

[InstantRicePack]

Thinking back on some of the novels I've read it seems I read quite a lot of chinese novels. And tbh yeah if they are in the same genre they do blend together in my memory a lot. I think there are always exceptions, for a lot of bad and trash novels for every language there are some good and great ones for every language.

For bad translations I just kind of turn off my brain, but sometimes I think my grammar may be regressing-

 

[melchi]

I think some of it is understanding the culture. Like for Japanese without the cultural context it is extremely underwhelming.

One time I went to an anime transition panel and they mentioned a couple things.

1.) there are not really curse words. The equivalent is being overly familiar and impolite. Like a stranger calling grey blob "grey" instead of blob-san is the equivalent to cursing.

2.) transliterations about. Like a shonen protagonist shouts "I won't forgive you!" And in English a better translation would be "unforgivable"

 

[Jocelyn_Uasal]

I've read very little from those countries specifically, but I've read plenty of Russian novels! 'The Master and Margarita' and 'Crime and Punishment' come to mind, nothing new and as fun as those cool Chinese blockbuster-esque stories, but still some of my favorites by faaaar.

In a Russian novel, everyone is crazy in just the right way

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Forgot about the International Novels classes I had in college - one on Caribbean Literature and one on African Literature. Ran into some very interesting stuff there, though both also tended to be quite depressing at times (these were English translations - though some needed very little translation at all, and the movie version of one of the novels had one of my all-time favorite bizarre subtitles vs. dialogue disconnects: Subtitle: "If you can afford to pay me, I will take you anywhere you want to go. If you do not, you are out of luck." Actual spoken line: "If you got da money, I take you anywhere you wanna go. You no got da money, you fu-u-u-u-cked.").