Chinese GL

electropengwing on Bluesky has posted a review of the audio drama Suffocation (窒息, pinyin: zhixi), based on the dark, thriller-y, stalker-y novel of the same title by Hua Qiong Ran (华琼苒). It features popular baihe voice actress Hei Zhi Shao (黑芝烧) playing the stalker character, very much against type — she's normally known for warm, sunny, somewhat androgynous roles, and one of her more famous early roles is as none other than Wei Zisong in the audio drama adaptation of Purely by Accident (纯属意外, pinyin: chun shu yiwai).

The audio drama (which is not yet complete; it's a non-commercial production, so releases have been sporadic) is available here on the Fanjiao app. The novel is available here on Changpei.

I've finished translating the two extras for Purely by Accident (纯属意外, pinyin: chun shu yiwai). The first extra sees Zisong and Feichen in their new home, dealing with visitors welcome and unwelcome alike. The second is from an outsider perspective — a young hunter decides to join Zisong's outlaw band (or is it Feichen's outlaw band, or do they swap), and is completely mystified by the goings-on he sees around him. The translation can be read here. I still need to go through the whole of the text and revise it properly, but as of today there's no new translation text to be generated.

I thought I would write some brief reflections on the novel, why I chose it as a project, and the experience of translating long-form prose fiction for the first time.

( about the novel )

( my thoughts on the novel; some potentially spoilery details )

( why I chose this project )

( brief reflections on translation )

The next project is going to be a wuxia baihe short story, which I already have a first draft for, so hopefully it won't be too long before I can publish it.

Fully three years and 41 days after I posted the first chapter, my translation of Purely by Accident (纯属意外, pinyin: chun shu yiwai) by Leng Qian Shan (冷千山) is finally complete. The translation can be read here. And here's the summary (which I wrote, because it didn't have one originally):

Through an unlikely series of events, bandit chief Wei Zisong — who was raised as a boy for Reasons — finds herself engaged to Chu Feichen, the emperor’s eldest daughter. Through an even more unlikely series of events, they fall in love.

I'm going to write more about the novel itself and why I chose it as a starter project at some point, but for now, one thing I'd like to note is: this book is, intriguingly, almost perfectly legible as an Anglo-published historical romance novel, up to and including the traditional third-act break-up and reconciliation.

There are of course still a number of things I need to do before I officially wrap up the project. The novel has two post-ending extra chapters, which of course I'm going to translate. Then I'm going to edit the whole thing one more time, ready for x_los (whom I'm extremely lucky to have as my editor) to look at. Once all the revisions have been implemented, I'm going to create epub/pdf/whatever digital format people are into versions of the translation, and if possible, talk a friend who knows about bookbinding into helping me with some physical versions (trying not to look meaningfully at momijizukamori). Oh, and I need to finish subtitling the audio drama adaptation as well. One thing that would help me immensely is if anyone could (or suggest someone who could) help me with a cover image for the eventual digital version. It wouldn't need to be complicated, or involve character art (although I would be delighted if someone decided to produce character art!), just a nice typeface and suitable background images would do.

In addition to general reflections on the project, I'm also planning to write at least one more post (similar to this one) focusing on selected technical aspects of the translation process.

And then, on to the next translation project, which I'm fairly sure no one can guess, and then on to the next next translation project, which I'm sure people who have been following my constant ramblings will have a pretty good idea about already (if not the book, then at least the author).

Today at around 1145 GMT, baihe author Ning Yuan posted on Weibo that two of her novels, historical court intrigue epic At Her Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) and sci-fi thriller The Creator's Grace (造物的恩宠, pinyin: zaowu de enchong) had been licensed for publication in English. I saw this about 17 minutes after it was posted (I took note of the posting time), so naturally I proceeded to toss the news post-haste into the roiling mass of Twitter fandom. Ning Yuan's post did not specify the publisher, but speculation was rife.

At about 1600 GMT, Singapore-based publisher Rosmei (who have licensed a number of danmei novels for publication in English), posted a hasty tweet essentially confirming that they were the publisher in question. The tweet is so hasty that they didn't even remember to state in it that the two licensed novels are baihe titles. No further information (identity of the translator(s), whether a digital edition will be available) has been provided by Rosmei at the time of writing.

My thoughts on this generally

I am delighted that Ning Yuan's novels will be available to a wider audience. She is one of the genre's most popular and longest-established authors, and it's practically criminal that international fandom hasn't, to date, heard much about her. The Creator's Grace is one of the best baihe novels I've read so far. In fact, I was planning to translate it myself after I finished working on Purely by Accident, so I'm both rather relieved that I won't have to be the one to tackle a 520K-word behemoth while also feeling faintly downcast about putting it aside. At Her Mercy is also one of the most popular court intrigue novels of the present generation, so I'm pleased that more people will be able to read it.

However, I have serious reservations about Rosmei as a publisher. Not only is their reach very limited — to date, most of their licences are confined to print books (they have managed to get ebook rights only for a few titles), and to Singapore (plus possibly Malaysia) only — but so far, they have not released or shipped any actual product yet. They also appear to pay translators an appallingly low rate, which is a poor guarantee of good work. The bits and pieces of their translation previews (for other novels) I have read do not, so far, inspire great confidence. The fact that this baihe licensing announcement is something they were clearly building up to (based on this tweet, it seems they were originally planning to announce it on 20 February), only to be pre-empted by the author herself, strongly indicates that they did not ask the author to sign an NDA or even strongly emphasise to her that the news should be kept under wraps — which one would imagine to be extremely standard business practice. I also have doubts about the choice of At Her Mercy as a first baihe licence. While the novel is extremely well-known among baihe readers in mainland China, it is also nearly 1.25 million words long in Chinese, and so makes for a very resource-intensive project, particularly for an untested publisher in an untested market.

My other vague thoughts on baihe publishing in English that no one asked for

For me, honestly, the ideal scenario would be to have a baihe English translation published either by a Big Five publisher, via a solid SFF imprint if it's genre fiction, and/or one of the highly-regarded small presses that specialises in works in translation, such as Tilted Axis. I would like to see the process of translation and editing being approached in a genuinely careful and thoughtful way, with an eye to popularising and marketing the work to a much wider audience than — as is the case at present — existing webnovel aficionados. One of my extremely long-term goals is to possibly work towards that, with support from like-minded people.

In the meantime, if anyone has a spare hundred thousand pounds or so for starting a small press focused on good translations of good/key baihe novels, let me know and we can work something out :)

I'm painfully aware that (1) this comm really needs a resource post on baihe audio dramas and (2) I really don't know enough about audio dramas to be the person to write it. If anyone wants to write such a post, please please please go ahead and do it! You'll have my eternal gratitude.

Fortuitously though, Fanjiao — the specialist platform for baihe audio content, itself a spin-off from the lesbian dating app The L (formerly Rela) — celebrated its fifth anniversary a few weeks ago, with a long video featuring 49 baihe voice actresses, so I've decided to shamelessly glom on to it and provide an introduction of sorts to audio dramas via sketching out the profiles of each VA featured and listing their major works. The list is set out below in more or less alphabetical order based on pinyin. The focus will be mostly on the Fanjiao-hosted dramas which each VA has participated in, but I will provide details of their voice work on other platforms and media where I'm aware of them.



The original video can be viewed on the Fanjiao Weibo account here. For ease of embedding, I've re-uploaded it to my YouTube account. There are currently no English subtitles because I, er, already have a very large backlog of things to translate, but if anyone is interested in trying their hand at subtitling it, you're very welcome to do so, and I'm happy to provide support!

( VAs A to F )

( VAs G to P )

( VAs Q to X )

( VAs Y to Z )

I previously made an excessively long Twitter thread on this topic with less textual detail but with voice clips and images, which you can read here.