Book II in a new Chinese translation

What changed

Both opening books now run in the new translation: "The History Of A Family" and "An Unfortunate Gathering" — thirteen chapters, translated from the Russian original rather than from another translation.

The Chinese text of the game used to be Geng Jizhi's translation from the 1940s. It is in the public domain, which is why it could ship with the game at all. But its style is archaic by today's standards, and Chinese readers said so — some took the old text for machine translation. It is not machine translation. It is eighty years old.

Book II is where this showed most, because it takes place entirely inside a monastery.

• Geng calls the Orthodox abbot 方丈 — the title of the abbot of a Buddhist monastery — forty-one times in this one book; the young monk is 和尚, a Buddhist monk. The reader ended up in a Buddhist temple rather than a Russian hermitage. It now reads 院长神父 and 修士.
• Names follow the standard convention: 斯梅尔佳科夫 instead of 司米尔加可夫, 伊万·费奥多罗维奇 instead of 伊凡·费道洛维奇, 阿辽沙 instead of 阿莱莎.
• The title of chapter five is corrected. Geng's reads 會來的！會來的！ — "it will come!". But "Budi, budi!" is Church Slavonic for "so be it", an exclamation of Father Zosima's, not a prediction. It now reads 愿其成就，愿其成就！

The demo

The demo is exactly these first two books. So all of it now runs in the new translation: you can read it and judge it without buying anything.

The old translation stays

It has not been deleted or overwritten. The settings carry a switch: the new translation, or Geng Jizhi, 1947. From Book III on the old translation continues either way, names included.

A request

The developer is Russian and cannot judge for himself whether the new Chinese reads naturally or amounts to literature. If Chinese is your first language, read the first two books and say what they are worth. The thread for it: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4955990/discussions/0/590687864233187080/