Book III now in the new Chinese translation

What changed

Three books now run in the new translation: “The History of a Family”, “An Unfortunate Gathering” and “The Sensualists” — twenty-four chapters, made from the Russian original rather than from another translation.

Until now the Chinese text of the game was Geng Jizhi's translation from the 1940s. It is in the public domain, which is why it could ship with the game lawfully. But its style is archaic by today's standards, and Chinese readers said so — several of them took it for machine translation. It is not machine translation; it is eighty years old.

What Book III shows

Its second chapter is called “Lizaveta the Stinking”. Geng titles it 麗薩魏達 — a transcription of one word, “Lizaveta”. The nickname is gone, though every other language in the game keeps it: die Stinkende, la puzzolente, la hedionda.

More than a word is lost. Smerdyakov takes his surname from his mother's nickname — the novel says so outright, and in Russian you hear it at once. In Geng the mother is 麗薩魏達 and the son is 司米爾加可夫: the two names share nothing, and a link that carries half the book simply does not exist for a Chinese reader. She is now 莉扎韦塔·斯梅尔佳夏娅 and he is 斯梅尔佳科夫, with the root 斯梅尔佳 standing in both.

From the first two books

• Geng calls the Orthodox Father Superior 方丈, the title of the abbot of a Buddhist monastery — forty-one times in one book; a 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 forms: 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 has 會來的！會來的！ — “it will come!”. But “Budi, budi!” is Church Slavonic for “so be it”, the elder Zosima's exclamation, not a prophecy. It now reads 愿其成就，愿其成就！

The demo

The demo is the first two books, and all of it now runs in the new translation: you can read it and judge it without buying anything. Book III is in the full game.

The old translation stays

It has not been removed or replaced. There is a switch in the settings: the new translation, or Geng Jizhi, 1947. From Book IV on, the old translation runs in any case — with the old names.

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 native language, read it and say what it is worth. The thread for that: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4955990/discussions/0/590687864233187080/