Book I in a new Chinese translation

The Brothers Karamazov · published

What changed


The Chinese text of the game has until now been 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 I of twelve has now been translated afresh, from the Russian original rather than from another translation.

  • Names follow the standard convention: 卡拉马佐夫 instead of 卡拉马助夫, 阿辽沙 instead of 阿莱莎, 索菲亚 instead of 骚菲亚.
  • The separator dot between name parts is everywhere: 费奥多尔·帕夫洛维奇·卡拉马佐夫. In the old text it was lost in 1210 places.
  • The second chapter's title is corrected. Geng's reads "the eldest son was flung out"; Dostoevsky wrote "He Gets Rid Of His Eldest Son" — packed him off. Nobody threw a child over a threshold.

The old translation stays


It has not been deleted or overwritten. The settings now carry a switch: the new translation, or Geng Jizhi, 1947. Books II to XII still run in the old translation 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 Book I and say what it is worth. The thread for it: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4955990/discussions/0/590687864233187080/