About translating from Chinese to English
It is not easy to translate Chinese texts into English, especially when they are full of martial art lingo, alien names and intergalactical mumbo jumbo. Translating this novel raises many conundrums. You might have noticed that translations vary a lot from one website to the other. There are a bunch of specific reasons for that.
First, Chinese characters aka sinograms or hanzi carry no grammatical information, for example they can be singular or plural. For example: 手 shǒu could mean hand or hands (and it could be subject or object of the verb, or have yet another grammatical function, and one character could have different grammatical natures like adjective, noun, verb, etc.).
Second, most Chinese characters have several meanings (and sometimes various pronunciations, especially regional variants). For example: 星 xīng could mean star or planet, surnames Xing or Singh, and could be associated with other characters to build many new words. 旧 jiù could be old, former, worn, etc. or mortar, or maternal uncle, brother-in-law, etc.
Third, Chinese characters (or the Japanese kanjis that derive from them) often carry different meanings when combined and sometimes only have a phonetical value (a pronunciation with no specific meaning), which makes it really hard to translate Chinese (or Japanese) while carrying all the puns and nuances. Here is a few examples:
高矮 gāo'ǎi means height while 高 gāo means high and 矮 ǎi means low. Indeed, you could try telling people that your highlow is 5 feet and see if they understand.
威廉 wēi lián means William while 威 wei means might, power and 廉 lián means incorrupt. Well, you could call your friend Incorrupt Might instead of William, they might not dislike it.
Here is a pretty Japanese compound word: flower 花 hana + fire 火 hi/bi = fireworks 花火 hanabi. Do you plan to watch the flowers-of-fire next summer?
Of course, the author plays with all of these subtleties. He builds names for places and people and martial art techniques with compound words and puns and phonetic spelling, we're not sure when the meaning matters more than the pronunciation, not sure when a concept is singular or plural, not sure about a lot of things.
To make things worse, you can find online versions of this webnovel with simplified Chinese characters and others with traditional Chinese characters—probably automatically converted, and there are regional variants for meanings and pronunciations.
I'll assume the author is using Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin pronunciation, though there are may other languages sharing the same writing system like Cantonese. If you know more about the author, please tell me, I couldn't find anything online.
Anyway, I'll try my best and in general I'll try to stick to straightforward, simple translations.
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I'll add some translation notes at the end of each chapter, and I created a "Glossary" chapter to make it possible to easily look up specific words. You wonder who Anon Turing is? Check *Anon (with an asterisk) in my glossary.
