“Wei Wuxian has died! May the world rejoice!”

The siege on Luanzang Gang had only just concluded, and not two days had passed before this news took flight and spread through the entirety of the magical community.  The speed with which the news spread could only match, if not overtake entirely, the speed with which the war itself had begun.¹

Before long, whether one belonged to one of the noble families or was simply a roaming country mage, everyone had only one topic on their tongue: the action taken by the Four Great Families, who had allied with many other families both large and small to besiege Luanzang Gang.

“Excellent, excellent!  This is truly something worth rejoicing over!  Which great hero was it who struck the final blow on the Lord of Yiling?”

We know there are already multiple versions of MDZS floating about on the internet. We wanted specifically to create a version of the text that was as easily readable and accessible as possible for friends of ours who have little to no experience reading xianxia novels or with Chinese language or culture.

To that end, we have made some bolder choices than others when it comes to the translation of certain names, titles, locations, systems. We do so for a combination of reasons that usually boil down to one or more of the following:

• Increases legibility, decreases word salad / translationese
• Allows the experience of reading the English text to more closely approach the experience of reading the Chinese text
• Decreases importance of minor nuance and literary references; increases importance of clarity on first read (footnotes exist!)
• Preserves intention/function over dictionary accuracy.  For example, certain names read, in our opinion, primarily as names, and secondarily (if at all) as descriptions (consider real-life English-language examples: Watergate, Lakewood, Big Sky, etc.), so do not require translation; certain titles are invoked for humorous effect or for some other emotional purpose, and where possible, we tried to preserve the effect rather than the 1:1 word choice. Again, footnotes and the glossary exist to fill in the blanks.

We apologize for the confusion if you read ours and then go out into the internet and have to learn other versions of words that the community has adopted as standard, but we cannot control the community; we can only create our own internally consistent document.

All that said, we encourage you to comparison shop all of your free options and read whatever makes you happy. If you really care about every layer of nuance in the original text, we highly encourage you to…… learn Chinese. ;D

We also beg and plead U.S. publishers to please pick up and license MXTX’s works officially and to pay a real professional translator to do a real professional English-language localization.

The version we used to translate is the latest from Jin Jiang Wen Xue Cheng, before it was recently locked down.

Your hosts,
bandit, summertea

POSTSSCRIPT: When reading our translation, or when reading any translation, if you find yourself feeling the urge to read into the secondary/tertiary meanings of the way someone said something or the way something was phrased or a certain word choice…… please remember that all works in translation have arrived to you filtered through the interpretation of a 3rd party, the translator. It is literally impossible for a translator to leave no mark in the process of translation; as one language is crunched down and extruded into another, layers of meaning are inevitably lost, and certain meanings are inevitably shifted, and it is the translator's job to pick and choose which layers of meaning are the most important to preserve. If you really, really want to get into the weeds with word choices and the ways people say things… perhaps it's time to learn the language and pick up the original text. ;D

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