This is not strictly wuxia but it is related in a way. And probably inevitable given my username. 
Would such a project be possible? There are several translations available such as the official translated books and online ones like http://threekingdoms.com but these are awkwardly translated. The books Iāve seen use the horrid Wade-Giles format too.
Hi there, welcome to the Wuxia Society forum! Yes, I get what you mean. The translations Iāve seen online are thorough but awkward. There are books of the English translations. From what Iāve read, some are pretty well-translated, though Iām not familiar with translation is the better one.
It is a staggering task to translate the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is written in vernacular Chinese. And with so many existing translations, it begs the question whether it is worth the effort.
Would be great to seeā¦ but it is sooooo longā¦
Yes, one thing that most people donāt realise is how lengthy many Chinese novels are. Or should I say, how lengthy they are after they have been translated. This is down to the beauty of the Chinese language. You can say so much with very few words. So when the same description is translated, it is a lot longer.
Based on my rough estimate, the longer Jin Yong novels translated are each the length of several English novels.
It was worth a try asking. How about polishing up the bad translations instead of doing a translation? Editing the translation to improve the quality. That might make it easier and faster?
Yes, it would lesson the work load but itāll still be a staggering project to take on. If there is a team to work on it, then maybe we can consider that.
Hi, reviving this old thread I chanced upon when I was visiting the website.
Iāve actually copied the RTK text from the threekingdoms website and made an epub, with the blessings of one of the community managers of the site. Itās not perfect, but itās something - until I iron out any mistakes and add annotations.
Cool! Thanks for sharing. What are your plans in terms of annotations?
The Annoted ROTKās gonna be slow.
TBH I came across a fan translated LOCH a while ago and was doing an edit of it when I came across wuxiasociety. While you already have a pretty good version of the translation of LOCH here (I think we were using the same draft translation - but I canāt remember which forum I found the translation from), Iāve already started the LOCH project so Iāll just continue with it (I find the initial translations too wordy and missing some narrative flow - as well as some historical stuff being off), since I also prefer to have a personal copy in epub (like the ROTK one)
Will share once done, but I do not intend for it to be a competitor.
The old fan translation is a great effort but some nuances are lost because some of the contributors arenāt native speakers or they misinterpret some parts due to a lack of cultural/historical background.
I actually want to re-do LOCH because a lot can be improved and the current one is based on 2nd Edition. But thereās the official one using the 3rd Edition source by Gigi so it might be better use of time to re-do other Jin Yong series outside of the Condor Trilogy.
Happy to host it here if youāre open to sharing it. We have the fan translations in epub but Iāve taken them down when we moved to the new site design. Plan to put them back up.
Thanks. Perhaps Iām too fussy, but I find it takes multiple read-throughs to get every chapter translated properly. So things will take a while. Iām at Ch 10 now but Iām only truly done with Ch 1 - 2.
Actually the official translation by Gigi was unsatisfactory for me, hence my current quest for a better translation.