Reason for dropping JMG

After one month – 1 day of translating, I am indeed dropping JMG. I do not dislike or hate JMG in any way, and I do enjoy reading the web novel quite a bit. But, the important thing is, that I enjoy reading it. Without a doubt, it is very entertaining, and quite funny at times. But, from what I can tell, it’s not too suitable of a web novel to translate, and I’ll give my reasons below.

The web novel is intended to be comedic (obviously), and there are many parts of the web novel that make it comedic. Some of the most important things that I think that make the web novel comedic are the tone and the references/puns/etc.

The web novel itself is written in Chinese and the author uses a very light tone to write the novel. After translating it into English, the light tone doesn’t remain as well as it did in Chinese, and because of that, the novel seems a lot “mature”, if you will, in certain areas. I rate the translated version as 16+, but I rate the Chinese version as 14+. That would be the difference in the tone between the two languages, and that’s also the reason why I am stopping the translation.

Putting the author’s tone and text into another language is what a translator should do, and I think I may have messed up a bit on that for JMG. Compared to other more intense novels like CD, MGA, Xian Ni, etc, the tone is fairly serious, and if it’s translated into English it remains serious. For JMG, the tone is light, but after translating the tone because a bit too serious. Because of that, I feel like I almost “mistranslated” the text from the author, so that’s why I have plans to drop the translation.

I will say it once again. I do really enjoy reading JMG, but translating is a bit hard because of the tone difference between the languages, and with my current translating ability I can’t do anything about it. In the future I may pick it back up, but I have my doubts. Of course, if any translating groups want to pick it up, feel free, and there’s no need to contact me for that. I apologize to those who did enjoy JMG, and I apologize for dropping the series.

But, on a better note, for a few days after dropping the series, I’ll be focusing on MGA and Xian Ni a bit more. In those few days, I’ll try to find another series to translate, and it’s most likely going to be Xianxia and things like that. Although doubtful, I can perhaps pick up dropped Chinese web novel series if they are interesting enough. I can also take suggestions on web novels that you want translated (if you’ve seen the synopsis somewhere), but most likely I’ll be translating a series that I found on my own. But anyways, although I do not usually post the regular chapters on Sundays, tomorrow is the one month anniversary (monthiversary?) for my translations (horrah~), so I’ll be posting extra MGA chapters tomorrow, but the question is, how many chapters? :p

EDIT: Hmm. So, I will be focusing more on MGA and Xian Ni, so I am temporary not picking up anymore series until a later time (who knows when), but if I do choose to pick up another series, then I’ll make sure to create a poll or something like that. For now, no new series.