Sword of the Yue Maiden translation

We have two translations of the Sword of the Yue Maiden on WuxiaSociety.

The old translation was originally published on another site by an anonymous translator, and was later reposted on this site in 2015 to preserve it.

The new translation is a WuxiaSociety translation done by Jenxi in 2022. Like all other WuxiaSociety translations, this in-house effort comes with translator notes, explanations, and annotations to improve the reader’s experience.

WuxiaSociety translation

This in-house translation uses the Third Edition of the Sword of the Yue Maiden.

Old translation

The old translation also uses the Third Edition of the Sword of the Yue Maiden.

Translation errors

Here are some of the errors in the old translation due to misunderstanding of the Chinese terms.

Wrong translation of the clothing of the Wu and Yue swordsmen.
- “Swordsman in blue” actually wears black. It is a very commonly seen bad translation of the term 青, which means black in older times but have come to mean green and blue nowadays.
- “Liveried swordsman” wears clothes with brocade, a common uniform for guards of kings and emperors.
Wrong translation of the five swords forged by Ou Yezi. These are swords recorded in the Lost Book of Yue and have official translations of their names.
Corrected translation of tin. It was mistranslated as zinc.
The capital of Wu 会稽 was wrongly translated as Huiji. It should be Kuaiji. The character 会 has more than one pronunciation.

Changelog

20 April 2022

Added Part 1 and Part 2 of the in-house translation.
Translation of parts the the previous translator glossed over.

1 August 2022

Added Part 3 of the in-house translation.
Translation of parts that the previous translator glossed over.
Left the title dafu in the pinyin form as there is no real equivalent in English. The previous translation used Minister but it is actually a scholar-official in the Warring States period.
Used the proper pinyin formatting of Aqing’s name. The previous translation used A’qing, a common mistake in trying to separate the prefix with an apostrophe. In pinyin, apostrophes are only used to indicate separate syllables in cases when not having an apostrophe leads to ambiguity in reading. For example, when a syllable ending with a vowel is followed by a syllable beginning with a vowel, or when a syllable beginning with a, e, or o follows another syllable.

18 August 2022

Added Part 4 to Part 8 of the in-house translation.
Translation of parts that the previous translator glossed over.
Cleaned up the footnotes.