2023 Hugo novelettes

Finally read "A Dream of Electric Mothers" and decided that I was not going to try to read "Space-Time Painter" via Google Translate. ( Read more... )

2023 Astounding - Xin Weimu part 1

When the Hugo finalists were announced, I was hoping there would be more translation activity than there's been. Either formally (I thought Clarkesworld, with a strong history in doing English-translation reprints of Chinese fiction, might rush some of the finalists into publication) or informally (I am peripherally aware via Untamed fandom of the world of fan translators - there are some very smart, dedicated, generous bilingual people out there doing fan translation work on danmei, it seemed possible that there might be similar people in SFF fandom). None of that has really materialized, or possibly it has but I can't find it - the collapse of Twitter has been really bad for my following anything going on in either fannish or SFF spaces.

Obviously nobody is obligated to do any work to spoonfeed us monolinguists! But given that the Hugos have historically been Anglophone, it would have been nice to get a *little* more content directed towards us? Not, like, by the concom, who are surely very busy, but just by... someone. By other fans or writers, who do bridge the two language spheres. Articles or essays or interviews in the magazines, introducing these exciting writers to their new Anglosphere Hugo-voter audience. Again, maybe that's out there and I just can't find it. But it feels like a missed opportunity.

Anyways, here's what I've been able to put together about Xin Weimu. (I'm like 95% sure Xin is her surname and Weimu is her personal name, that's the first thing.) She's on Twitter as xinweimu , which I guess is useless now that you need an account to see anything on twitter. She's posted some nonfiction essays here at a site called Sixth Tone, including one about being a danmei reader and author.

There are three stories included in the packet. I've Google-translated the first one, 哈农练指法, which I'm pasting in here behind the cut. Instantaneous machine translation is on the one hand amazing and mindblowing and on the other hand still kind of laborious and annoying to actually do - all the highlighting and copying and pasting and going back to put in the paragraph breaks, and the other two stories are longer (18 and 21 pages vs 14 for this one). I hope to get to them over the next couple days. But here's "Hanon Fingering Practice", about 8700 words, in case there's anyone out there who hasn't already done the Google-translate work themselves but would like to read it if they didn't have to.

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2023 Astounding - Xin Weimu part 2

Google translation of the second Xin Weimu story from the packet, 明天就出发. About 9700 words.

Content notes: this is a Holocaust story and involves Nazis. Also I'm not sure if it's the POV or Google Translate being unfortunate but there was a word choice in the translation that I found antisemitic and really took me aback.

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