A small rant and a bit of help from your side ….

Sup guys

So this happened yesterday, as we were eating dinner, my sister CurlyAdi, who you might have known from the previous posts, is studying Chinese for the past three years in her college and has taken it up as her minor, suddenly asked me out of the blue as to why I chose to translate the title 造化之门 of the series that I was translating here as “The Gate of Good Fortune” rather than “The Gate of Creation” or “Nature’s Door” or (going by the literal translation)  “Good Luck Gate” which are actually a more accurate translation of the title. Moreover even SmartyMouth chipped in that he had seen some chats on the other websites that say that the main reason why they don’t read this series is because we didn’t even translate the title correctly (Don’t burn me for this as even I am not sure about this as he always has a tendency to make things up and exaggerate things to out of proportions).

Some of you Chinese speaking readers here also might have a thought about it, and let’s be honest here even I thought about using “The Gate of Creation” rather than “The Gate of Good Fortune” (which is the translation you get if any of you use the systrans site and a few other translation sites to read ahead) when I started out translating the series with the help from Void, MeTaL MaX and Petie. Moreover the four of us also deliberated on this for quite a while before settling on this translation of the title.

Moreover I am sure that everyone knows the importance of a good title, as many people usually start to read something if they are hooked onto by the name of the title, i.e. the so called “Judging the book by its cover” philosophy.

Truthfully, my personal choice was still “The Gate of Creation” as the title (which also sounded more cooler at that time) but then a friend of mine (the dude we kidnapped earlier to help out with our glossary who is also btw a native Chinese speaker) said that this name actually plays a significant role (more so than the other translations of the title) in the story (you won’t believe it when I say this but that freak of a human actually read the entire 1250+ chapters in just a week and is for better or worse hooked onto the web novels bandwagon and is lapping up series after series week after week while his wife disses me for introducing him to this new addiction), so from what he pointed out, (don’t quote me on this as I haven’t that far ahead into the story) you can even say that the title’s role in the story is something like that of the role of “I Shall Seal The Heavens” in its story, but not in the same way though but important nevertheless. He also pointed out the chapters where the title was pretty much was the highlight of the entire arc, though I will not disclose the chapter number here due to my on spoiler free policy, but suffice to say it is much later into the series, those who read ahead might know what I am talking about. As a result, after much deliberation we finalized the title translation to “The Gate of Good Fortune”.

Moreover, if you remember the chapter in which the four good luck treasures were described in brief, i.e. Chapter 26, and if you go through the raws, you will see that they also contain the same two characters (造化) in their full name. So calling them creation treasures also was absurd, moreover in the coming chapters you will come to know more about how these treasures come into play, and change one’s luck from bad to good (oops minor spoiler).

If there is still any confusion regarding it then just look at Ning Cheng (one of my favorite MC btw), before he got the Good Luck Mysterious Bead he was just a thrash who basically could not cultivate, but after getting the Mysterious Yellow Bead not only was he able to cultivate, his cultivation was also a lot stronger than other people of the same level and if you followed through to the latest chapter, you could see that he could even fight people a few levels above him too, if this is not changing one’s fortune from bad to good, then truthfully I do not know what to call it. As for the gate part, it too is something very important that will come way later in the story (I am not sure if it is mentioned in the latest chapters in the raws, as I am only taking the word from the people who claims to have read the story till the latest chapter in the raws, i.e the freak of a human who just refuses to be named).

But then again this is just my own personal opinion, as I still have not read past the 150^th chapter in the raws, and am solely dependent on both CurlyAdi and my friend and the other kindhearted souls on reddit and Wuxia World Forums to provide me the specifics for the later chapters and also help me out from time to time in the translations. So all in all our way of thinking might have been wrong too (We are human too and will obviously make mistakes). If you frequent the Wuxia World Site, which I am sure many of you do, you might have come across a post from Ren describing how hard it is to select the correct translation for the title (can’t find the link on his site for the moment, if any of you do find it then just send it to me and I’ll add it here) moreover, sometime, translators even abandon the original name of the series completely and choose their own title which they feel is suited more better than the original (but then again such cases are really really rare).

So if any one of you have an opinion to share with us, it doesn’t just have to be about the title though, anything that you want to ask other than spoilers then please speak out your mind, we want to make our work as interactive as possible, and it would only be possible if you readers also join in, it doesn’t matter if you are a Chinese speaker or not or whether you can read the raws or not, just voice out your opinion if you want something to be clarified or if we translated something wrong, point it out, criticize us, or if you are too shy then mail us, after all only by facing the criticism (good or bad) and interacting with you all could we improve ourselves to a higher level and bring a better reading experience to you all.

So for everyone to join in, I created a separate poll on trying to decide the correct translation of the title, so please do vote your preferences, and hopefully, the result with the highest vote might even be considered as the new name (I know it is a little late for this but, you know its all for a better reading experience):

[I’ll keep it as a stickied post for a week, so that all of you can share your opinions, and just as I said speak out you mind, as we wouldn’t know what you want corrected/clarified if you just don’t speak up]