As I watch more Novoland #cdramas, I find myself growing more confused about the geography and placenames used in the shows and movies. I’m familiar with the background of the whole franchise to a certain degree. 7 Chinese authors came together to create a fictional world as robust and detailed as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. But just as Middle-earth is an idealized English myhtology, so Novoland is an idealized Chinese mythology.
The similarities in scope and detail between Novoland and Middle-earth are amazing. And the Novoland franchise has proven to be immensely popular both in China and internationally thanks to online streaming services and translations into multiple languages. But the franchise has experienced some problems.
The original authors fell into disagreement (details of which I don’t really know), so they stopped collaborating on the project and moved on to other things.
More than one production company has acquired rights to various Novoland stories, so the adaptations have been uneven in quality and style. And that leads me to the maps. Each show or movie has its own map (if one is needed). Or so it seems to me. I haven’t watched them all and I can’t follow the online discussions of the show that occur among Chinese-speaking/writing fans (who have access to all the original stories and promotional materials).
I (and millions of fans around the world) must read translations of online discussions and blog posts, or find discussions and blog posts in our own languages where multi-lingual people offer a few scraps of translation.
It’s frustrating when you’re trying to follow a video series and the characters talk about a geography that you can’t simply look up on Google Maps. And, yes, there are scans of various Novoland maps online, but they’re all annotated in Chinese.
So I finally got frustrated and decided to start working on my own English labels for as many of the maps as I can find and translate. I will share my progress in this SF-Fandom forum discussion about translating the Novoland maps (into English).
I explain my methodology there, so I won’t do that here. But I will say that I don’t know how far I’ll get into the project – nor how successful it will be.
I’m sure I’ll make mistakes along the way. How can I not make mistakes, given that I don’t speak, read, or write Chinese? So I expect there will be more than one version of each map.
I hope I make a lot of progress but it’s going to take time.