• Options
• Login
• Register
• Desktop Style
• Accelerated Mobile Pages Theme

Translating the Novoland Maps

• Index

  • Science Fiction and Fantasy Community Forums
  • Science Fiction and Fantasy
  • Fan Sites
  • Translating the Novoland Maps
• Translating the Novoland Maps

• Translating the Novoland Maps

  Michael > October 8th, 2023, 04:27 PM

  I have set myself the insane task of translating (as much as possible) the maps for the Novoland universe. Widely compared to Tolkien's Middle-earth, Novoland was created by 7 Chinese authors in the early 2000s as a response to the Peter Jackson LoTR movies. They developed a 10,000-year timeline, a mythological framework for the fictional world, and published over 30 novels and stories before they became divided in thought (to put it mildly).
  
  Quite a few of the Novoland stories have been adapted into TV shows or movies, but it seems that each adaptation was handled by a different production company. I say that with some uncertainty because the history of the adaptations is complicated.
  
  That said, each production company (and at least one of the authors) revised the maps/geography/nomenclature to some extent for their new adaptations or stories. So you won't find consistency across all the maps.
  
  And I've only been able to find a few of the maps online. I don't know how much variety there is in design and detail across the entire collection of Novoland maps.
  
  Here is one of my early attempts at translating a Novoland map.
  
  
  
  There are several challenges in making these translations.
  
  First, I don't read or speak Chinese. And when I say "Chinese", I mean ALL (or ANY) of the various Chinese dialects. In online translation tools you may only be given a choice between Traditional and Literary or Simplified Chinese. Mandarin is sometimes an option but I don't know if it is equivalent to Traditional or not. And there are various regional dialects and such, as well as ancient (earlier forms) of the Chinese languages.
  
  There are about 8,000 characters in the Chinese pictographic system. They are constructed according to fairly simple rules, but until you know what all the components are, it's hard to figure out what you're looking at. There are some pretty good online tutorials (both videos and articles), but I don't have time to learn how to read/write Chinese.
  
  You can glean a few hints for what you need to know from the subtitles in the various shows and movies, but the translators are inconsistent. In fact, you might see the same string of characters translated different ways in successive episodes for a series. It seems to depend on who was assigned to do the translation for that episode.
  
  And since some of these shows are syndicated through multiple services, you might see different translations for the same series or movie. There are also some fan groups who upload their own translations to YouTube (and doubtless other video platforms).
  
  I have to play a guessing game with the translation tools. If a scene in an episode mentions a place name (and Yebei was the one that gave me the most trouble), I have to use two translation tools to guess at what English words would be translated back into the characters that appear in the Chinese subtitles (you often see both the Chinese characters and the English subtitles stacked in the streaming shows).
  
  Chinese words often have 5 different inflections (each denoted by a diacritical mark). The subtitles in the streaming shows don't indicate anything about the inflections (English subtitles don't need them). And the actors can speak so fast that you don't get much of a chance to hear the individual words.
  
  As an example, one common phrase you'll hear/see in these shows is zǒuba. For years I thought they were saying something that sounds like "so BAH" but they're really saying "zo BAH!" The word/phrase means "let's go".
  
  The placename Yebei ends with the word for "north" (běi). This word is used in many combinations across all the shows and movies I've watched (naturally). But translating that first vowel (Ye) proved challenging because I couldn't get the online translators to suggest the right Chinese character for me. Apparently there are a lot of "Ye's" in the Chinese language(s).
  
  I finally found enough clues (by translating long phrases and short sentences) to figure out that the first word means "night" (so in one of these dramas, the characters are all saying "Night North" or calling one of the main leads "Night").
  
  Night North (or Yebei) is the name of a tribe.
  
  That's the most complicated example I've run into so far, but I've had fun translating many of the place-names.
  
  I've been collecting translation notes in a Word document and I hope these notes will help me figure out a lot of map annotations as I go along. I won't be able to translate everything on the maps because many of the characters are illegible.
  
  But one reason why I'm able to do this at all is that the written language is pictographic. It's relatively easy to find an appropriate English word for each pictogram once I can grab it from somewhere. I have to get the online translators to replicate the Chinese characters displayed on the streaming shows. Once I have reproduced those subtitles, I can translate everything back into English.
  
  Of course, this doesn't help with any metaphorical phrases. What I've translated as "Night North" might actually mean something else completely to a native Chinese language speaker.
  
  But for now that's the best I can do.
  
  One of the other challenges I haven't been able to resolve fully is figuring out where all the (fantasy) races live. And that task is complicated by the fact that some of them moved around during the 10,000-year history (or at least sub-groups of them did).
  
  I've found a few online discussions where people have translated place-names and group names and talked about some of the history. So that helps. But those identifiications I've put on the map you see above are really tentative.
  
  In the most recent Novoland show (Shining Just for You, or Princess from the Plateau), the story takes place early in the 10,000 year history and the Yebei tribe actually moves from somewhere in the north to the southern land of Yuezhou.
  
  The connections between the various stories are tenuous at best. The overarching theme is the 10,000 year timeline. Each story more-or-less stands on its own. So the authors and the production companies can invent their own details and it's not always clear how things are supposed to fit together.
  
  It doesn't help that some of the adaptations aren't as well done as others.
  
  But given all that, I want some maps that I can understand. So that's why I'm following all the clues I can find to re-label at least some of the maps when I can. At least this way I have an idea of where the stories are taking place.
• Next Oldest Next Newest