The Deer and The Cauldron
This is a fan translation of Jin Yong's last book, The Deer and the Cauldron (Lu Ding Ji). In translating this story, I am making a conscious effort to stick as close as possible to the original Chinese text (even more so that my previous works), for two reasons:
1. To distance this work as far as possible from existing work (i.e. John Minford's)
2. To save time, since I do not have to think too much about the proper English equivalent of the words.
Therefore, the names, titles (you won't find 'Trinket', 'Whisker Mao', 'Misty', 'Helmsman' and the like here), and especially curse words (which, surprisingly, Jin Yong used a lot in this book. WARNING: this story is not suitable for children) are kept in their original forms, or translated literally. Those of you who are used to Hollywood-style cussing may find it sounds a bit strange. The only exception is 'tamade' [他妈的], which I translate as 'damn it'. I even keep the units of measurement in their original form, with modern day equivalent in footnote. For the same reason, I apologize for grammatically-inaccurate and other sounds-rather-strange sentences.
This is a massive work. Jin Yong's original work consists of 5 books, 10 chapters each. I browsed Minford's, and found that his work consists of 28 chapters plus the prologue, i.e. Minford skipped a lot of text. Even so, his work is published in three books; just imagine how much text I'll have to translate ... I will try my best to finish it, but I make no promise to do so.
- Foxs