We are Fourtranslations or simply Fourtrans, a group of classmates who has decided to try translating some Chinese and Japanese webnovels to English.
Arkased
Greetings fellow humans, I am often identified as “Arkased” or simply “Ark” on various internet communities. I enjoy spending free time learning about fellow humans and fellow human societies in Asia and engaging in digital recreation.
Academically, my interests are all over the place. For people who can’t decide a major, some have no options, other have too many (which is a nice problem to have). I’m of the later camp, so I really can’t complain. Besides my interest in Asian languages, I also enjoy learning about history, politics, chemistry, physics, and I am technically able to code (though not nearly as well as DRY can). More recently, I’ve taken an interest toward Path of Exile, an MMORPG with a crafting system which partially consists of sequential geometric Bernoulli trials, which has lead me to try calculate expected value and variability of various procedures to calculate profitability. I’ve tried to supplement what I’ve learned in stats class with Google and Wikipedia, but it’s been rough; Wikipedia’s math articles are extremely difficult to grasp for a newbie like myself and tend to provide too much information, much more than I actually need. My end goal (after figuring out how to calculate everything) is to utilize price checking API (which I also need to figure out) to dynamically calculate and sort the most profitable crafting procedures. Of course, I’m not actually that good at the game to begin with, so I would also need to spend time building up some capital before I can reasonably start investing. (Though it’s worth noting there’s a pretty decent chance I move on to a different game by the time I’m able to figure all of this out. We’ll see.)
I once thought of myself as super Asian compared to my peers (I’m second-generation Asian-American), until I met Mango and DRY. Turns out I’m not actually that Asian, hence the lack of a Chinese handle. I can speak Japanese and Chinese on a conversational level, but am not fully literate. I’m mostly involved in editing and site management.
I’m also waitlisted at UChicago and Cornell and waiting to hear back. Here’s hoping!
Also thanks for reading the about page.
千言万语 // Mango
Hello. I think college essays drained me of motivation to write about myself, but here goes my self-intro:
My Chinese name happens to literally mean “10000 languages” (万语), which also happens to be pronounced “mango” (one of my favorite fruits) in Japanese, hence my English username. This is also why I like to use the Chinese phrase 千言万语 as a username, even though contrary to its meaning, I’m probably one of the quietest people you’ll ever meet.
I like to think that I’m pretty fluent in Chinese for someone born/raised in America (though compared to native speakers I’m probably at elementary/middle school level), and I’m currently studying Japanese and Korean, with the former being way better than the latter at this point.
I love reading, writing, studying languages (Asian ones specifically), and translation, so translating online novels is a win-win situation. I’m especially interested in poetry translation, which I’m hoping explore more in college as an East Asian Studies major/Translation Studies minor. My current goal is to become fully tetralingual (that might not be an actual word but oh well) in English/Chinese/Japanese/Korean.
Other things I love include music, basketball, and puns. I listen mostly to classical music (I’ve played piano for 13 years) and a lot of underrated Asian artists (who will hopefully rid themselves of that epithet eventually). Favorite genres: classical, indie, ballad, rock.
This is getting long and I’ve completely overused parentheses so I’ll stop here. Thanks for reading 🙂
昙花一现 (世人无缘) // DRY 😛
FYI:
DRY = Don’t Repeat Yourself (Sound familiar?)
I’m pretty fluent (and literate) in Chinese, but I don’t know Japanese (though I do know French :P). My Chinese “code” name is 昙花一现, which means basically “Nothing gold can stay,” but I like this version better because of its allusion. “昙花” is a “dama de noche” or Christ in the manger, and they only bloom once a year for one day. The idiom laments (?) about how short something’s or someone’s life (usually beautiful and good or very accomplished) is. I wouldn’t describe myself as such nor do I want to. This idiom intrigues me because there are many examples of such cases in both (Chinese) history and stories 🙂
As a kid, I used to argue with my mom about my memorizing ancient Chinese texts (古文), but now, I find them to be very …. beautiful. Kind of ironic. I also like Chinese and English poetry, as well as the French poems that I can understand, but I don’t know if this is just a phase or something longer. Personally, I’m fine with translated English poetry (they sometimes sound better in Chinese :), but when it comes to translated Chinese poems, at least the older ones (especially Tang Dynasty), it seems to lose some of its…. let’s call it “personality” or “atmosphere.” Mostly b/c Chinese is more versatile/specific?
I also code as well and like C++ the best for now although I do understand that Python is more versatile and has better libraries for stuff I want to do :|I’m probably going to major in computer science (not engineering).
Here’s something interesting: 彼岸花 (百度百科：”曼珠沙华，出自法华经：本名摩诃曼陀罗华曼珠沙华，意思是，开在天界之红花，又叫做彼岸花、天涯花、舍子花，它盛开在阴历七月，花语是’悲伤的回忆'”) –> a cool symbol in Chinese stories & literature. See if you can decipher what it means w/o a translator 😛
I like C++; maybe that explains why teachers tell me that I’m too wordy 😛
// 我现在有些书荒了。若有建议，尽管提。:)
// Basically, I’m a little out of books, so if you have any good suggestions, feel free to comment 🙂
Fourtrans 