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The writing in The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu) feels tacky (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by lightsecond@programming.dev to c/fiction

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I have been reading the English translations and the characters and especially their dialogues feel very fake. I do appreciate the hard science aspect of the books but the long monologues, kids speaking like middle-aged philosophers, and army personnel being one-dimensional macho men breaks the immersion for me. It has the depth of a 1980s low-budget thriller.

I don’t read a lot of hard science fiction or translations of Chinese books. I don’t know if this is genre-related.

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[–] MikeyMongol 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The translator is a novelist in his own right, and his Dandelion Dynasty series is quite good. It's not the translation. I suspect it's a combination of it being a hard-sf "ideas" book, and different national styles in novel writing.

[–] PseudoMon 1 points 1 year ago

Well as a translator myself, I can say translating and writing are VERY different skillsets! Entirely possible for someone to be good at writing in English but mediocre at translating to it (I am one such example 😔).

But yes, it seems likely the different styles and SF-hardness is more to blame than the translation itself.