Hi! I am a beginner translator. And I was wondering if someone could please help me with translating this properly. I am starting to lose it honestly. para: Although they are members of Dizisha(地字杀) and usually don't perform tasks together with Tianzisha(天字杀), but, in the past, they had all received training together from childhood, original: 虽然是地字杀的成员，跟他们天字杀通常不会一起执行任务，但当年大家都是一起从幼年开始接受培训的， my problem: For context, this is from a shadow guard's pov and he is talking about another shadow guard who died on a mission by committing suicide to avoid getting caught. Now what i need help wth is that dizisha and tianzisha. Google is just giving it as Earth Killer and Sky Killer. And from extensive research aka baidu... my only hit is that dizi might mean 'background' which frankly does make sense but i can't find tianzi as its opposite. I am inclined to just go with that and name them inner and outer guards except for the fact they are shadow guards and they are all inner or hidden guards so that just seems redundant and illogical. My oher option was naming them day and night guards but again that doesn't make sense. I am really losing my head here. So if someone could kindly give me some advice that would be highly appreciated and i would be really eternally extremely grateful
so how do i translate it? Like heaven guards and earth guards? But its just a palace intrigue novel. Won't those be a little too high-sounding?
pretty sure. Though their job descriptions aren't fixed and they can do assassinations too but their official name and designation is shadow guard.
Although they are members of the Earth character and usually don't perform tasks together with the Sky character, but, in the past, they had all received training together from childhood. 地 dì: earth / ground / field / place / land / 天 tiān: day / sky / heaven 字 zì: letter / symbol / character / word / From what I understood, they were divided in earth and sky characters/letters. Usually, in novels shadow guards are named numbers (An Yi, An Shi, Shadow One, Shadow Eleven, right), but here it happens that they are named based in a character, like their names should follow that Chinese character, maybe Earth one, earth two, and Sky one, Sky two. Pretty odd in English, but fairly ok in Chinese. So you can translate it as, Earth character groups Earth group Earth gang Earth platoon Earth named Tian is used in China as the cosmos, the universe, the heavens, something like that, right? But since the other group is just earth, then I think you should chose to translate tian as Sky rather than Heaven, so it makes sense. I recommend you use mdbg.net "Chinese word for word" to analyze the raws. It helps a lot to see what each character means, so you can get a general idea.
So I have instead decided to just paraphrase it as separate teams instead of specifying what team. If this gets mentioned with context again in later chapters, I will go back to alter it. Thanks a lot for this... I really appreciated it even though I eventually decided not to go with it. And I am even more grateful for your suggestion of mdbg.net. You have no idea how much its helped me