Discussion Bad Murim Translators

I hate when I’m reading a Murim story and I see the translator use gibberish names for sects, skills and locations. They like to combine 3 to 5 different Korean words into one and create something impossible to comprehend. I’ve seen stuff like Gwayachangma be used in The Undefeatable Swordsman.

 

In their defense, wuxia/murim series are among the most difficult to translate. In particular, the names of sects, skills, and locations require the ability to read hanja, or chinese characters, which most native Koreans cannot do, let alone a non-native translator. Without the hanja, translating stuff like Gwayachangma is basically a guessing game, e.g. without any context I would guess some nonsense like Overnight Spear Demon.

Personally, I keep a spreadsheet of character names and common murim terms and run a python code on the raws to pre-translate the jargon before I work on the chapter. Reduces the amount of gibberish my brain has to process.

Edit: MTL doesn't work on murim series because of all the jargon and archaic, overly-formal language.

 

I’ve actually recently been considering doing something similar with python code and having sheet of the familiar terms for it to reference since there were some tl’d novels that I enjoyed that were dropped and they’ve always kinda been on mind.

 

Here you go:

Code:

import os
import pandas as pd

#choose excel file
dictionary = 'dictionary.xlsx'

#choose text file
txtfile = 'raw.txt'

#read excel file
df = pd.read_excel(dictionary)

#get each column words
wrongWords = df['Raw'].values.tolist()
rightWords = df['English'].values.tolist()

#read text file
with open(txtfile, 'r', encoding='utf8') as file :
  filedata = file.read()

#replace wrong words with right words
repeats = len(wrongWords)
for x in range(repeats):
   filedata = filedata.replace(wrongWords[x], rightWords[x])

#rewrite the file
with open(txtfile, 'w', encoding='utf8') as file:
  file.write(filedata)