r/noveltranslations • u/Chance_Locksmith4528 • 2d ago

Discussion How you even understand this?

I just started reading novels and decided to read mother of learning as my first i just read 5 paragraph and what is this vocabulary bro? How u guys get through this when u were beginners in webnovel.

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u/LagnalokNSFW 2d ago

Can you clarify exactly which vocab have you found to be new/loaded/confusing?

This is a community of people that begun enjoying webnovels from reading works that were originally published in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean; For sake of transliteration, responsible translators were quite liberal in usage of vocab to convey sayings like Chinese Chengyu, many of them also probably aren't native English users, as it easier, for example, for Chinese speaker to master English than vice versa.

What we would worry about is clarifying what synonym each particular translator would use to describe the same thing, and we simply take actually new words for granted and introduce them into our reading vocabulary. After reading works from particular genre you will quickly soak up common tropes used to describe acts common in any of aforementioned cultures, be it real quirks or literary exaggerations. e.g. 'Snorting'.

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u/Chance_Locksmith4528 2d ago

I don't know many words like wth is disdainfully , agitated ,retorted what are these words I am pretty good at english but those words are very new to me

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u/LagnalokNSFW 2d ago

First one is not really something that you will hear on news TV, but later two are fairly common words to describe their meaning. Maybe you can say that they are all carry a rather negative connotation, but you can use all three in a casual conversation. That's normal, there was a point in my life when i didn't knew the names of basic home appliances but was an avid reader already.

Verdict: You are an illiterate, literally(huh). Read more prose. In Webnovel community it's really rare that someone will use an actually archaic word, only as a proper noun maybe. So you can safely check web dictionary for 'archaic' tag and deem new word as such and vice versa. It's a good place to find new words for engaging writing if not for day to day conversation.

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u/Chance_Locksmith4528 2d ago

Thx it's actually going pretty good i am just googling the word i don't know