Hello everyone, I am the translator of the Warhammer 40K official novel “Dark Empire” trilogy and “The Horus Rebellion Chronicle” introduced by Zhejiang Science and Technology Publishing House.
The first contact with the world view and story of Warhammer was nearly twenty years ago. But the real in-depth understanding was after I started making independent games in 2017. My Chaos Galaxy series of games is set in a universe of battleships, mech warfare, with many factions and characters, so I was hoping to take inspiration from some of the successful titles of the genre. Not satisfied with the Chinese materials on the Internet, I began to read a lot of English rule books, settings, and novels of Warhammer 40K. From the first edition of Rogue Trader in the 1980s to the seventh edition, I have read hundreds of English materials. Warhammer 40K also benefited me a lot from the establishment of a grand worldview and the detailed description of different forces, characters, and arms.
In the second year, by chance, I participated in the translation of the first batch of Warhammer 40K novels imported into China. Mr. Lu Luming, editor-in-charge of Zhejiang Science Society, who was in charge of introducing Warhammer novels, signed the copyrights of “Dark Empire”, “Horus Rebellion Chronicle” and “Horus Rise” trilogy from GW. The translation of the trilogy of “The Rise of Horus” was handed over to Mr. Haldir Zhao Di, who is well-known in the Warhammer 40K translation team. And I was in charge of Dark Imperium and Visions of Heresy.
Since “The Rise of Horus” needs to be published together after all three translations are completed, “Dark Empire” has become the first official Warhammer novel published in China. We were faced with two main problems:
First, the Warhammer world view has accumulated a huge amount of text over the past few decades. First of all, it must conform to the existing network translation habits.
Second, although there are some senior Warhammer enthusiasts in China, they tend to be in the small circle of elites, and their popularity among mass users is not high. We must also do a good job of getting started with the world view for new readers, so as to reduce the reading barrier of the story.
For the first question, Mr. Haldir established a unified translation form. For some new concepts that appeared in the eighth edition of Warhammer 40K at that time, such as the source cast space warrior, etc., we also referred to some translations of the source quality jaw teacher and the old Chinese rules of war chess. ideas, but most of them respect the existing translations in the circle.
For the second question, we sorted out and created a simple Warhammer 40K major event chronology from the English rule book, translated the map of the Milky Way and the territory of Ultramar from the eighth edition of the rules, and placed it before the main text of the novel as an appendix . And applied to GW for some illustrations to be added to the book.
With trepidation, we handed over the results of our work in the summer of 2018. Although there were a few translation errors and typesetting problems in the first edition of Dark Empire, fortunately, it was tolerated and recognized by Hammer Circle and readers. Some fans even bought several copies as gifts, and promoted them spontaneously on the Internet.
However, there were still some disturbances. After I finished translating “The Horus Rebellion Chronicle” based on the 2013 edition of Visions of Heresy, the Black Library published the newly revised 2018 edition of Visions of Heresy. When I finished translating the 2018 edition of “Dark Empire II Plague War” (the domestic translation name is “Nurgle War”), the Black Library revised the timeline of the main story and re-revised the Dark Empire trilogy. In the end, I translated all three books, “Empire of Darkness”, “Plague War”, and “The Chronicles of the Horus Rebellion” twice, and did a lot of useless work. All three of these books were written or revised by Guy Harley, who has given me a hard time.
Following the success of the “Rise of Horus” trilogy translated by Mr. Haldir, Zhejiang Science and Technology Society has introduced more batches of Warhammer novels and formulated a multi-year translation plan. Readers have also seen the continuous publication of HH series novels such as “Thousand Sons” and “Escape from the Eisenstein”, as well as new books such as the “Dawn of Fire” series and “Eisenhorn” series.
What I can reveal here is that the last book of the “Dark Empire” trilogy, “God’s Calamity”, will also be published in the near future. My main work in the translation of Warhammer novels in the next few years will be devoted to the novel series “Gaunt’s Ghost” by Dan Abnett, the legendary author of the Black Library. This is a grand novel series that has been continuously created for more than 20 years and is still producing new stories. Let us immerse ourselves in Dan’s majestic and tragic Sabat expedition in the future.
Source: Zhihu www.zhihu.com
Author: Han Zhiyu
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