From old discussions: How Bagelson does the translation work.

Passerby: When you translate, do you have a huge dictionary for when you stumble onto a word you don’t understand? Doesn’t it get annoying when you have to look up a ton of words in a row to get the sentence’s meaning? (Interrogating you because I kind of want to translate some novels after learning some of the basic language)

Bagelson: Yes, pretty much. Though not in dead-tree form, fortunately. I use a dictionary app on my phone with handwriting recognition, so every time I don’t know some characters in a sentence (which is most times, honestly), I enter them and get the various meanings for each character. It’s honestly a really slow method, and could be done much faster by using something like http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php, but I use it as motivation to learn characters faster - every character I learn is one I don’t have to manually enter.

Passerby again: Thank you!

Khoukharev: Thank you for translating this novel! Great work! Btw, you mentioned it numerous times - an app with handwriting recognition, could you tell me what app that is? I want to try it as well ^_^

Bagelson: I use Pieco. When I first picked it up the handwriting recognition was a paid feature, though I got it free in a promotion. Not sure if that’s still the case. Reasons I like it include: Incredibly robust handwriting recognition, I’ve basically reduced some radicals to scribbles; enter multiple characters and get definitions of individual words from multiple dictionaries, though beware that the app will put together character combinations for words it feels is most suitable even if you wanted other combinations.

Discuss.doc 2:
Bagelson:But, given the present day online community there should be online resources as well. This one looks like a good place to start(http://www .chinesegrammar.info/general/beginners-basic-chinese-grammar/)? I would also recommend a browser extension dictionary, where you can get definitions of characters by hovering over them, I use this one for Chrome (https://chrome. google.com/webstore/detail/zhongwen-a-chinese-englis/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde?hl=en).

The way I learned Chinese, and I expect the way most teaching materials go about it, is to first get down the most elementary [subject-verb-object] sentence structures and elementary words like personal pronouns and some particles. There are also a host of constructions using set word combinations that sort of have to be learned to some extent
- though many can be intuited - but after that’s done it’s mostly a matter of having an extensive vocabulary, which can easily be replaced by a dictionary.

Bagelson wrote:Ah, I forgot to add, if Frausty's had time to give any suggestions to what I've translated I'll make sure to review them, and if he's got any unpublished translated material I'll go over his text and suggest changes.

Since the RAW can sometimes be a bit crappy, I'll sometimes find a copy from somewhere else, which has its own issues since the length of the parts can vary a bit between sources.

slimikyi wrote:

Since the RAW can sometimes be a bit crappy, I'll sometimes find a copy from somewhere else, which has its own issues since the length of the parts can vary a bit between sources.

I tried reading raws and found out that is a major problem. I end up opening 3-4 different light novel sites and double checking between them.

Sometimes, a chapter is "misplaced" and became a totally random light novel's chapter.
Sometimes, a chapter is "misdirected" and that page is just gone.
Sometimes, it's missing parts near the beginning of the chapter.
Sometimes, it's missing parts near the end of the chapter.
And others, which is probably the worst, it's missing parts in the middle of the chapter.

The horror of "free" raws.

That aside, do you translate from Simplified or Traditional Chinese?