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[petronia]

What the hanzi compound means: 'the lush seductive beauty of the uke that excites the desires of the seme, with the implication that the uke fully deserves what he's going to get'. (Not always. But that's what it means in the context of BLfic. It's all about context.)

What Sabina is going to translate the compound as: ...'alluring', probably.

The character in question is using the word as a subtle and witty barb. I love the Chinese language, I really do. Now someone pass me a stiff Manhattan.

Comments

[juuchan.livejournal.com]

As a person completely lacking in formal Chinese language training, stumbling across various cizhu (argh, pingying spelling) hurts my head a lot trying to figure out "hm, does the author intend this or that? Or maybe something I haven't learned yet? Oh wait, the dictionary isn't quite clear..."
I think it's one of the things that scare off foreigners from learning Chinese, unless, of course, said foreigner likes challenges. Everybody likes learning a language that doesn't have an alphabet but rather uses a large collection of pictograms whose pronounciations and meaning changes depending on context and coupling with the appropriate character, tosses 4-character idioms every five seconds ("Na xian zhou ma kan hua!" "...eh?"), and screws around with the grammatical structure of the English language, not to mention pronounciation sensibilities with pingying. One musn't forget the different pingying versions of mainland and Taiwanese as well, and while it's there, the simplified and traditional forms.
Perhaps you should try this to alleviate the pain?: reading Chinese fanfics in the best Shanghainese accent one can manage. Either that, or imagining in one's mind the gentle young man barking out shanghai hua. It always worked for me.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you should try this to alleviate the pain?: reading Chinese fanfics in the best Shanghainese accent one can manage. Either that, or imagining in one's mind the gentle young man barking out shanghai hua. It always worked for me.

*lotfl* Duuuude. I've never thought of that, but I have to try it out now.

My Chinese education is horrifically patchy as well. Advanced preschool reader + several years of home-schooling mostly consisting of copying passages out of books during vacation time + 2-3 years junior-high-level Sunday school in traditional script + three-month business Chinese course. I can read and *understand* everything up to and including classical poetry, but I'd have trouble reading the newspaper out loud, and I can't write without a dictionary. I'm a one-way translator. ^^;

[sjdr.livejournal.com]

Not 'seductive' or 'tempting'?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

'Seductive' implies that you're doing it on purpose, or in any case that it's a spiritual intangible, whereas the word in question describes a type of visual attractiveness. (In context, it's a Pwetty And Pwetentious way of saying someone looks fuckable.) 'Tempting' implies that the speaker herself is tempted, and she's not. ^_^

In fact the sentence is a play on connotation, so I'm forced to pick a translation that's in itself relatively neutral.