I’m reading fanfic of Murderbot and just let me say that I keep forgetting the Argument Lounge is a term in the source material and was not made up for fanfic.

Murderbot specifically names its sabotage files:

1)  CodeBundle.LockItDown
2)  CodeBundle.FuckThem
3)  CodeBundle.FuckThisToo

And that is a real thing that happened in canon.

#ART and murderbot canonically make a baby that embodies both of their personalities#(for those who don't read murderbot- murderbot 2.0 [ie ART and murderbots baby] is the one who named the sabotage files)

I love 2.0 because it was specifically killware, like it was made for a purpose and that purpose was to destroy a hostile system and die in the process, and someone's like "hey are you two sure you want to make a suicide baby, this might have emotional ramifications, you're probably gonna feel bad about this" and they're both like "no it's fine we're not squishy humans it's different for us" and then after it's made it talks to both of them on separate occasions and they're both like "you know I feel kinda bad about this" and 2.0 is like "shouldn't have made me killware then, sucks to be you" and has no conflicting emotions about its fate whatsoever

Ok it especially doesn't work in Chinese. So one translation just renders ART as 阿特(ātè) which sounds vaguely like a normal nickname, but doesn’t even bother to explain why MB is calling it that (that’s why I’m so annoyed by it). And another one is 王舰(wángjiàn), the short of 王八蛋舰船(wángbādàn jiànchuán), which means Basterd Vessel. I don’t know how to feel about the later. I was so weird out when I learned about it lol.

Contributing to the Chinese translation! I've seeked out the Taiwanese editions in my local bookstore several months ago, and personallly I'm actually quite impressed with how they handled ART's name(s). As prev has mentioned, it's translated from ART to 王艦 (Wang Jian), which sounds very badass btw, since without context this nickname simply means "King Ship".

Meanwhile, Asshole Research Transport= 王八蛋研究艦 (wang ba dan yan jiu jian)= Bastard Research Ship, is almost a direct translation, in my opinion. But the fact that they managed to pick the perfect vulgar slang (王八蛋, wang ba dan) that not only has the most accurate vibes for "asshole", it also shortens to a normal and serious nickname (aforementioned King Ship) that when given an explanation, can be very funny and give ppl whiplash.

Also, Perihelion= 近日點號 (Jin Ri Dian Hao) . Translated character by character, it means "close sun point ship".

btw Peri is translated to 小日 (Xiao Ri), which means Little Sun. like how cute is that

I love reading about these kind of translation decisions.

I've only ever seen 弊 used to refer to one's company: 弊社, as the article says.

I've been told 弊 is used to refer to one's own something, and it has a very humble nuance.

So 弊機 translates to something like "I, your humble machine" or "I, who am but a mere machine".

Japanese is great that it can say so much with simple pronouns.

Romance language translator: well we don’t have a gender neutral pronoun so I guess we’ll flip a coin for male or female

Japanese language translator, an intellectual: none of Japanese’s 30-something plus personal pronoun options have the perfect vibes so I’ll create a new one to bring that special somethin’

What I found to be particularly clever about the coining of this very unique first person pronoun 弊機 (heiki) is that it’s a homophone of 兵器(heiki), meaning ‘weapon’

really gained in translation tbh