Tantai Jin Apologist

Tried reading Mistaken Era, currently being filmed as a drama (Cuo Shi Lu), translated by Dobytranslations, & while it was an excruciatingly slow start (the time travel element is front & centre in the description, & it doesn't kick in until chapter 14), I was enjoying it. However the translation I was reading (along with the other 3 I could find) was MTL. It wasn't too bad at first - the occasional strangely-phrased sentence that was clearly an idiom, a minor character from a night hunt in the first few chapters having their name switched from Bai to White in a few instances when the machine failed to realise that was a name that should not be translated. But gradually issues started to accumulate.

- Wei can be a homophone for Wei, apparently. Yeah, thanks.

- A character was described as perching on a 'stone stele', which apparently isn't wrong as a translation as such as it does mean 'vertical piece of stone with writing on' (which is an accurate description) according to an online dictionary, but is not in common usage & an alternate meaning is the core of a plant stem, which is what my phone's dictionary went with, making for confusing reading. Then a few paragraphs later it was translated as 'stone tablet', which works better, but then it's back to stele again.

- Sects had a different name on pretty much every mention, going from a pinyin transliteration, to an English translation, to a completely different English translation. Items got translated completely differently, often nonsensically so.

- Characters tussled over what, based on context, were spiritually refined pills, which were translated variously as Golden Core or Golden Dan, both singular terms, as well as being crappy translations.

- ML's mother constantly referred to as a "Femme Fatale". Which is a character trope, not an actual thing. It's very clear they meant huli jing (since she was described as a fox demon at least once). I kept imagining a very vampy woman in a 1930s film noir outfit, smoking a cigarette, wandering around fantasy ancient China.

That might have still been something I could deal with in a different book, & if there'd been some effort to proofread. For instance, in Salted Fish Ascension (Live Long & Prosper) it was still easy to follow when sect names & characters' titles switched between English & pinyin because there were only 3 major sects which were all distinct from one another, & a fairly straightforward plot, so it was obvious what was being referred to from context (additionally, that MTL had actual humans keeping it somewhat coherent). Hell, that same site did a decent enough job of How Dare You?!, which was more chaotic, but centred on a relatively small cast. But here, the plot is more complex, with 2 different time periods, misunderstandings & deception, so sects & items getting different names on each mention & incoherently translated idioms makes for a confusing mess.

Bailed 21 chapters in, slightly more than 10%. I'll watch the drama when it comes out, but I can't be doing with the book until an actual person translates it.