And here we meet Alibaba. Simultaneously the most relatable and most frustrating character to translate for a person who’s learning Chinese.

I actually have no idea how to recreate his speech pattern in English. The thing is, Chinese is a tonal language - a different tone can completely change the meaning of the word. It’s one of the most difficult parts of speaking Chinese as a foreigner - and Alibaba is no exception. He pronounces a lot of words wrong - which in the manhua is depicted by the usage of wrong characters. As you can imagine, translating it is a pain, because as written? Some of Alibaba’s sentences are pure nonsense.

But I can’t really blame him - I imagine I sound much worse! Still, that’s not really something that exists in English. I thought of trying to emulate it by typing out sounds that are difficult for foreigners - like ‘z’ or ‘f’ instead of ‘th’, but the amount of sounds I can think of changing this way is too limited and doesn’t come up enough in his dialogue, so I’m going to leave that fact as a footnote - when Chen Shi says Alibaba has a weird accent, he’s not kidding. Simultaneously, Chen Shi’s regional accent would also prove difficult for Alibaba to understand.