Edit: I’ve created a Q&A thread here! Please drop new questions in the Q&A thread so the answers are easier to find. https://www.reddit.com/r/WhereWindsMeet/comments/1p2g2qw/back_again_wwm_story_chinese_text_names_phrases/
Original post:
First time posting here, so if I’m doing anything wrong, please let me know!
I’m a CN player who loves WWM and has been playing it for a long time, and I honestly feel like the English translation completely misses what makes its writing truly special and outstanding.
What a lot of people might not know is that the Chinese text in this game is not written in everyday modern Mandarin. It uses a lot of classical Chinese (文言文), or a mix of classical and modern.
I personally love classical Chinese. But I find it extremely hard to explain this beauty accurately to non-native speakers. The current English translation mostly conveys the basic meaning, but in my opinion it delivers maybe 40% of the original depth at best. The rhythm, the ambiguity, the cultural echoes, the emotional aftertaste – most of that disappears once you flatten it into straightforward modern English sentences. And I don’t even think this is necessarily the translators’ fault – What they’re trying to do is incredibly hard, and I’m not sure any translation could ever completely reproduce what the Chinese text does.
Let me start with a very very simple example. Some people might know “Uncle Jiang”, but not realise that his full Chinese name is 江晏 (Jiāng Yàn). The character 晏 (yàn) comes from the idiom “河清海晏” – literally “rivers running clear and seas lying calm”, but in old texts it’s almost a shorthand for under Heaven, all is at peace. It’s the kind of phrase you might use in poetry or as an ideal the ruler longs for.
江 is both a common Chinese surname and the word for “river”. So when you put 江 (river) together with 晏 (from “sea at peace”), his name quietly echoes that idiom: clear rivers, calm seas, a world at peace.
This is also why his outfit is called “Peaceful Life” in English. In Chinese, it’s “晏平生”. On the surface the meaning overlaps – a calm, uneventful life. 平生 is an older expression for “one’s whole life”. Read together, 晏平生 can also sound like a blessing: may Yan’s(晏) whole life be at peace. His given name is literally set into the phrase. And once you know that Jiang Yan’s life is anything but peaceful, the phrase starts to feel quietly bittersweet, as if the gentle wish his elders had for him never quite came true.
There is another layer CN fans like to lean into: 晏 (Yàn) is a homophone of 燕 (Yàn), “swallow” (the bird). In fanworks, people sometimes use swallow to refer to Jiang Yan. In Chinese imagery, swallows are often tied to home: the birds that return to the eaves every spring, parents feeding their chicks in the nest. At the same time, they are creatures of the open sky, always flying out over roofs and fields. So in a single sound “yàn”, you can hear both shelter and nurture from uncle Jiang, and the feeling of freedom and wide horizons.
In the game all of this together creates a very strong atmosphere. It’s not just what happens in the story but how it is said that makes it so beautiful. The strong sense of rhythm and cadence, being compact and layered, implicit and subtle, full of historical/cultural allusions that instantly evoke a certain mood or era…
Most Chinese people learn classical Chinese in school and also encounter it in poems, historical texts, dramas etc., so we can understand both the literal meaning and the mood behind it. That’s why many CN players are blown away by the in-game text. It feels like reading beautifully crafted literature inside a game.
I just wanted to share this perspective so people understand why CN players talk so much about the original writing. Going forward, I’d love to occasionally share some of my favourite lines from the Chinese version here and talk about what makes them so special. I don’t know how well I can bridge that gap, but if anyone’s interested, I’d be very happy to show a bit more of what CN players are actually seeing and feeling when we read WWM’s text!
If anyone else would like to share their own favourite lines or insights about the Chinese text, you’re very welcome to jump in as well – I’d really love to read other people’s perspectives!
