Xiao Qing San Guo ( 笑倾三国 ) was something I dabbled in very briefly before I started Tonari no Megane-kun. It was extremely short-lived. Bad as my Japanese is, my Chinese skills are non-existent. I never studied Chinese at all, informal or otherwise. (Though, I do know some cultural and historical snippets.) The only reason I even encountered the title was because I was on a manhua and ancient China binge, and found this blog mentioning it.
Based on the pictures I saw, it’s a time travel shoujo, where the heroine gets sent back to the Three Kingdoms period. Amongst the Chinese, the Three Kingdoms era seems to be a really popular time period to make stories on. Despite being rather short, it was a very bloody time. In fact, one of the more (in)famous figures of that time was Cao Cao, known for being a ruthless warlord and emperor. In English, we have the saying “Speak of the devil.” Well, in Chinese, it’s “Speak of Cao Cao.”
Anyways, it’s not often manga with a female demographic has the Three Kingdoms setting, so I really wanted to bring at least one chapter out for the English speaking world (myself included), in hopes of stirring interest and getting someone to pick up this project. (I’m also a huge fan of time travel and transported to another world themes!) I was transcribing the Chinese characters and putting them through electronic translators or looking them up in dictionaries. I heard Mandarin was an easy language and I figured I could pick up whatever I needed along the way. LOL (I severely overestimated my language skills.) Worse yet, my transcribing was halted by Chinese characters I, nor OCR programs, could not recognize (and these weren’t handwritten characters either!). You don’t even know how long I spent looking up stroke indices… And so things quickly came to a stop before they even started. I did manage to get a page done though, hahaha.
“Teaser” under the cut:
Original script:
孩子…..
你这是皇后的命啊…
那群凡夫俗子, 又岂能压得住你?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I translated the last line incorrectly.
Sage's Valley 