Hi, and welcome, if you are new!

Great little short story. Actually, after translating it, I was suprised how long it is... each of those characters seems to be worth many words .

And, the translation from google was amazingly readable, folks; don't feel shy to use it! I never tried it before on Chinese, I thought it would be too difficult (as Japanese is... those translations make little sense).

Thanks for the new story, Min!

(I have to admit to having been suprised by the name; I went to a private high school in Canada with a guy named Min.)

story link: http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/B/ea_54154boys_in_.htm

Stephan, how do I get to read these Chinese stories. Google what? What's with "encoding" GB or that BIG5 code. I donta speak chinese, though I love their food. Let me know and thank you.

My Google toolbar did it for me automatically.

Paolo wrote: Fri Dec 25, 2009 1:36 pm My Google toolbar did it for me automatically.

Could you do a cut and paste of the english version for the archive? I have so many features turned off on my browser because I crawl the underbelly of the net a lot... BTW, Merry Christmas, Paolo...

all you have to do is go to http://google.com/translate and paste in the URL

The Google auto-translation of this story is relatively good, in that for the most part you can puzzle out what each sentence is supposed to mean. (Not much harder to follow than some English-language stories in the archive with seriously nonstandard grammar, spelling and/or line breaks, actually. ) There's also the added bonus of unintentional humor in many of the translations, for example "'You are off to their underwear,'" which I think would probably have more accurately (and definitely less funnily) been translated "'Take off your underwear'" or "'Strip off including your underwear.'"

(I know a tiny bit of phrasebook Mandarin and Cantonese -- the most useful of which, "wo bú dông," means "I don't understand," the first thing I learn to say in any foreign language -- and can recognize a handful of ideograms for which I know at least one of the meanings they can signify, but there's only one character I can both pronounce and recognize the meaning associated with the written form for. Chinese is very hard for native English speakers in just about every way a language can be: different consonant and vowel sounds from English's, completely different kind of writing system, meaning dependent on tone as well as pronunciation, to say nothing of the grammar or the different ways of thinking about the world... tl;dr version: I'm not remotely qualified to do a better translation.)

For those willing to put a little effort into puzzling through the story (context helps a lot, I was able to eventually figure out lots of sentences that seemed hopelessly muddled when I first looked at them) it's pretty good. I found it exciting that someone who does know Chinese well enough to write in it found this site and uploaded a story! The internet makes so many cool things possible... or, as my fiancee likes to put it, 'I love living in the future.'

Not for those uncomfortable with stories involving minors or nullification, as the story tags warn.

Since some people seem to have had trouble using Google language tools to access the auto-translation of the story:

Boys in the 22nd Century part 1 (http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... N&tl=en&u=

StefanIsMe (imported) wrote: Thu Dec 24, 2009 12:56 am http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/B/ea_54154boys_in_.htm

)

Boys in the 22nd Century part 2 (http://translate.google.com/translate?j ... h-CN&tl=en)

I think there are only the two stories, or the two parts of the one story I guess. They went up just under a month ago, on the 23rd of December 2009. If there are more parts I can put in direct links to the translations for those too. And if the links above don't work, please let me know, including what browser & OS (Mac, XP, Win7, Linux, etc.) so I can try to figure out what I did wrong.

In case Min (the author) reads this: 谢谢 ("thank you") for posting!

edited because Vbulletin apparently dislikes HTML character codes, and failed to turn ô into ô -- sorry to Mac users and anyone else whose computer displays gibberish instead of "wo budong" with a couple of tone-indicator accents.

Thanks for the effort on this feedback post. You can't post HTML into the forums, it's turned off.