>A popular Chinese author said on Monday many parts of his science fiction trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, have been edited by a US publisher in the English edition for gender discrimination.
>Liu Cixin told the Global Times he wrote on popular online forum newsmth.net on Sunday that Tor Books made more than 1,000 edits in The Dark Forest, the second book of the trilogy, some of which touched on gender discrimination. This included a reference to the secretary general of the United Nations as a "beautiful woman" and four males as the most important protagonists.
>Words used to describe women, such as "purity" and "angelic," were deleted as well.
GAH
Isaiah Young
censorship is okay in the west because it's about being nice and not offending anyone
Brody Rodriguez
>Chinese author's work is made more ideologically sound for western audiences Which kind of irony is this? I can never remember
Isaiah Nguyen
...on the other hand, you could also see this as perfectly normal editing. Just because a work has been edited for a Chinese readership doesn't mean it's good to go for a completely different readership.
It's not strictly censorship (the government doesn't require these changes), although it does raise questions about the concept of 'self-censorship' which does get applied a lot to Chinese media.
Alexander Stewart
>doesn't mean it's good to go for a completely different readership
Readers of a Chinese sci-fi novel might be looking for something a little different. Why edit it to make it more American? This reminds me of how they use to redo the voices on Australian movies to remove the Australian accents for American release. WHY??
Dominic Johnson
Gas the whites, rice war now
Brody Foster
>Why Capitalism
Jeremiah Hughes
>ching chong accusing other countries of censorship
Asher Parker
>Censorship = capitalism
Gabriel Rivera
Changing a book in order to make it more marketable and appealing to the lowest common denominator thus maximizing your audience and boosting your sales = capitalism.
Cameron Morris
What a counter intuitive way of looking at it.
Did you consider that maybe the impetus for a Chinese author to publish their work in a different country was precisely to escape the censorship that happens to be present in their own?
Carter Robinson
They're doing it for ideological reasons and would still do it even if it lost money, they're actually True Believers in this nonsense
Nolan Clark
Glad to see the west approaching a totally political nature of existence.
Ryan Stewart
Yeah I'm sure they don't care about the money at all, they're totally doing it out of pure personal conviction. This is obvious if we consider is the US we're talking about, one of the least materialistic societies of the entire planet.
Jacob Sanchez
They are, they have and continue to do these things even though it loses them money. They plan to go down with the ship.
James Campbell
Finally learning all that Chinese will pay off!
Zachary Adams
Yes, because all those millions of female readers of obscure Chinese sci-fi will get pissed off if you don't rewrite it for a feminazi audience. Yeah, that must be it. The most logical conclusion, certainly!
Luis Thomas
kek'd, it's still your fault if you read mainstream garbage
Alexander Morales
China is a country controlled by a totalitarian revolutionary one party Communist state, and their writers have more leeway in expressing themselves than Western writers do. Think about that.
Brody Reyes
>Liu said that he personally replied to a post that questioned the credibility of the book's foreign translator, adding that he accepts the need for the edits.
"Of course, there are cultural differences," he said. "I understand these changes."
Carter Ross
>on the other hand, you could also see this as perfectly normal editing. This isn't "normal editing", it's Bowlderization.
Lucas Adams
It isn't obscure at all, brainlet. And I said it was also in order to expand their audience. Learn to read.
Bentley Howard
>>Words used to describe women, such as "purity" and "angelic," were deleted as well.
What if in the original pretty words are used to soften the image of women? What if by removing all the compliments they now come across as bitches?
Mason Adams
There's a perverse irony to it all.
We collectively pat our backs for having overcome bowdlerization, and then ten years later we start doing it again. Even more perversely, we remain ignorant of this fact--willfully or otherwise.
Isaiah Edwards
>expand their audience
Oh what a wonderful dream. Tis a shame that certain groups will never find themselves drawn to Chinese sci-fi. Ah, but a man can dream.
Lincoln Foster
return to Hays Code hollywood when?
Gabriel White
that literally goes against what that user said
Josiah Wood
but perversity is good, no?
Thomas Rodriguez
>i want rules so that I can feel good breaking them
Justin Gutierrez
...
Leo Gutierrez
Progressives lack the cognitive tools necessary to recognize when they're being hypocritical totalitarians. Self-awareness doesn't come into it. The hive sincerely believes they're shaping society in accordance with reality, not their ideology
Jaxon Adams
Given that the books in question had already been published in China, no, that's silly. The reason was obviously money, fame, and ladies.
Aaron Lopez
But where is the citation?
Jackson Morales
I need to know what kind of bizzaro fantasy land you're all living in where boardrooms full of billionaire sociopaths are deliberately bankrupting themselves out of fear that someone will be mean to them on Tumblr >Publishing company making edits for marketing is just like government totalitarianism! Really got my noggin joggin
