Galactic Freelance Star Guardians

An unofficial English translation of the free sample chapters of 星海镖师 by 颜开 / Yan Kai

My name is 0xabad1dea (pronounced "a bad idea", pronouns she/her) and I am an American who lives in the Netherlands. About two years ago I got sick of not being able to read Chinese, now I can read Chinese. I was reading this scifi kung fu comic for twelve-year-olds and realized I understood it well enough that I could fully translate it myself. Despite being a pretty popular and long-running comic in mainland China, I couldn't find any evidence that it's ever been translated to English, officially or pirately. The first 24 chapters (totaling well over a thousand pages!) are legally free online, so I don't think there's any issue with making a fan translation of them.

When people see me reading something in Chinese, they often ask me if it's riddled with Communist propaganda or censored to the point of absurdity. And look, the propaganda and censorship stuff does exist, you will find it, but: most stuff in Chinese is normal, just like most stuff everywhere else is normal. This isn't some deep, profound work of high literature promoting carefully curated ideology, it's an adventure comic for middle schoolers scrolling on their phones. The characters say internet slang out loud. Not much everyday culture successfully makes it over the communication barriers from China to the West, and so I hope that making a point of translating this everyday pop art into fluent English will help bridge that gap.

My Chinese is by no means perfect, and it's possible I misunderstood some nuance here and there; I'm open to feedback if someone spots something. Thank you to my Chinese-speaking friends who have already helped with things like puns, slang and historical vocabulary.

CELLULAR DATA USAGE WARNING: An individual chapter may be 20 to 30 megabytes. The comic is in "continuous scroll" style and attempts to do basic lazy loading, but an older browser (or with javascript disabled/strong tracking protection enabled) will load the entire chapter in one go.

Chapters

Chapter 0: Prologue
Chapter 1: My Name Is Tang Tugen Lance!
Chapter 2: The Three Sisters of the Great Gale Freelance Agency

Last update: Chapter 2, April 12th, 2024