Why Naruto Stays Naruto: Retranslating Titles With a Fandom Glossary

Every English title on DaoSearch used to come from Google Translate, one title at a time. It did a fair job on plain sentences and a bad one on the things web novel readers actually care about: fandom names, character names and genre slang.

You can still see the old style on books the retranslation hasn't reached yet. Take 星铁：人生选择，开局流刃若火！ on Fanqie. At the time of writing its English reads "Star Iron: Life Choice, Start with a Sharp Edge!", and the footer of the page says Google Translate. 星铁 is Honkai: Star Rail. Anyone who plays it knows that, and a word-by-word translator has no way to.

So since the 1.7 release, the English on DaoSearch is being redone by GPT-6 Luna, with a glossary that tells it how to say the names. Here's what that means for what you see.

What gets retranslated

Five things:

• book titles
• synopses
• pen names
• booklist titles
• booklist descriptions

Reader comments and the notes curators leave on books inside a booklist stay on Google Translate for now.

Every book page names the engine behind its English in the footer, next to when the book was last refreshed and the Report link. It reads something like "Refreshed 5h ago | GPT-6 Luna | Report". Booklist pages show the same note beside their figures. If a page still says Google Translate, it simply hasn't been reached yet.

The glossary

The glossary is about 50,000 entries covering 468 fandoms, and it does two jobs.

Title openers. Chinese fanfiction titles start with a short tag naming the source material, then a colon, then the hook. About 240 of those tags have a fixed English form, checked by hand:

These only apply at the start of a title, because that's the only place they mean the fandom. 火影 at the head of a title is Naruto. The same two characters in the middle of a sentence are the Hokage, the rank. 精灵 at the head of a title is Pokemon, and anywhere else it's an elf. 斗罗 is always Douluo Dalu, never Soul Land and never a bare "Douluo".

Names inside the story. The rest of the glossary is characters, places, sects, techniques and items, most of them drawn from the story wikis on RandomTranslator. Pokemon has the most entries, around 3,400, then Swallowed Star, Harry Potter, World of Warcraft, Marvel and Douluo Dalu. That's why 唐三 comes out as Tang San, 昊天宗 as Clear Sky Sect, 写轮眼 as Sharingan and 火神蛾 as Volcarona, instead of a literal gloss of each character.

There's also a short list of web novel slang with a set English form, because a bad rendering of these ruins a synopsis: 签到 is "sign-in", 金手指 is "golden finger", 马甲 is "secret identity" (never "vest"), and 扮猪吃虎 is "play the pig to eat the tiger".

What it looks like

A few real titles as they read now:

• 精灵：开局一只火神蛾 is Pokemon: Starting with a Volcarona
• 火影：复制万物 is Naruto: Copying Everything
• 海贼：在红发船上当实习生 is One Piece: An Intern Aboard the Red-Haired Pirates' Ship
• 诡秘之主 is Lord of the Mysteries
• 魔道祖师 is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, and 天官赐福 is Heaven Official's Blessing
• 我在精神病院学斩神 is Slay the Gods, the English title its donghua goes by

The last one shows the tradeoff. The literal title is closer to "I Learned to Slay Gods in a Mental Hospital", but the donghua is released in English as Slay the Gods, so that's the name we went with. The Chinese is still printed beside every title, so nothing is lost.

Pen names, once per author

A pen name is now translated once and reused on every book by that author. 墨香铜臭 is Mo Xiang Tong Xiu on every one of their books, and 爱潜水的乌贼 is The Squid Who Loves Diving on every Qidian book they've written.

That matters more than it sounds. When the same author came out three different ways on three books, an English author search could miss two of them. Pen names are still often literal, because most of them are jokes or phrases and have no official English. 三九音域 reads Three Nine Sound Domain. For searching, the Chinese pen name is still the reliable one, and the search guide covers that.

Why consistent names matter

Three things you'll notice.

Searching in English works. Title search checks the Chinese and the English, so once every Naruto fanfic starts with "Naruto", a Faloo title search for Naruto can find them. It turns up more of them as the retranslation works through Faloo, where about one book in four is fanfiction.

You can scan a list. On a ranking or a big booklist you can see at a glance which rows are fanfiction and of what, without reading the Chinese.

Titles stop drifting. Once a title has its new English, it only changes again when the Chinese does, or when a report gets it redone. Fanqie authors rename their books a lot, and when they do, the new English keeps the same fandom name at the front.

How far along it is

The retranslation started with the books on the charts, then went through every booklist, and is now working through the rest of the catalogue in the background. New books and books whose Chinese just changed skip the queue.

As of 27 September, nearly every booklist title and description on all four platforms has its new English. For books it's about 200,000 so far, most of them on Qidian, out of about 5.6 million. So for a while you'll see both styles side by side, and older or quieter books will be the last to switch. Anything the new engine can't handle falls back to Google Translate rather than being left blank.

When it gets something wrong

It will, sometimes. If a title or synopsis reads wrong, use the Report link at the bottom of the book page and pick "Bad translation". A person on the team reads every report, and one of the fixes they can apply is redoing that book's English straight away. Here's how reports work.

The Chinese stays the source of truth. The English is there so you can find the book at all, and now it uses the names you'd actually type.