Translating

My friend gave me something to keep me busy- a Yu-Gi-Oh card (probably a fake fan-made one) in Chinese for me to translate! It can be found here- search up 草泥马 for a better chance of finding it.

Here is the text (mainly just copied and pasted from the website, not exactly what's on the card)

草泥马
神兽/兽族
百度十大神兽之首。生活在神秘美丽的马勒戈壁朝尼族自治区。拥有哀怨的眼神。

And here is Google Translate's translation:

"Baidu first ten animal living in the walls of the mysterious beauty of the horse toward the ground Nepal Autonomous Region. A sad look."

I used my dictionary a lot and even then it only helped a little because I'm lacking in knowledge in Chinese grammar (not that there is too much grammar in Chinese) and there were a few characters that I couldn't see because it was too blurry on her iPod touch (that's why I looked up the original source on the Internet as I was hoping that it would have some "commentary").

Here are the words that I looked up, for anyone interested in learning the Chinese language (it's actually a lot easier than it looks).

神秘 shénmì- mysterious, mystical
生活 shēnghuó- life, to live眼神 yǎnshén- expression in one's eyes
勤 qín- diligent
自治 zìzhì- autonomy; self-government
自治区 zìzhìqū- autonomous region
哀愁 āichóu- sad, sorrowful
哀怨  āiyuàn- sad, plaintive (btw, that means "sad, mournful")
拥有yǒngyǒu- possess, have, own
兽 shòu- beast, animal
神 shén- 1. god, deity; 2. supernatural, magical; 3. spirit, mind; 4. expression, look; 5. smart, clever
族 zú- 1. clan; 2. death penalty in ancient China; 3. race, nationality; 4. a class or group of tyings with common features
首 shǒu- 1. head (the body part that is- just to clarify that for those sick-minded people out there!); 2. first; 3. leader (there were also two other definitions in my Chinese-English dictionary, but I didn't copy them down because they were irrelevant)

This gave me enough to translate the last sentence.

拥有哀怨的眼神。
Yǒngyǒu āiyuàn de yǎnshén.
Possesses sad expression in eyes.
Note that the character 的 (de) is just a grammatical word. Often it indicates possession, like an apostrophe S in English. However, this character is also used after adjectives. It doesn't really mean anything on its own, but it makes the sentence flow better.

I also translated a few other words on the card.

The title of the card is 草泥马。At first I thought that this could not mean "llama" (even though the picture was a llama) as 骆驼 (luòtuo) means camel or llama. However, when I searched up 草泥马 on Google Images, all of the pictures were of llamas. Therefore, even though Google Translate says that 草泥马 means "mud horse," I'm going to stick with pictures from websites which are presumably made by native speakers of Chinese.

The text at the top of the flavour text box which indicates what type of monster it is says  [神兽/兽族]. The first two words (神兽- shénshòu) mean "beast" or "animal." The next two words (兽族- shòuzú) mean "orc" according to Google Translate, but it could probably just mean "monster" as well- my definition of "orc" does not fit in with my definition of "llama!" However, I looked up both 兽族 and "orc" and similar results were yielded, so that word is probably specifically for orcs only.

It's late now and I should probably get off the computer. Eventually I'll continue with this translation project.