Xiang Liu and Xiao Yao’s Story and Romance

@liddi

Please don’t take my desire to clarify Chinese grammatical constructs as questioning your expertise in the Chinese language. As evidenced by all the amazing translations you’ve generously provided, I understand you are highly proficient in the language. Your skills in the language far exceed mine since I’m barely fluent and wouldn’t even consider myself literate. My main method for reading Chinese is to put the text into Google Translate and then read the ping yin and translations :) I appreciate all the explanations you’ve provided about the language. It’s helpful to my learning and understanding of Chinese.

As an engineer, I was taught to validate solutions instead of relying solely on a single expert opinion. Although I’m impressed by your knowledge of the language, I cannot assume that your knowledge of Chinese is complete. For some questions, I will cross-reference your answers with other expert opinions. Generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT) is very powerful, and usually a good starting point for research. That said, I’m aware that GenAI can sometimes hallucinate responses, so I generally validate those responses with the knowledge of experts, such as yourself and/or other expert sources.

For the specific phrase that we are discussing, I tweaked the question to ChatGPT 4.0 to be more specific. The question and output can be found below:

Can "情人蛊已经被王母解了" be interpreted to mean "The Lover's Gu had already been explained by the Royal Mother”?

Yes, "情人蛊已经被王母解了" can indeed be interpreted as "The Lover's Gu had already been explained by the Royal Mother." In this sentence:

• "情人蛊" (qíng rén gū) refers to "Lover's Gu," likely a concept from folklore involving love-related magic or a curse.
• "已经" (yǐ jīng) means "already," suggesting that the action was completed before the current point in time.
• "被" (bèi) indicates a passive voice, pointing to the action being done by someone else.
• "王母" (wáng mǔ) refers to "Royal Mother," a figure often associated with high status or mythological contexts in Chinese culture.
• "解了" (jiě le) can mean both "resolved" and "explained," with "了" marking the completion of the action.

Thus, the phrase can be understood to mean that the Royal Mother had already explained (or perhaps resolved) something mystical or problematic associated with the Lover's Gu.

I cross-referenced the meaning of “解” in Google translate and in the Pleco dictionary and they both seem to indicate that “解”, by itself, can mean “to explain”. Finally, during lunch today, I spoke to three co-workers who are native Chinese speakers and all did their undergraduate studies in China. They all confirmed that the response given by ChatGPT is correct: "情人蛊已经被王母解了" can be interpreted as "The Lover's Gu had already been explained by the Royal Mother” and is grammatically correct in this usage of “解” to mean “explain.”

Of course, they also all agreed that “解” in the context of "情人蛊已经被王母解了" is ambiguous and can mean “to resolve”, “to explain”, and many other interpretations. Anyway, I appreciate your guidance on this question.

 HeadInTheClouds:

The idea that WYL/XY is some sort of innocent, unaware little lamb doesn't work for me. She's cunning and shrewd enough and weighs her gains and losses before agreeing to that investment pact with Jing. Once she regained her real identity, it seems like I'm supposed to buy that her IQ dropped to the mid-double digits and she doesn't know this and that; she couldn't figure out this or that. Nope, what she does is engage in some self-hypnotizing.

Totally agree that she is a shrewd calculating person and her IQ never dropped when she resumed her princess identity. I also agree she tried to self-delude to some extent. I do question how much of her self-delusion should be attributed to each factor:

• Pure selfishness and/or insecurity
• Obligations to CX and her family
• Going along with XL's selfless desire not to pursue the relationship for XY's well-being
• Tong Hua being extra tricky in her writing and deceiving readers into thinking that XY is self-deluding more than she actually is

I also question how successful she is in self-hypnotizing. How much did she believe her own BS vs how much did she know and acknowledge the truth deep down, but just feel helpless to do anything about it.

@solarlunareclipse

I don't take offence in your questions. You are not wrong to depend on just my interpretation. I am in the technical field as well and I do not rely on one source either, however supposedly infallible. In my course of reading / translating, I do use ChatGPT and other AI translations as a reference especially when I am searching my mind for a word which eludes me - these are great tools, while not necessarily always accurate or sufficiently detailed. 

Exactly as you said, I am just one person. I don't claim to be expert in any way, particularly in Chinese. I only tell you what I know,  and exactly because I do know my limitations as only one person also prone to mistakes, what I do explain, particularly when you go into the nitty-gritty of the language, I have also cross-referenced with multiple dictionaries and references, discussed extensively and counter-verified with others far more knowledgeable and were educated in Chinese from childhood to adulthood as well. I threw the exact same sentence to them and they agree that just because 解 can mean "explain" and the sentence is grammatically correct, 解了 should not be used to mean "already explained". It is irrelevant to the context of the sentence.  The word itself simply does not mean "explain" when used in that way. The way I was explained to (that word in contention!), simply substituting a known meaning of a word in a sentence does not automatically mean the meaning actually applies.

Anyway, you can take my explanation if you think it makes sense to you. If not, just go ahead and ignore it. We are all entitled to different opinions anyway.