Four days before the release date of my debut novel, The Art of Falling in Love with You, I found out that there was an error in my manuscript. In Chapter 8, I mention a few Cantonese terms and translate them in English. Apparently, there was one word I mistranslated. Thank you so much to my friend, Baylin Wing, for catching this and informing me.
The basic gist is that I translated a Chinese number wrong (lol/not lol). In my minor defense, the Chinese number system is really confusing for non-fluent Chinese speakers.
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*Minor Spoiler*
Mistranslation: “Man-gee” = one thousand
Corrected Version: “Man-gee” = ten thousand
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So of course I immediately worked on changing it (I pray that I corrected all the mistranslated words in Chapter 8-it was very last minute and I did it in the middle of the night…) and re-uploading my e-book to the different platforms that sell my book. Unfortunately, as my luck would have it, I passed the time to resubmit a new file on Amazon and have to wait until after the release date (5/18/23) to upload a new one. I will be uploading the corrected e-book file asap.
For the print copies of my book (paperback and hardcover), I already made the adjustments so no one will be receiving the mistranslated version of TAOFILWY in any of the physical book formats (whew). As a newbie author who is publishing my first book, this was definitely a huge nightmare for me to deal with (especially so close to the release date). I’m glad that I had time to change it, but I’m sad that there were a handful of readers who got the mistranslated version (along with a few extra typos ;P) of my e-book.
My mistake has definitely caused many issues for me, but I’m glad I was able to correct it under such a short amount of time. However, since my release date was very close to my last minute changes, I’m not sure when the corrected e-book file would be available for all book retailers. As of May 17th, 2023, I believe Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Google Play have the updated version of my book. For the other book retailer platforms, I believe it will take around a few days to weeks before the most recent changes have been made. So sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.
I hope I don’t have any other similar experiences in the future or close calls. As always, thank you for reading! <3