The Approach (A Descent from Sky High)

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Notes on This Project

This is a translation of 从万米高空降临 by larivegauche (aka 塞纳左岸).

This is a passion project, for which I've spent way more time than was probably wise on aviation terminology. Progress will most definitely be inconsistent (sorry). I don't own anything (not the story, not the characters, not the air traffic control knowledge) except my translation.

I have contacted the author, larivegauche, for their permission to translate their work and post it on a platform that I see fit. In the author's words:

I have not signed any contract with 长佩 or any other platform, and I hold the copyrights of all works I have written. You have my permission to translate 《从万米高空降临》 to English on the premise that a) you do not profit from the translated work, and b) you have no intent to print or distribute the translated work. This permission is given to you and your project, and is not transferable to any other person and/or group. I’d kindly ask any other interested party to also write to me for permission to translate this work.
I'll leave it to you to decide what's the best platform to share the translated work on.

I hope you all enjoy this work as much as I did, and for any and all who can read Chinese, you'll be able to read this novel on 长佩 (all chapters are free), and the author has posted all the smut (censored on the Chinese platform) as a work on her AO3. After all, a translation is never the same as the original; it's not a question of which one is better, but rather that they are not comparable things in the first place (Richard Howard, "A Professional Translator's Trade Alphabet"—not that I can claim to be professional).

For me, literary translation is an act of engaging with the text, with a piece of work one loves or admires or is fascinated by, an act of personal interpretation. As such, I believe that there is no one "correct" translation of any single piece of work—all that is to say, if anyone wishes to create a different translation for this web novel, they shouldn't be stopped by the existence of this unfinished (as of yet) one. (But I'd of course say to request permission from the author first!)

About This Website

I made this website because I wanted to have a way to view footnotes as popups-on-clicks instead of having to scroll to the very end to find them, and also because I wanted to distinguish text messages using a different font, but didn't like how it looked with skins on AO3.

However, despite having an undergraduate degree in CS, I am Not Very Good at It, and I went about making this website in a very naive way—that is to say, from scratch. In hindsight I probably could have been more efficient with my time if I had used WordPress or some other platform, or even if I'd just searched up some website template or bootstrap CSS. Alas, I did none of that and began with a single Google-Doc-converted HTML file, then started building the CSS and the JavaScript on top of it. And because this is a Very Naive Website, I add each page as its own individual HTML file. The upside of doing that is that it gives me a lot of flexibility; the downside is that it's not as efficient as it could be, and therefore probably Not Good Design in terms of how websites should be made.

In any case, though, I tried very hard to make sure things display correctly on different screen sizes, so it should work okay on phones as well. I also spent too long on the navigation bar (the <prev, Table of Contents, next> buttons), trying to have them fixed at the top of the page wherever you scrolled, only to give up because it Really Wasn't Cooperating (it refused to stay centered).

So the bottom line is that I spent a Very Long Time on the CSS and the arrangement of words and design and colors in general, and I think this website should be considered fanart. I have generated a piece of fanart for The Approach, thank you very much.