Where were you before Weibo was born?
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account Jingshi Scholars (ID: jingshixueren), author Mu Yuren.
Where were you before Weibo was born?
For Frost Night, this answer is vitality.
Energy, this name with the color of the chess room of the 1990s, was once one of the largest Harry Potter forums in the country. On February 18, 2002, Liu Xiaohu, a computer teacher in Liuzhou, Guangxi, rushed to the boom of the Chinese online community and registered the domain name of the vitality. At that time, Frosty Night was a three-year-old child who grew up slowly in Dongguan.
This slowness is compared to the energy. As a forum, the vitality grows faster. Between 2003 and 2007, the daily average number of visits to the vitality reached thousands. Every day, countless people meet here, become friends or leave silently.
In 2011, a term search made the frosty night go into the energy. When she began to call Harry Potter’s enemies Voldemort with “Vordy,” she entered a world called a lover. In this world, people will not only write novels and paintings for their favorite characters, but also arguing that the humanities society will translate the word “aura”, which has a mysterious knowledge, into a “halo”, and analyze the dementors. Whether it is a psychological metaphor for depression.
Frost Night uses the verses in “Ulysses” quoted by “The Call of the Cuckoo” as her own signature, “I have become a name.”
What she can’t think of is that after two years, Vitality has really become a name that can only be left in the memory of a few people – the pressure of server renewal, the rigorous backup of the network security department, and the migration of servers The difficulty makes this forum run in the bumps. I remember the frost night, once she entered the website of the vitality, the result popped up a chess room, but it recovered in a few days, and then went back to problems. For so long, this tears the members who have been motivated by the end of the original work, and the popularity of the vitality has been falling. At the end of 2013, the Vitality Forum collapsed completely.
In the days of waiting for the forum to resume, people raised the “vital forum”, and almost no one expected that this temporary stop will become the last position of vitality. Frosty night applied for a new ID, “Owl’s Summer.” The avatar is on the yellowed sheepskin, and Hagrid, painted in soft watercolor, glared at the heads of Harry, Ron and Hermione.
She changed her signature to “Magic”Will never end.”
Magic Begins
Returning the hour hand back to 1997, the single mother J.K. Rowling, who wrote at the Elephant Cafe, published “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, which was just translated by Chinese students in the UK. It has trained the first batch of HP fans in China. At that time, the Chinese Internet culture was just emerging, and after the Internet chat room was short-lived, it was the beginning of the forum.
“Where the river meets the river, there must be a god.” In the past, there was no phenomenon-level work, and there was not a large number of fans. It was only that they mostly talked to the author in their imagination, and it was difficult to see what the works in the eyes of others were. Kind of. After the rise of the online forum, a large number of readers and the big communication platform geared together to form a forum for peers.
In the beginning, the vitality bar has casual chat, emotions, original literature, and irrigation districts. Later, the main Liu Xiaohu became HP powder, and in 2005 opened the Harry Potter board.
In that year, Google has not yet withdrawn from mainland China. People don’t have to cross the Great Wall to go to the world. At that time, QQ was also called OICQ. The shy penguin that everyone is familiar with had a slender good in that year. The skin pouch, Baidu Post Bar was officially launched two years later. In the past year, it was called the first year of online novels, and a number of novels such as “Farewell to Wei An” and “Chengdu Please Forget Tonight” were published under the banyan tree. 20 million netizens grew wildly with this upcoming era.
Early vitality page (Source: screenshot)
On June 21, 2003, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” was published in the UK, and the Chinese version of the translation cycle took more than half a year. Many readers who are not good at English or who have no access to the original books have been thoroughly sifted through the Internet. They have turned the dictionary into English news and books. After a summer vacation, English has improved a lot.
On July 12, a netizen named Nicole posted a message on Harry Potter “Good news! HP5 (formal) translation will meet you on this site in the early morning of July 14!” It’s energy, a lot of fans are registering for energy and waiting for a message, but “(the post) results prove to be a huge scam”. Vitality later said that the influx of friends caused by this post was the fuse of the later “HP5 translation event.”
Query the vitality of the sixth periodThe bar magazine found that on the same day, the friend Laohe released the 1-12 chapter of Harry Potter 5. On the 15th, the 13 chapters published by Burudon were published on the 16th. On the 16th, 14 chapters jointly translated by keycity, buudon and mouse0620 were found on the website. If the vitality is only passively started to translate because of the influx of netizens, it is difficult to explain why the first day of the post was published with 12 new books.
More and more members have joined the translation team. According to statistics, there are 23 people in the translation team from the beginning to the end. They translate the new chapter at a rate of 0.8 chapters per day, and the average daily update is about 10,000 words. After only half a month, the translation team has translated 26 chapters in chapter 38.
In the process of translation, the popularity of vitality is getting bigger and bigger like a snowball. However, the problem has also come. The People’s Literature Publishing House has already purchased the mainland copyright of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. According to the plan, the book will be published in September of the same year. The online translation that appears in advance is bound to be the entity. The sales volume of the book brought shocks, and the translation activities not only caused dissatisfaction of the publishing house, but also caused copyright infringement. Moreover, the banner of the translators is “only purely out of hobbies and dissatisfaction with the translation of the publishing house”. The quality of spontaneous translation of fans is not only higher than some common pirated books on the market, but even the authority of genuine translations. Degree creates a challenge.
On the day of the translation, the Beijing Youth Daily published a news article entitled “Net Translation In an era when copyright awareness is not so developed, “Bamboo” (the name of the early years forum for the moderators) faced reporters who came to the door, and did not feel that something was wrong, and they could not be energized in the agreement. After the conditions, I immediately agreed to the interview. Unexpectedly, after the relevant reports were released, things were further fermented. The Beijing Youth Daily reported that more people, including the Humanities Society with the Harry Potter series copyrights, and even Rowling himself, noticed the vitality. The influence… Most people are unaware of this, and the energetic er (the self-proclaimed friends of the year around 2003) immersed in the centripetal force of the online community this summer, shaping a certain sense of identity, they think they witnessed A “mass event.” The Pottery Translation of Harry Potter 5 was named Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. On August 21st, Vitality released a “Harry Potter 5 Chinese Web Translation (Vitality Bar Address)” post, which aggregated the translated content into an e-book, which made the already low acquisition cost close to zero. Qingwang also provides full-text downloads of the dynamic translation. The turning point On September 11, 2003, J.K. Rowling’s Shanghai agent sent an email, “The wording sternly accused the vitality of the translation event.” On that day, the vitality was shut down. The friends asked what happened on MSN. At first they thought it was a line problem. Later, after knowing the situation, they asked about the future energy. What to do, until September 11th, 19:45:09—— Liu Xiaohu said: Finished Silent. keycity says: Is there a backup? Keycity says: What do we need to do Liu Xiaohu said: Domain forwarding is temporarily closed ZHANGCHOU says: We are miserable and homeless Zhang Yingyin said: Well, it is better to make the reputation of vitality to the United Kingdom. TMR said: I saw in the newspapers and magazines that I sold the Chinese version of Ha, and I smiled and said: I translated it. did not expect. . . This conversation has appeared countless times in three days. According to the chat records that can be seen at present, Liu Xiaohu has twice said that “I can finally rest well” and “I plan to write a notice”, and the most mentioned words by friends are “etc. “,” “home”, “write”, “obscenity” and “vigor”. “Do not open me to kill you,” Zhang Yingyin said. Part of the chat history of the friends (Source: Vitality Bar, 6th screenshot) Liu Xiaohu once suggested that friends go to other forums to play, “There are other Harbin, Hatan.” “But we like energy.” “People don’t know.” “Our original area is the fastest and the translation is the fastest. We can change the image and play it. We can still gamble.” “If you have been away for a long time, you will recognize it. There is a process.” Finally, Liu Xiaohu just said this. The vitality is finally restored. Those who consulted the legal materials in the group and wrote to Rowling’s Agency and Chinese agents have a lot of relief and plan to do what they want after reopening. I said that I want to write a “seismic shed diary”, and later the word became a vibrancy. The vitality of the celebrations is not known. For many years, perhaps because of copyright, perhaps because of the server, perhaps because of the registration of domain names, they have to go through countless stops.“911”
