Distance and Tone in MidnightDesk’s Chinese Version

Localising MidnightDesk into Chinese meant more than translating its English pages.

At first, I thought the work would be fairly direct: keep the existing English structure, then replace each paragraph with Chinese. But once I started, I quickly realized that the real issue was not language itself, but tone. Many sentences that felt natural and complete in English, with just the right amount of explanation, became stiff, empty, or too much like an explanation of an unfinished system when translated into Chinese.

That made me realize that Chinese localisation was not a sentence-by-sentence match. It was a reconsideration of how the site should speak to its readers.

Parts of the old site sounded more like developer documentation. Those lines accurately described what the pages were for, but on a public website they made the reader feel as if they were reading project documentation rather than entering a personal portfolio. A website does need structure, but the structure should not be overexplained. A project does need boundaries, but those boundaries do not always need to appear in a defensive form.

The Chinese pages made these problems easier to see. Longer explanations could feel balanced in English, yet become cumbersome when carried into Chinese at the same level of detail. But if the writing became too light in pursuit of elegance, the projects could become harder to understand. The most important work in this localisation was not finding prettier words, but adjusting the distance between the sentences.

The homepage needed to feel like an entrance. It should not hurry to explain everything, but should let the reader sense what the site is generally doing. The work page needed to be clearer, because the projects should have a clear purpose, background, and result. The About page could keep some first-person warmth, but should not become a resume-like introduction. The updates page should record changes without becoming a running log. The notes page could move more slowly, leaving space for thoughts that do not belong inside a project page but are still worth keeping.

These pages do not need to have exactly the same tone, but they should belong to the same site. When readers move from the homepage into work, then into notes or a project detail page, they should not feel as if they have been taken to several unrelated places. The Chinese version needed that continuity: each page can have its own function, while the whole site remains quiet, clear, and recognisably personal.

I also began to notice that Chinese writing for a personal website can easily move toward two extremes. One extreme is too formal, like an institutional profile or a product website. The other is too casual, like private notes or a temporary log. MidnightDesk does not suit either direction. It is first a portfolio, but not a cold display case; it also keeps personal thought, but not as a wholly private diary.

So this localisation became a kind of reorganisation. It did not only change a few words, but changed the reading experience across the site. Which places should speak directly, and which could leave room; which content needed to be clearer, and which expressions should step back; which sentences only looked complete without actually helping the reader.

By the end, I wanted the Chinese version not to read like “MidnightDesk after translation”, but like a Chinese form that MidnightDesk should have had in the first place. It can be a little more refined, a little quieter, but the most important thing is that it feels natural. Natural does not mean casual. It means that every sentence knows why it is there.

As this round of Chinese localisation came close to completion, my understanding of the site also became clearer: copy is not the final decoration of a page. It is part of how a website is understood. Whether a portfolio can be read clearly depends not only on which works it contains, but also on how it introduces that work to its readers.