Earlier this year I hired someone to write out Chinese text for me (it wasn’t translation work)
as part of my work behind this self-marketing project:
https://www.georgetrailtranslator.co.uk/i-would-love-to-see-malinda-sing-this/ I was satisfied
with what they did in it. But this isn’t about that…

Very recently I got back to them in connection with this:
https://twitter.com/TrailTranslator/status/1618233373205618694?s=20 This tweet reflects a
certain goal of mine: I wanted to arrive at my own as-educated-as-possible guess translation
of what Wu Zetian’s name actually means based on whatever I would be told the three
Chinese characters of it 武則天 could be translated as – at least, according to Google
Translate. And yes, I wanted to attempt this even though, as I say in the tweet, I don’t
actually have a proper command of Chinese and certainly can’t write it. It’s like this: yes,
Google Translate will translate these three characters as a whole as “Wu Zetian” and only
that; but what I did was translate each single one individually (one at a time) just to see what
I could come up with.

Well, I was ready to declare this endeavour over when I came up with “Fierce Heavens”. But
I just thought of getting back in touch with the Chinese person who once did a job for me, to
ask them how they would translate 武則天 as a normal Chinese expression – not just as the
name of one person, “Wu Zetian”.

So what did they tell me? They were quick to point out that Wu Zetian was the first and (to
the present day) only female ruler of China, dating way back to the Tang dynasty. They also
argued that she had a reputation for being “kind of cruel”. That said, I must say here that even
I know enough about Wu Zetian that she had a reputation for being (if you will excuse the
generalisation) uncompromising, and her Wikipedia article (and who knows how many other
sources) will confirm this. And they said that Chinese people could only really translate 武則
天 as “Wu Zetian” and that, given her image and reputation, to translate these three
characters as “Fierce Heavens” would “make no sense”. If nothing else, that explains the title
of this article.