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I once played an online multiplayer game called Boom Beach, which involved some team play. I was in a multinational group, and we did have two mainland Chinese folks in the group. One was reasonably good in English and the other was pretty fluent, and because the group was multinational, we defaulted to English in chat anyway.

That said, it was my preference to exhort my teammates before they went on their missions, in their native language if possible. My catchphrase was, "die gloriously!"

Some additional context: Each player got one attack per mission. Usually, you lost all your troops in each attack, but you then go and re-train your troops for the next day's mission. Basically, you died repeatedly in this game.

I'm pretty sure that I just Google translated my catchphrase at the time. The current translation is "光荣地死!" (guang1 rong2 de si3). This didn't sound quite right to me, so I would say "死地光荣!"

Is there a better translation? Are there any appropriate colloquialisms that I don't know?

Note: I grew up in Singapore to an English-speaking family; I can pronounce and write Chinese, and I could probably order something at a restaurant, but my Chinese is pretty bad. My Chinese teammates never suggested any alternatives at the time, but I thought I'd check.

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    I do not play online games a lot, so I might be wrong. You could try to quote some phrases like 不成功便成仁 or 风萧萧兮易水寒,壮士一去兮不复还。The ones I had may not be approriate, but you can try to search other similar quotes.
    – zyy
    Mar 8, 2019 at 0:13
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    EMMM,TANG HO s answer is not that "internet" but much literary. If I were you, I would say 死要死得漂亮/兄弟走好/ Mar 8, 2019 at 2:48
  • "Much literary" is actually how I tended to speak in the game, but these are good suggestions also!
    – Weiwen Ng
    Mar 8, 2019 at 3:21

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Chinese have many phrases for "good death" like 犧牲, 捐軀, 就義, 成仁, 捨身, 捨生...

Examples:

"去壯烈犧牲吧!" (Go, go heroically sacrifice yourself!)

"去英勇捐軀吧!" (Go, go bravely give up your life!)

"去光榮戰死吧!" (Go, go gloriously die in battle!)

"去慷慨就義吧!" (Go, go gracefully meet your doom for your allegiance!)

"去捨身報國吧!" (Go, go give up your life for your country!)

"去殺身成仁吧!" (Go, go give up your life for honor!)

My choice:

"去捨生一戰吧!" (Go, disregard your life; forget about death and fight this one battle!)

捨生忘死 disregard life; forget death

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  • Thanks for the comprehensive answer. "去壮烈牺牲吧!" would be my own choice. Note to other readers, I type in simplified Chinese, whereas @TangHo appears to be using traditional.
    – Weiwen Ng
    Mar 8, 2019 at 15:27

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