The Pilgrim said, "Changed how?" Old Gao said, "When he first came he was a stout dark fellow;

The Pilgrim asks the one question the old man had hoped to slide past. 黑胖漢 — a dark, heavy man; nothing at all remarkable.

afterwards he turned into an idiot with a long snout and great ears, with a ridge of bristles down the back of his skull,

長嘴: 長 is cháng, long, not zhǎng; pypinyin defaults wrongly. 獃子 — dolt, blockhead — is the name by which the Pilgrim will call him for eighty chapters. 一溜鬃毛: 溜 is liù, a row or ridge.

his body coarse and frightful, his head and face for all the world like a pig's.

模樣 takes 模 as mú. The comparison to a pig arrives last, after the snout, the ears and the bristles have made it inevitable — and after the surname 豬 was given, unremarked, two segments ago.

And his gullet is prodigious: at one sitting he must have three or five pecks of rice,

食腸, the "eating-gut," capacity of appetite. 甚大: 甚 is shèn, the intensifier. 三五斗 — 斗 is dǒu, the dry peck; pypinyin gives dòu, the fight.

and for his morning bite a hundred-odd flat cakes are barely enough.

點心 here is the morning meal, not a sweetmeat. 也得 takes 得 as dé, "requires." A hundred cakes for breakfast is a joke that will be repeated at Zhu Bajie's expense to the end of the book.

It is a mercy that he still eats vegetarian. If he took to flesh and wine,

喜得, "happily, as luck has it," 得 as dé. 還 is hái, "still." 齋素 is the vegetarian abstinence — the fiend has kept a Buddhist rule for three years, and his father-in-law counts it a saving on the grocery bill.

then all this old fool's holdings, land and stock and the rest, would be eaten clean away inside half a year."

家業田產: the household's estate. 罄淨 (qìng jìng), emptied to the bottom. 不上半年, in less than half a year.

Sanzang said, "He eats so because he works so." Old Gao said, "The eating is the small matter.

Sanzang's one contribution to the interview is a piece of plain justice: 只因他做得，所以吃得 — both 得 potential, dé. He who can do the work may eat the food. It is the only word spoken for the monster by anyone in the chapter.

Nowadays he raises winds besides, and comes in cloud and goes in mist, and sends the stones walking and the sand flying, so that he has frightened my whole household and the neighbours to left and right out of all peace.

諕 writes 嚇 and is read xià; 諕得 takes the resultative de, while 不得安生 takes the potential dé — two readings of one graph in a single segment. 走石飛砂 is the standard formula for a fiend's wind.

And he has shut my little daughter Kingfisher Orchid away in the back court, and for a full half-year we have not seen her face, nor do we know whether she is alive or dead.

一發, "altogether, for a full." 更不知死活如何: the father does not know whether his daughter lives. Three years of free labour bought a great deal of patience.

By this we knew him for a monster, and would fetch some exorcist to be rid of him — to be rid of him."

去退去退 — the doubled verb is the old man's fluster, and the translation keeps the repetition. 法師, an exorcist of either persuasion.