Don't Be a Dong - Translating in 2019

You should try the Godsfall chronicles. Its a great post-apocalypse novel. Its actually has the quality of novel that you would find published in stores.

 

Actually, I AM comparing to other small, individual sites; note where I mentioned some of them making $4k from Patreon alone for their one novel? Versus AH making $500 a month across all novels. Just didn’t name them because didn’t want to rope them into this discussion, but you can easily find them yourself if you spend some time. Alternately, if you are interested I’ll discuss it with you in PM. And it really is peanuts on AH, even compared to working for hire on places like QI!

You are getting mixed up on a few things. One, don’t confuse the exception for the rule. Two, this is in the context of trying to make a *living* off translating or making a business out of it. Three, this is also in the context of all the other problems and a damaged brand AH has. Four, word counts are very different in terms of chapter size with Kenkyo and most JP stuff; not all chapters are created equally. Five, stuff like Kenkyo was started years ago before expectations changed and thus has an inbuilt audience that is going to stay with the story, much like how TDG still has 200k readers per chapter, once a month. This is NOT standard and not a good baseline for people to use. Lastly, honestly expectations still aren’t too high for Japanese novels yet, because there isn’t much of a Walmart.

Let me repeat: do not confuse the exceptions for the rule. If it’s a hobby, go crazy. If you want to make a business or any sort of living off this, don’t expect a few chapters a month to do anything. It’s not happening, and that’s the hard truth, no BS. You aren’t generating enough value for that.

 

Well. I agree about quality and factors being a important, but speed is as important.
Exceptionally good novels or novels of niche genre(so not much to read and essentially nothing to choose from) will be read even with slow updates.
But are there many exceptionally good novels or people who read just one niche genre where every novel counts?
If we take 2 novels of similar quality both in original and translation the ones with faster updates will have more readers as constant and faster updates attract more attention from the reader and take away their reading time. Slow one if put on a shelf to pile up might be forgotten, or initial interest will be lost and reader won't bother reading it.

 

Yeah, FlowerBridgeToo was the king of that. Miss that dude/dudett.

 

Thanks

 

That says nothing about how much the translators are paid, only how much the site's owner earns.

Qidian pays pretty well as far as I'm aware anyways, so I'm not sure why you even brought it up as comparison... >.>

Unless you're going to tell me that CKTalon went to Qidian while wishing to earn poorly... Or that INvader (or whatever was his username) worked in both WW and Qidian (even if he quit Qidian after a while) for a long time because Qidian's payment was terrible.

Oh? Pardon me for my foolishness in thinking there is a Walmart for JP novels or that there are expectations for JP novels, obviously Baka-tsuki didn't start the whole translation community long before you considered starting your business... Oh, and J-novel club surely isn't very successful either, just like Yen Press isn't... I'm so sorry for being misinformed... What else...? Oh, of course, NU's rankings, let's use that.

#1 Death March -> 601 releases, has an average of 1 release per week.
#4 Tsuki ga Michibiku -> 368 releases, average of 1 release per 2 weeks.
#6 Death mage who doesn't want a 4th time -> 226 releaes, 1 per week.
#7 Tensei Shitara Slime -> 161 releases, 1 per week.
#9 Genjitsushugi Yuusha -> 116 releases, 1 every 3 weeks.
#11 The New Gate -> 197 releases, 1 per week.
#14 Kumoko -> 711 releases, 1 every 2 weeks.
#19 Growth Cheat -> 246 releases, 1 every 2 weeks.
#20 World Teacher -> 195 releases, 2 per week.
#21 Lazy Dungeon Master -> 333 releases, daily releases.
#22 Nidome no Yuusha -> 94 releases, 1 every 2 days.
#23 Arifureta -> 192 releases, 1 per week.
#24 Death Flags Show No Sign of Ending -> 105 releases, 1 per month.
#25 Sevens -> 370 releases, 1 every 3 weeks.

I think that's enough? 14/25, or 56% of the top 25 novels in NU are JP novels, out of those, only 1 of them has daily releases and 1 of them has 1 release every 2 days.

Comparatively, 8/25, or 32% are CN novels and 3/25 or 12% are KR novels.


I don't mind you having your opinions, but please try to remove your bias as a big site holder and try doing a minimum of research before spouting nonsense. You're using yourself as the rule when you're the exception.

 

Wow a lot of good general business points. Love the focus on value. I think true profit is really made based on that. It might be quality, speed, or trust, but you need something otherwise people won't come to you. AH's model is lowest cost and that's about it. It offers no assurance of quality, speed, or reliability and doesn't have a niche either. It's just kind of there filling a void. With MTLs as a market floor, that model itself seems to be difficult to make significant profit from as a business, especially when your product is marred by its presentation.

Investment is incredibly important too. Take for example a business and its employees. You hire random person A and you never take the time to learn about them and train them. Perhaps they do the task you hired them for and that's it. But maybe that guy has potential or skills that could actually your overall business a lot more in different ways. And you'll never know that if you don't put in that investment. Heck, even for a normal business, the quality of your employees is going to depend on the investment you spend training them. It's truly a world where you get what you pay for. If its cheap or low investment, there's a reason.

I will still admit that AH does bring up some good points on some of his posts I've read. Particularly the very difficult, and sometimes ridiculous, attitude that a lot of readers have. But at least from an overall business perspective, I think rwx has a very good take.

 

The main missing point when bringing speed up, is that each individual novel is different, and once a reader got interested in a novel, it's hard for them to let go.

Sure, if the speed is average, writing quality is average and translation quality is average, then you have pretty decent chances of losing readers if you take some random hiatuses and disappear for a while. But if the story itself is good and you translate well, it's pretty unlikely readers will remove your novel from their reading list, and they'll be more than happy to come back once you get back to releasing.


I don't deny that speed is important though, but if you see my above post, numbers say that it isn't the main factor by any means.

If anything, it shows that it's very unlikely you'll get into the top rankings if you release one chapter every month... One chapter per week seems to be a speed most readers are more than happy to follow though.

 

This is debatable. I would just point out that QI shutdown many lucrative patreons. The best example is RSSG from GT which when it was forced to close by QI was earning ~$20k/month.

Compare that to WN's $40 per chapter and there is a disparate difference.

Baka-Tsuki is a shell of its former self.

Again, it is clear that you are conflating fan translations with translations that are monetized in some form or fashion, which I believe is more the point to RWX's post.

 

Again you're taking the exception instead of looking at everyone. CK is paid way more than what the average translators get for many reasons. (can go back and look into the whole mess if you want) You're taking the highest paying person on QI and saying that's the standard when most people get offer way less.

You also forget JP novels has a much wider fan base due to manga/anime adaptation pulling in readers. But you also forget the fact that we are talking about running a business here and making a living off translation. While these novels rank high these translators are also not full time.

Also actual publication is completely different beast than the online translation scene so idk why you even trying to pull that into the conversion. Not translator (not very likely) is going to start their own publication company. Not to mention the method of sale and money generation is completely different from what online translators do.

You are being extra nitpicky, here a better way to phrase what Ren said, people are much much much much more likely to be willing to pay to support translator with faster release. That's why there lot of novel people will shit on constantly here that makes lot of money off people sponsoring it.

 

I'm going to assume you're using NU's release frequency for this, because the release rates are clearly distorted. I know that Death March, and Tsuki ga Michibiku are caught up to raws, and a few of these have gone on hiatus at some point making the release frequency much higher than what you see

 

i think another factor to consider about translation, is the fact a jp mtl is absolutely shitty and unredable and slow release doesn't matter much. Readers can only wait.....while Cn mtl is still unreadable but a lot better than jp mtl so some readers go to read there if the speed is too slow.....

 

Not to mention some are completed.

 

Let me put it to you like this way. With how much Wujigege talks about wanting to make a profit, be sustainable, etc., do you really think he’s operating at a big loss? We know how much his Patreon is, his ads are roughly, and we know he pays per chapter, and we know how many chapters is being posted each month. The math here really isn’t that hard, Alice. As for why I mentioned QI, it’s because they also pay by the chapter. CK got a special deal because he was at WW (they offered many of our translators the same), while Invader only stayed because his Patreon kept it feasible; once they shut it down, he left. But that’s neither here nor there. Point is, AH pays peanuts compared to what small sites can do on their own if they really want to make a living off it. You know it, I know it, and you are just being argumentative.

I’m sorry, but once again, you are just being argumentative, possibly because you don’t seem to like me very much . By Walmart, it should be pretty clear that I’m talking about the model which is live both on Chinese/Korean raw sites and major translation sites: rapid releases of (often multiple) 3000 character chapters each day. This is NOT happening on the Japanese side, hence expectations are lower, as I already said. You’ve taken a single comment, that the expectations for Japanese novels are much lower in terms of speed because of the lack of WW/Gravity/Qidian/Zongheng/etc. style sites, and made an entire off topic rant about it. Hell, by this logic you should be bringing up A Song of Ice and Fire as a counterpoint: “See, there are entire books that come out between years that are super popular! You are wrong!”

Look, the entire point is, if you want to make a living or business off this, especially as a fan translator, you need to provide much more value than a few chapters a month. That’s all there is to it. If it wasn’t, the big sites would be translating hundreds or thousands of books at 1-2 chapters a week instead of a much smaller number at 14-20 a week. If the AH model worked, other people would be doing it. It doesn’t.

 

God of economics flaunting his powers to pleb mortals again.
Let's be real, even if you release 4 chapters a month, if the novel is pulling in the numbers which satisfy the translator with business mind ideas, I don't see problem. Pick a novel with quality like LMS and there is your piggy bank.

You are just throwing down shit since you rode the train of cd success. That's how you come off to me with your post.
Why not post your bullshit over yout site?
Let me guess, you don't want those small sites to pull numbers of readers from you, right?

 

Okay, let's work with your numbers then, 40$/chapter.

Let's assume it takes a newbie translator 4h to translate a chapter.

This means they'll be making in 10$/hour, which is somewhat above the US minimum wage. Seems pretty good for a newbie translator IMO, working at home-office doing something you love with a schedule of your choice for above US minimum wage? Seems very decent for someone in a 1st world country (assuming they don't have qualifications for a high-paying job... As in, college students for example) and excellent for anyone in a 3rd world country.

Now let's assume a better translator that takes 2h/chapter... That's 20$/hour, which is about 3x minimum wage in US for working at home-office with your own schedule in something you love. That seems like a pretty good deal to me. Sure, it's still not as good as you can get from professional translations that pay 0.10$/character, but it still seems like a very solid number, especially if you live in a country with weak currency.

J-novel Club, Yen Press, WW and Qidian are all translation companies that have absolutely nothing to do with the fantranslation community, I don't see your point.

But if you want to compare things with fantranslation, see the rest of my post where I checked the top 25 novels in NU and listed all of the JP ones. They should speak for themselves.

That's why I also mentioned Invader, which was another Qidian translator for quite some time. And see my reply to Checkm8 just above for further numbers on Qidian.

And yes, I know we're talking about running a business and making a living off translations. But the thing is, when you have 100k+ readers for your novel, the chances of being able to live off the translation if they dedicated themselves full-time to it is extremely high. So I think they're a very fair comparison.

Only actual publication site I mentioned was Yen Press, J-novel Club works pretty much the same way as other translation companies like WW and Qidian. And it's extremely successful by working with Japanese novels.


All I'm doing is pointing out that some of RWX's arguments are flawed. I didn't reply to his entire post for a good reason, it was because those were the arguments I found flaws with.

I'm using NU's release frequency indeed, though NU's release frequency is biased towards the latest releases IIRC. In order to not let hiatuses impact the numbers too much.

My bad for the ones caught up to raws though, I don't really have a way of knowing as I don't read said novels... I know for a fact that the frequency gets halted once a novel gets completed though, so the frequency should be proper for novels like Sevens.

Perhaps, I'm mainly pointing out that while speed does matter, it's definitely not the deciding factor over rather or not you'll have many readers for your novel.

In other words, you don't have numbers so you are going by what you assume he earns because you have no clue about how much he earns from ad revenue, which is definitely more than what he earns from Patreon.

Did you even bother with contacting anyone that worked for him in the past before trying to make this post? You'd at least have some outdated numbers to work with.

You missed my point, I'm not saying that speed doesn't make you earn more, it definitely does... Since... Yanno, you get more views, which means more ad revenue. And you also get more readers.

The amount of extra readers you get from speed don't really compare from the amount of readers you get from delivering high quality translations for high quality novels though, as can be seen from the numbers on the top 25 of NU.

That's fine? I mean, I never denied that most people in the JP translation community are doing it as a hobby.

My point was mainly that RWX's argument that says readers won't bother with reading your novel if the translation rate is slow is ridiculous. They'll definitely read it, NU's rankings prove this much... And well, if someone can get 100,000 readers while translating as a hobby with a slow translation rate, I'm pretty sure they could be successful if they tried translating full-time and tried monetizing it.

I just got pissed at someone saying such BS argument that you can't get readers if you don't translate fast enough. It feels (as in, my personal intake and opinion on the implications of his argument, totally personal argument for anyone that bothers with replying to this paragraph) as if he's basically saying that all novels in NU are utter shit and the only thing that matters is how fast you can throw said shit at the readers' mouth, because they don't care for the words within the novel since it's all trash anyways. It's BS and it's one hell of an annoying argument.

 

I took a look at Sevens, and it doesnt seem so? 855 days between first and last release and 370 chapters according to your earlier post, that would be 2.3 days/chapter, NU lists 21.5 days and looking at its releases there seem to be 3 final chapters that came out after almost a year otherwise it would be 1.5 days

 

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeird... I'm sure Tony had added a feature that did that... But it doesn't make much sense either even if it didn't halt, because even if the number was 1200 days for 370 chapters, it still wouldn't get to one chapter every 21.5 days...

This is a bit of guesswork and me going off by my memory of features released in NU. IIRC the release frequency takes into account the last 15 releases instead of the whole amount of releases for the series (or at least gives focus to those last 15). And then it halts the number if the series gets the [Completed] Tag... My guess is that the final 3 chapters that came up much later totally messed up with the release frequency of the novel due to it taking only the recent chapters into account.


What this means is that the Release Frequency for Sevens is completely wrong and that I might have also gotten wrong numbers for other series (another user pointed out Death March and Tsuki somethingsomething since they're caught up to raws) that got big hiatuses near the end of the series, probably because the author released a few chapters much later than the series ended.

I guess this kinda makes my list of 25 novels in NU somewhat unreliable, someone would need to check each series to see rather or not it's caught up to raws and rather or not the latest releases have a large gap when compared to the rest... Which is well... Probably not happening.

So... I guess everyone should take the list with a few grains of salt then. It's not as reliable as I hoped it would be.