A fellow translator friend of mine always encounters the same problem of realizing later on that the story she is stockpiling translations for has already been translated on NU despite using both traditional and simple chinese characters in the search bar. Besides that, she can't guarantee that her english translation of the novel title would be the same as how others would translate it and using the original chinese title would be far more accurate in giving results. Is there any way to improve on the search function for non-english words?
Doesn't NU already have the function to search the non-English titles? The pages should have the original title listed in the "Associated Names" box on the page, so if you can't search it up then that's the fault of whoever made the page without filling out the proper names.
The thing is chinese has two forms. Simple and Traditional. A simple search in google would yield both results regardless of the form used, taking novel title ”嫁給豪門老男人“ as an example below. However, NU's current search function will only show the EXACT result as that shown in the associated title part but what if someone were to mix both traditional and simple chinese in the title? That just increases the difficult of search. All I'm asking is a way to make a translator's life easier but merging both the use of traditional and simplified into one.
for now, try search partially. keep back-spacing the words one at a time. at least that's how i do it alternatively, go by author's name. or, just ask in the forum (best result) in fact, i've been pushing for a dedicated author's page (a la mangaupdates' for years). a dedicated page, imho, is a lot better, because it can list (and be searchable) all known iteration of author's name. perhaps when tony's back from SH, it could be one of the thing's he'll do.
This actually would be good too. Referring to my translator friend's case, one of the novels she picked out had TWO DIFFERENT TITLES for the same novel. I know it sounds crazy, but she checked the summary, the first chapter and the author name was the same. This was the title of the novel: Title number one: 逆天九小姐:帝尊,别跑! Title number two: 云家小九超皮哒 At that time, she didn't know how to search for author's name so another translator pointed out that the plot and the summary seemed to be the same and she had to drop her stockpile.
i've actually seen such cases quite often. qidian/webnovel is quite the frequent culprit. jjwxc second. though they do share quite similar reasons. 1. adaptations (to drama, webtoon etc), or 2. physical book publishing.
Welp. I'm glad I haven't encountered such a case yet.....or have I without being aware of it? Hopefully would have that omnipotent search function soon. Thank you!!
before i forgot, you can also use google for searching both title and author. just add "site:novelupdates.com" at the end. example: Code: 我欲封天 耳根 site:novelupdates.com
I've always used this for raw titles and author names: With any of what I'm searching for replacing _ but if you're gonna use this method make sure to use the full URL with wwwor you'd be encountering results from the forum too.