Webnovel, wow

do they pay?
yesss some do that~ well not surprise thing for this cat~ entertainment and hobby stuff can reach ridiculous price, hmmm example perhaps plants hobby~ some plants can reach few thousand usd for it price~
well this cat just read free stuff cuz imo wn not worth it, LN maybe hmm sure some title worth but j-club only accept credit card no? and this cat have none~ consider these cat have no need for credit card for live hmmm nah~
oh well people can charge as much as they want as long as people still pay it~
btw it remind this cat about Breeding Season patreon, a porn flash game that was disaster of delay lol~ back then this cat have similar opinion~ do people pay for this?

 

Yeah, they r super expensive. As a jobless high schooler, I cheated and made around 50 emails to get the daily three free passes on Webnovel. I used gmail, protonmail, yandex, and excite. I also made a whole album for the screenshots of all my emails and their passwords. Still wondering if this is actually illegal and I’m a criminal.
Btw, this was over summer break and when I was reading like 15 hrs a day during a pandemic. Confession: I’m a bit of an addict.

 

This is called commercialism, monopoly (at least an attempt), and capitalism

 

Don't mind me, I just mine some nuffies in here

 

Iirc, there was a post that the author is not paid if you unlock it using the freebies you get daily. This was the time when spirit stones was still the currency. I am not sure about now since they are using coins and fast pass, but it probably is.

 

I am willing to pay if the translation of actually good on Webnovel. That's why I pay for novels like: Nano Machine,
NEET Receives a Dating Sim Game Leveling System and Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint. But if the translation is trash of obviously MTL I would rather just pirate, thats the entire reason why Qidian Underground is a thing.

 

You don't have to concern yourself on how they cost, their target are those few whales that would actually pay to read their novels. Because who are you kidding, even if they're cheaper I highly doubt that you'd still pay for WN/LNs. I'm still glad that someone is willing to pay for these novels though, and grateful for the bots that copy their content.

 

This is just wrong... translating is damn hard, is even harder if you speak/read both languages at a near fluency level. If it takes you 5 minutes to read a piece, it will take you about 1h to translate it to any decent level; if you don't mind broken grammar and use of foreign words then you can do it in about half that time.

Ironically is easier if you are only intermediate level of the second language.

 

Which part of translating other than finding the right words sometimes, which is a half-minute-googlesearch away, is hard? Catching the meaning in some idioms or explaining things? Honestly, the translating takes around twice as long as the reading in most cases, after which you can add between the reading and twice the reading time for editing. In the rather uncommon cases where there are very hard to translate parts, it may take you another 5-15 min for just those parts, but putting out a 2000 words translated chapter absolutely doesn't ever take more than an hour, if it is even significantly over half an hour.
Do you translate often?
I can at least tell you that I don't have any problem translating spanish or English, which both aren't maternal languages for me (but I am fluent in both), texts at that speed (depending on the text content I may be faster or slightly slower, like I would take around an hour for legal mumbojumbo, and perhaps a quarter hour for an elementary school text) and that is despite me not translating regularly.

I respect authors a lot more because anyone can translate given enough time, but not everybody can write great stories. Not to disrespect translators, as I am still thankful for their work, as it would make more sense to learn the other language than try to constantly read pure mtl, both of which are bothersome. That said, obviously there are authors, editors and translators I respect more and some I respect less, depending on what they put out. You wouldn't respect the author of a shitty trash-novel for more than being somewhat creative and posting it, and you wouldn't respect a great translator who works a lot to put out daily translations that read very well less than a mediocre author.

 

not a translator but id think that translating between languages that have very different grammar systems is pretty hard

 

chinese is a bitch to translate compared to french -> English (from experience). I've been doing it so long and ironically, the more I tl, the worse I feel like my work is bc there's still so much to learn.

places like wn demand a lot of chapters weekly, way too many to be done without proper compensation. Nobody would want to work their ass off and stress over a deadline for nothing lol. It's not a hobbyist thing anymore so it's only natural they'd want readers to pay. Though tbh, idk how flying lines hasn't been DCMA'd yet.

 

I dont know, you can buy full length novels for the price of a couple of chapters that's even factoring in printing cost which by all rights make a product more valuable than its digital equivalent.

 

I wouldn't mind paying a monthly subscription if it was at a reasonable price (~$5), but there's no way I'm ever gonna pay per chapter.
I don't even buy ebooks or proper novels unless they're way cheaper than any physical edition I can find (not used), so there's no way I'm gonna buy something I'm unlikely to ever read again.

 

If what you say is true, I suggest quitting your day job and becoming a full time translator, you will make a fortune. The industry standard is 2,000 to 3,000 words per day on average. That is what is expected from a full time worker on translating agencies. Obviously it changes from company to company and from translator to translator, having said that I have worked on a proper TL company before and we were expected to pull 500-750 word per hour but it was from English to Spanish, from Asian languages to either English or Spanish the high rates skyrocket and the word per hour goes down.

Btw, the faster translator I have met from Asian languages pulls a measly 1,000 words per hour, and he is not typing but using speech-to -text software. so in the best case scenario I can think of it would take him 2h to finish, adding next the editor/proofreader, it would be two and a half hours work. So your one hour estimation is way off the mark.

 

ngl this post is making me think maybe i should try translating LOL