Hii I'm bea and I want to know your thoughts about this; I would start my own translation privately and I won't have a site or any public releases... This would be a 1 to 1 thing. Everyone can suggest or request a novel/manhwa they want to be translated and they would be paying me via PayPal. the translation cost is negotiable and can be fixed, but there is a minimum rate. I saw someone did this and I wanna know if this is a bad idea or not just to be safe and stuff...
Do you trust ppl on the internet? No = this is a bad idea Yes = Until you learn a lesson and then it will become a bad idea.
Just make sure hey pay ahead of the translation, then make sure you actually do the work. Maybe try and have them pay on er per chapter basis, they pay, you deliver. No one will pay a grand sum for the whole thing before seeing the actual thing, and translating first and then getting paid is a surefire way of getting scammed. As long as everything is agreed upon ahead of time, and they pay in advance, you should be safe. Problem is finding someone who actually trusts you enough to pay in advance.
you might as well do this exclusively on patreon. but even then, maybe they can copy paste or something... Idk man. Find a way to make a client liable to pay. That should work. Ofc, your work and speed also has to be up to the task.
I think I saw the LMS translator site used to have a milestone bar on the right of the page for donation. They had like 80$ goal for chapter x sort of thing going on I believe? I'm not sure. I read it a long time ago. Also the novel is super popular too so that might be too high of a goal for lesser popular translations. But this onlyfans/novels thing you're talking about, yea. I've never seen it be done. You should have a couple of chapters out in the open for people to get a feel for the novel at least. But people are doing translations more or less for free, if you hoard a novel and translate it then not let other people read it...people might get salty. Also it might be illegal too if you don't talk with the author about it first. (Yea, now that I think about it, it definitely might be illegal to do it without permission.)
I would say this is legally and ethically wrong as you do not have the licence for whatever you are translating, thus you should not be profiting off of it like this. IMO , donations and ads are already a gray zone, this takes it past acceptable.