Westernification of novels

So recently I applied to a translation company, and they don't advertise as such, but they heavily focus on absolute westernification of chinese novels.
Meaning, if the name is in chinese, they want it to be changed to american or some other crap.
If the story is about fighting in heaven, they want you to change it to some music competition.

Basically, I never knew there are things like this going on. Is this really normal? To completely change the novel via translation. Is it even legal? Because it seems kinda not. (doubt rises to stealing content, and presenting it as new western books)
Do people even prefer this over standard way of translating novels? leaving names and theme original?

Note. if you ever come across Transn (company in china). stay away. cunts are unreliable. and might be scammers

 

Context matters. If they change it to a point where it is unrecognizable, then it's legal since it's so screwed it might as well be original work lol.

 

It depends on if they are the copyright holder or not.
Is it ireader?

 

No, it is not normal, but there seems some kind of new ideals or trend or whatever it is that is been going on for a while now and for some reason alot of people think it is normal, if you ask me it is racist XD

 

It's not racist. It's stealing content.

 

Yes, that is another way to interpret it XD

 

Does that even count as a translation? That's more like an abuse of creative license tantamount to plagiarism. That is the vibe I'm getting.

 

i wish I knew before I applied <.<

 

Remind of the Icelandic translation of Dracula "Powers of Darkness" where the author-translator change the entire story differently from original

 

Well, it's not like it's all one way, lots of "Chinified" things out there like songs and movies. It's just that the audience is the Chinese, so you don't hear the complaints over the language barrier.

 

uf. that sounds problematic.

 

Yeah, some people like to white wash the stories into something more culturally appropriate. Sounds like a trashy place to work to me~

 

It really depends. One client that I've had was had more of a romance focus, and they wanted most things to be localized, I didn't find much of a trouble with that, because, well the content was quite similar to chick-flicks...

 

For TransN specifically, Wuxiaworld has worked with them twice on a small scale (one or two novels) on the procurement side. Overall, the quality of work produced was pretty good (although we were super picky with their translators), and they were also good at production output. However, we eventually ended the partnership as we had enough homegrown translators of our own and it just wasn't necessary.

Regarding Westernification of novels - I strongly suspect this is something client-requested, as TransN is a 'middleman agency' and I doubt they would make such major decisions without client request. They don't license novels or a platform (last I checked), they just provide translators as a service to companies who want their stuff translated.

 

Robotech, Voltron, Speed Racer, Pokemon, Battle of the Planets, Power Rangers, and a bunch more titles have no idea what you are talking about right now.

 

thanks for the input.

btw. is ww hiring any more tls? shameless shilling

 

We're more focusing on the Korean side for now, as we have a pretty good supply of Chinese translators, but thanks for asking. I'm under the vague impression that you really didn't like us though?