Anyone else annoyed by Licensing?

Don't rub it in. It takes most people at least three years to be considered competent in Japanese.

 

I like licensed publications because it give the writer some money for his hard work but unfortunately even if it gets licensed that doesnt mean it will get bought by readers. I try to buy any licensed projects I enjoy as often as I can even if I mainly read fan translated versions. But how many people just drop reading it completely just because it gets licensed and it costs them money or they are disatissfied with the translation quality or whatever. Yes some of them have crappy translations or editing or whatever but just dropping it and washing your hands of it isnt going to make things better. If you want to get better licensed works then how about buying them and when you see errors or whatever email them saying that there are errors, they may do nothing but then again they may fix it and at least then you can say you tried whatever the outcome. And who knows maybe if more people did that they might be able to translate faster.

 

i dont mean being perfect.... with the german language i have no problems writing speaking listening and reading but english i can write listen read but if i try to speak i sound like a drunken retard..... i could learn it only to to lever to be able to read easy novels and by reading reading reading and reading get better at it.... i dont need to speak japanese or understand someone speaking japanese only reading is enough...

 

there was also similar discussions about this kind of thing. my rants were shot down by wall of texts explaining how the most "popular" english translated LN publisher does its work. if it's to support the author, we can buy them in their original language. no one wants to waste their money buying only disappointment.

first, the slug-paced releases. i suspect this is due to how license renting (as said by @Kemm). to buy/rent the next volume they must rack money from the previous volumes sales. then what if the sales doesn't go well? SLOWED DOWN. then, how to do a better sales? you answer me. i can suggest things like 'speed up the publishing!' but it will hit the wall of the said rights. maybe to buy or collaborate with the already provided fan translations? also not a brilliant idea. are you saying you want to buy something you already know? i mean, if you already read the first volume of Lord of the Rings by borrowing your friend's, are you still gonna buy it? i believe it's only a handful of people who's willing to do it. the other reason not to buy is that some 'official' translations were far worse in quality compared to the unofficial, fan-translated, immoral purposed publishings.

second, the act of suddenly cutting fans' enjoyment is the main reason all the hate emerges. by simply licensing those, the publisher that originally has the right, the manpower, the money, to do commercial versions of said enjoyment, gets their own reputation dived deep. the analogy is: when you're playing your favorite game along with your friends and your dad suddenly cut off the power source saying 'time to study' how will you feel? surely there will be some who understand but majority will hate such act. and along with this hate, the supposedly good products don't sell well. and it fruits in the slow release. this loop is inevitable.

of course, there might be win-win solutions. for example....
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i give up! maybe licensing something that hasn't been fan-translated?

 

in the first place sending an email to a big company and except someone to read it is pretty much insane and i think they will try to better themselves when they see that they sales are going down....

 

I'm not. Please read what I've written. I have mentioned several ways to read it for free and I've believe I implied that there are several more ways to read it for free legally. And I have also mentioned in the three kinds of fan translators that they make series to be known outside their country of origin. I just mentioned that profiteers often tend to make more money per word per view that the author or proffessional translators with usually subpar work quality and that "anarchic translators" more often than not tend to harm the series itself due to the absolutely low quality and lack of proficiency in both the languages translated from and to most of them display.

It depends. Published novels have no legal public raws, while webnovels turned book go by a by case basis, with the three most usual ways of action being keeping it as is (usually, but not always, if the web and published versions differ enough), replace chapters comprised in the published books by summaries or shortened versions (when they are mostly identical) and deleting the original web novel. However, this happens when the novels makes the leap from web to paper, never when it gets licensed into other language.

 

cool thanks for the reply

 

Main problem is it's like buying 1/2 of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, but for them to only be 1 novel.

 

i'm not, as its author intended way to gain "extra" money, just that i'm not sort of person that buy book without knowing its content... wich mean i approve of it but wont support it ^^

- theres a saying "let them taste their own medicine"... and let them go bankrupt (the company) by licencing multiple thing with less to no customer

 

only found this site a few days ago when i finished Stellar trans

 

Its not a case of whether people read it or not because the assumption that they wont is wrong. They may or may not read it but just going "No one will read it so why bother." wont help in any way, it takes a short amount of time to send an email, so you dont really loose anything but you may gain something. And if there is a drop in sales they will assume that the story was unpopular so they will toss it, they will not think that the reason people stopped reading was they had problems with the translation.

 

I don't see anything wrong with licensed novels. Sure their release speed is slower than fan translators, but that's normal considering they have to go over everything quite a few times to ensure that nothing is wrong.

There are some problems I have with their finished product, but that's not what is inherently wrong with official translations.

 

A decent proportion of the time, their translations are worse than the fan translations. So they quite clearly don't go over things very thoroughly.

 

Most of the ones do, e.g. Mahouka. I do have a problem with localisation, but that's another problem and is not inherently 'wrong'.

No idea about SAO though, but I have seen a lot of complaints about it.

 

Almost everyone except those who received profit exluding author...

 

That's probably the best idea I've heard in awhile. At least in a perfect world. We'd still run into the same issue of them delaying releases until the previous novel stopped selling.

I dont really get why they start at such a low volume though. I mean most of the hardcore fans(who would likely buy the English translations if the companies weren't assholes) would have already read up to the latest fan translation.

Someone mentioned earlier about how often they don't finish novels(yet still keeping the license so no one else can finish it, the assholes, but that's an entirely different thing). I don't get how they don't see what they're doing kills fan interest. And stopping translating doesn't really make much can sense to me. Mass releasing a few novels should easily be able to keep the novel/company afloat and restore whatever business they've lost. If someone can pick up translating and finish 800+ chapters in a single year while still working a full time job, I don't see how that could be a problem. I mean Ren is amazing, but at even half that speed, that's like 20 LNs a year for a single part time employee.
What exactly is killing them?

Also, I have no problem with authors getting money for their work. I was complaining about the companies and the shit job they do.

 

the thing is most of the people here have unrealistic complaints, its not that they can't translate fast... there are various other factors but its so very nice to be ignorant and just nag without knowing...(and that quality of TL is not bad don't why people have this stigma that its worse than the of Fan translation when most of the time its not ) it also depends on the experience of the TL working on the project.

YP has also never dropped a LN in case of low sales and doubt that will change with Kadokawa and Hachette partnering up.

also pretty sure SAO still has active translation...

 

this is impossible, too much complications. the company must pay the volume right & fan translations but its hard to profit because theirs translation available in internet. and there is a case where the author can sue fans translator for pirating their work and must pay their pirating first before author agree too give their right in novel ( not all author like their work translated by fan illegally)

 

I feel as if your coming down too heavily on fan translators. Going against licensing doesn't make them bad. If companies want to stop that from occurring then they have to actually release the novels at a reasonably rate. And I call bullshit on a lack of professional translators and editors. There are a shit ton of them.
If they can't find translators, either they aren't looking very hard or they're offering really shitty pay.

Going off of the editing cause, I again call bullshit. They barely edit if the usually average to subpar quality is anything to go by. But not even going into that, they barely actually NEED editors.
The novel is already released in a previous official version. All they're doing is translating it, and then making sure the grammar and spelling is up to par. Occasionally they try to work around better ways to phrase certain things(because some things don't translate exactly), but that's it. They don't do what publishers and editors of a normal novel do, stay in contact with the author and occasionally help change certain things.
The only reason why they take so long is because they follow the old school of thought when in comes to releasing books. Release each novel when the previous is lowering in sales. But that doesn't really work with translations mainly because most people already have read the fan translations up to a certain point.

They need a new method to make money, not more translators or editors.

 

Yeah after releasing 1 volume of 1520 in english, the medium randomly dropped it for no fckn reason and years later I'll never know how it ends.