News Centinni: Behind the Scenes

dang it!

Their announcement is shady!!!





THIS IS VOLUNTEER WORK YOU SAYYYY!!!

 

geez ya guys only want tea huh

 

Public image and integrity is important in business yall~

Being too greedy isn't going to last very long. Also I'm confused about the person who said nobody knew OP was leaving until they got hate for this post. Is that suggesting that A) OP has an obligation to inform everyone publicly that they're leaving, or B) Upper management never told you because you're unrelated? If this was an argument in favor of the translation group, please try again.

Also, for whatever circumstance actual reality happened, revealing personal information and lying is pretty much a black mark in reputation. "I did it because I was angry" isn't really an apology.

 

Treated fairly like the translator get proper compensation or so. She got less than half (15%)of what was promised (35%)and got even less than the supposed editor(25%)?!?!.

or do you say the editor also get less than half of what was promised? the poster as well? Lets hypothetically say that was true; translator get only 15% of the supposed 35%. the editor should get 10% of the promised 25% and the poster get like 4%. So that means the tax is... 40%?????

 

say... is this professional?

 

It's precisely because your attitude is like this that this whole thing is blowing up even more. Why not, instead of replying to the messages here, you actually move to rectify the situation. You are just deliberately giving more bad pr to translators. Heck, centinni is attached to your name. Everyone knows your affiliation and with the way you're acting you're giving them an even more bad rep.

So please, for the sake of the translators of your group, take responsibility and act like a fucking professional.

 

Ummm..the stated total is $347(and I can't find any counterpoint to this). kitket was supposed to get $121 (35%) but she got only $54 (15%).
If you say only $125 from the supposed $347 is left due to what you said, does that mean server maintenance+kofi commision,etc cost $200???

 

shady right? hahaha

 

Bad remarks in DMs? I think they're trying to advise you ah my dear centinni

 

I've been lurking on this thread for a while and I wanted to throw in my two cents on the issue.

Dear Centinni translators, it's nothing personal. I don't even read your translations. I'm not here to complain about the quality of your translations or about the poaching incidents that your translation group has been involved in. I'm not bashing you, Centinni translators. I mean, Centinni translators are coming in and saying that they have no idea about this until now. Ignorance is bliss. Or rather, continuing to be oblivious may help you avoid this whole drama. Who knows? Maybe it'll work, and your (and the readers') money won't be scammed. Parts of the whole do not necessarily mean you are all implicit. Nor does it go the other way around. No, what I am going to talk about is the owners of Centinni and maybe whoever was behind the public announcements-oh wait, that will be the owners of Centinni. So I suppose I'm mainly bashing the owners of Centinni. Please don't feel like I'm attacking you, Centinni translators. I actually know some of you (Look at my friendly, sincere smile!!)


I think that Centinni needed--and still needs--more transparency. I'm mainly concerned about the owners of Centinni and their management of this translation group. Honestly, the group needs better management of how they are paying their translators and the respective teams. There were monetary issues where the 90% payment changed to 70%, but even with that change, Kitket didn't get the 35% that they were supposed to get from the new 70% payment rate. What happened to the rest of that money?


Fan translations are a moral gray area, yes, but when you say "Hey, we're going to PAY YOU. You will get xx%", then you better deliver on those promises. What I found amusing is how Centinni claims that Kitket "wanted more than [they] were due," that they "were greedy," but Kitket clearly stated that they didn't care about the money (refer to the screenshots in OP's wordpress page). Quality was more important than quantity. So please explain what you are basing your claims off of. Moreover, the conversations between Tinni and Kitket about the Russian machine translation also gives off a very bad feeling. Basically, the co-translator and the Russian (machine) translation are being forced upon Kitket despite their vehement refusal. Please explain or provide screenshots of how you (Centinni) have actually listened to Kitket and dropped the Russian machine translation. Don't use the same screenshots that Kitket has already provided.


Heck, Centinni, you even need better public announcements. Maybe get a proper public relations team, or a editor/proofreader at least. The public statement that Centinni gave definitely had a vast amount of room for improvement in terms of professionalism, clarity, cohesion, grammar, organization, and sentence fluency. TL/DR, it was a bunch of words and reminded me of a student rambling words to try to bs their way through an English paper when they only skimmed the book. Maybe this student didn't even read the book, and went off of Wikipedia and SparkNotes.


Speaking of English papers, what happened to your evidence to support your claims? The screenshots Centinni provided are of super poor quality (now better with the Google doc) and basically offer no other information. What's new is the screenshot of the groupchat at the end, but there is no other context or explanation given aside from your claim. Do you have any more "proof" for your claims? How about actually addressing some of the other issues?


Next, the lack of professionalism in how the issue was handled. The discord announcements used text-speech. The note in the recent chapter of Possessing Nothing literally used text-speech. Even the official statement used text-speech. These statements and announcements already lose in terms of professionalism and credibility. This isn't an academic workspace, but you are representing your translation group. Instead of seeming righteous and what-have-you, you appear very petty and immature. Grow out of your text-speech for official statements, this isn't a casual matter. Furthermore, there was no neutral tone used towards the translator after their resignation. It is not professional to name-call and ping everyone in the server to make an announcement calling someone a "traitor." Others have pointed this out already, but I really have to ask: why say you want to keep this drama out of the public eye (paraphrasing) if you yourself ping the "everyone" role and share it yourself first? The note in the recent chapter of the novel also confronts the previous translator with words such as "We just want to say, were we rude to u ever? Or was it our too much kindness that made people feel like they may crush it whenever they feel like? We know we couldn't pay u high, because we are a new translator group..." etc. (I had to fight the urge to fix the text-speech and grammar.)


So, here we are. Was this keeping the drama out of the public eye? Was this neutral? Was this even necessary?


The answer is a big, flat "No." This is playing the emotional card and to be frank, it screams, "White Lotus." (Centinni, are you sure about your name? Even my autocorrect thought you were a "centipede," not a "white lotus.")


And again, publicly revealing the private information of your translators after they have left is not appropriate. Yes, people share their information on the internet, but it is not going to win you any points for "maturity" and "professionalism" for doing so afterwards. Again, you are supposed to be the owners of a translation group. If this is your behavior now, then this will most likely be your behavior in the future with other translators and staff. Hey, Centinni translators (and other staff), please tell me how you still feel safe staying in this group. I genuinely want to know. Please don't feel offended, I am simply curious. I promise this isn't an attack on you!!

 

(Actually, I'm going to complain of your quality after all, Centinni. What is up with the image quality of your screenshots on the page? I hope it's not the same for any images on other posts on your page. I mean, I know Asians like me have relatively smaller eyes, but I really had to squint to try to make out the words. I felt like I was at the optometrist's for an eye exam when I simply wanted to sip the tea. So yes, Centinni, I'm really going to have to complain about your quality. My eyes do not need to get any smaller, thank you very much. How dare you make me squint!!)

 

Centipede-I mean Centinni-, get your act together! You're supposed to be a translation group, not a flaming barrel of tea! You're not even FRESH tea! Give me back my time spent on you!

It was hard work typing out these letters
As a poster, I think I deserve to be paid. Here I am, helping you gain more attention by commenting in this thread. It's hard work typing out these letters one by one.

That will be 35%-no,i mean 70%-no Frick, I mean 90%. Actually, just give me all the money.
Instead of WE DO NOVELS. it should be WE DO MTLS or WE DO BULLSHIT.

"We do novels" how can u engaged in sexual intercourse with novels bro, excuse my dirty mind.
We do scams, We do garbage,
We do nothing but quality work you should read bc we r unprofessional and mentally 5 yr old spoiled brats.

Wait actually, I think you guys can do yourselves a better job than how you do other things, cuz from what I can see, this little situation here has gotten rather big~

Stop poaching projects, you money-grubber! Work on your translation quality first before you spread yourself out on others' projects! People pay you to read good quality content, not for gibberish! If they wanted MTL, they could go mtl it themselves! For FREE

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ugLzm4nJ4gnuM0W3rT7lvmDalg-JZk0-V5GHSzgBlks/edit?usp=sharing

 

Centinni:

First of all, we would like to apologize to lanji/Kitkat. We did not intend to blame you or anyone else, but the situation spiraled out of control and turned into a blame game: which wasn’t what we intended. This incident in general has been handled very poorly, so we are changing how things work in Centinni. Many things have gotten completely out of hand and if there had been better communication, things might not have blown up to this degree. We are working hard to resolve these issues and adding new policies to prevent something like this from happening again. We ask you all for your understanding at this time as we work hard on re-evaluating everything having gone through this, and we thank you all for the comments (both good and bad), as they have helped to show where we need improvement.

During this time, we ask you all for patience as we take a step back to work on the things we are lacking. Please do not send any hate comments to staff in Centinni. This incident has affected more people than those who were actually involved and they don’t deserve any frustration being taken out on them.

We will be working on improving our communication. We have had a discussion in our staff server and have implemented an open channel for any complaints or issues so that there will be transparency. This is also so that any issues that may arise will be dealt with fairly and impartially, with all staff being able to comment and add their thoughts for any changes that will take place. We do not want a repeat event where another staff member will feel any sort of dissatisfaction, and most certainly not in private conversations.

We will also be looking over our staff payment system and ensuring that pay is correct and paid on time. We have already paid Kitkat the amount that was owed for the last pay cycle. Her pay for this pay cycle, along with the rest of the staff, will be distributed at the current agreed on rates for this month on pay day. We will also be looking into the tax issue, as some comments have mentioned that the mentioned tax rate was too high. We are all still new at this and have not had any experience dealing with this. Moving forward we will be re-evaluating how any profits will be split for all paid staff members, and the work they provide.

In regards for the Tax issue: We would like to tell you all that the tax which is required to be paid, is different for different slabs of income, for us, its 20% and with reductions it goes down to 18%, this is from India and you can check the tax laws there here, (https://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/acts/income-tax-act.aspx). You can read everything about the laws there, as for some people saying it is being deducted from the translator’s pocket, it isn’t true. And also, for the Paypal fees, the fees are being paid by us as well, to everyone, we would like to let staff be paid as much as we can. After all fees and taxes are paid there is a take of less than 12% from that 30% (not paid to translation teams), and part of that goes to any unexpected costs as we try to maintain and support the website.

Going forward from here, we hope that you will all continue to support the hard working and dedicated staff on our team who work tirelessly on providing you with quality novel and manga translations.

We look forward to any comments and advice that will help us to improve our community as a whole.

Sincerely,

Centinni staff.

 

Haha you guys are contradictory.

First its fan translations no need to act like big ass companies but now you want people to act professional lol.

Someone mentioned age earlier, it is relevant.
This is probably the first time they are running a website or business.

I find this all normal

@Kiki0246 I keep seeing ridiculous numbers like yours the past week. $0.50 for 1,000 views is ridiculous.
No one gets that unless you are maybe Wuxiaworld with 30 million views per month
Oh wait, you said $0.50 for translators which means it's more than $0.50 per 1,000 views.
Even with Header bidding I am sure Wuxiaworld doesn't get that high consistently.

Also, this will be a good opportunity to correct a misconception. Getting 1,000 does not mean that all 1,000 earn.
Only 500 might earn and it called 50% Active View Viewable
People just keep throwing out numbers out here that make no sense lol

https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3481946?ctx=tltp&hl=en

• Active View Viewable: The percentage of impressions that were viewable, out of all measurable impressions.
  
  All viewable ads are measurable, because you can't confirm that an ad has met the criteria for viewability unless it can be measured. For example, say the ads on your site had 100 measurable impressions. That means there were 100 impressions where Active View tags were able to measure viewability. If only 10 of those 100 impressions were measured as viewable, then the site would have 10% Active View Viewability. This metric only includes impressions from regular AdSense for content, AdSense for video and AdSense for games ad units, it doesn't include data from link units, or data from dynamic allocation in Google Ad Manager.
  
  

 

Wtf on the income tax. According to this article, you don't need to pay income tax for overseas employees if they are not Indian (for tax purposes). Do you even have an accountant guiding you on your company accounts? This is just bs. If there's any payment going around, especially on vague things like 30% of something, you need written and signed contracts and you need to keep proper accounting for transparency. You're just being shifty af. I hope you get fined for bs business practices, especially since you've shown you're a registered company in your country. I so understand the "is OP Indian" question now. Even that person knew something was wrong with you taxing them if you don't know for sure if OP is Indian.

 

Well we don't expect them to act like big companies. We just wanted them to have some decency to not implicate the group further based on the actions of one or two members.

I mean replying in sarcasm wouldn't help their cause at all, would it?

I get that this may be their first time running a site, and they've probably learned from this event, but it doesn't cost anything to not write libelous things about another human being. Even if it was out of anger on their part.

 

Well,, they are human.
They cannot be professional from the getgo.
Also, age is relevant. These people might be younger than you expect.
The average age on here is younger than you might be comfortable believing haha

Something very important that everyone needs to realize.
People might call it fan translations to ease their guilt but lets not kid ourselves
These are free to read translations that someone is paying for.
For these to stay free to read, a group has got to be exploited

• Translators (Exploited with crap pay/Opportunity Cost)
• Readers(Exploited with crap translations)

You just take your pick. This is what happens when things are free or prices are ridiculously low.
And those who think anyone earn $200,000 from 200,000 ad views, please don't reply since you have no idea what you are talking about.
The same way we get low prices for goods and child labor and work abuse is the result.
Personally, I rather exploit advertisers

 

From what I read in another post, it seems that the "accountant" is non-existing with the only way they learned about TAX even existing is because their father told them it does.

 

Welp, we have some dubious tax shenanigans going on then. Chances of a fine are high if anyone in the government starts looking for more money.