With how there are web novels and light novels with the whole gambit of length, there really should be a mention of how long chapters are for a series. Some series have only 6 chapters. While those chapters are an entire novels worth (say 600 pages). While another (most commonly web novels, especially from CN) are 1-2 pages worth of text in a chapter more often then not. Meaning you'd need to read 300-500 chapters or so just to get the same amount of story at times. While going by page count is of course quite subjective, and average word count per chapter would be really nice. It can be rounded to something large like say the closest 100. Just to give a ball park on how much is actually out. Since looking at a series "number of releases" is most of the time ridiculous because of the aforementioned problem. You even get other series that do chapters in parts, yet those part lengths are just as varied. With some translators only wanting to translate a page worth, to some translating half of one of those long novel chapters from before. Of course, I cannot see this feature being implemented as it would then need every novel to be updated with the new data.... and that would take a while. But it is a feature I believe is much needed. ----- On a side note, while this is mainly aimed at JP novel translators, half of those (mainly seeming to be MTL translation groups), like to place spoken text with "what is said" (who said it). It's the (name) after it that is quite ridiculous to me as 99% of the time you can tell who is saying what and it almost seems demeaning to me as a reader that they feel the need to point out who is speaking, when normally the very next sentence the person's name is mentioned. This just to me shows that it is a poor translation who doesn't understand how to translate things with ["blah blah" said John Doe]. They can use words like screamed, cried, whispered too to mix it up in their translations where appropriate. Or just not even write anything after it with just the "blah blah" and nothing saying who said it, because the context is already there. You know who spoke..... In other words, any novel that does translations like this should be marked with a tag indicating that the translator is using this pattern or just mark it as "poor translation". Again, this seems to be mainly a JP web novel translation problem with almost half doing that... I have seen 2 CN web novels and 1 KR web novel do it as well, but the rest don't. Light novel translators of any language have not been seeing translating like this though, which is good......
Thank you for saying this!!! I really need a tag like that rn cus I cannot press on link to see how long each chapter is (dies from seeing 3k+ words)
No. You can make a list and share it with other readers. You can make a thread and share it to others, and perhaps have others also add to it. But no for tags. While it can be helpful to others, it can also be harmful. People are toxic. NU might seem neutral and clean most of the time, but it's not. NU mainly relies on member edits. These members, not all of them have good intentions. In fact, not all of them even understand English with how they kept making the same mistakes even after seeing examples from others. So again, no tag. All I can see from it is the downside and the abuse it will cause.
That is true. People can be quite harsh. Though possibly instead of "poor translation", an "MTL" tag for machine translations would be nice. This doesn't necessarily mean the translation is poor, as some do edit their work, but it can still be generally seen and many don't care for MTL's and could just copy paste it themselves into an MTL at that point as well. Then again, the poor translation thing was a side note. The main thing is chapter length. That I see no reason why there cannot be a tag or section on that with the average 1k of characters a chapter has.
Pointless feature. I think Novel Updates is getting to cluttered. I would not mind if some features are removed instead. A majority of the community doesn't mind MTL crap, so that won't go away. This is not a site for professional translations so I can't complain either
Also true that there are lots of features, but I don't think a chapter length one is pointless. As some series, as mentioned, have over 200 chapters, but that barely makes up 250 pages in a light novel, while some series say they only have 6 chapters release, but have the same 250 pages worth of words. THAT is a large difference and makes it so that the "number of releases" is quite silly, giving one no way of knowing how much there actually is there to read without clicking on EVERY SINGLE ONE just to find out.....