The Dark pits of Novel Commercialization

Ah, no, not really, I didn't misunderstand, that's exactly what I meant.

Any sort of writing can always be improved by an editor, which includes translation, it's why all companies that work with printed books have them, an outside view can always find some way to improve your work no matter how good it is.

Again, there is no problem with doing it the way you are doing, you bring high quality releases after all, but I can see how it just isn't worth the effort to try and make your "good" as "even better".

I do agree it would be very hypocritical if you tried to enforce something you yourself didn't follow though! xD
Just saying that if you wanted the quality all around the team to be at the highest, you'd have professional editors working on the whole site's releases... Which is... Well, pretty unfeasible to say the least, considering how you wouldn't earn a single more dime for it and your revenue would probably drop drastically.

 

Well legally u r right ...
I can't hate nor disrespect something lawful
I am sorry for that

But to change the view is different
Qdian s way of doing is just not suitable for me ( though no one would care about that)
There premium system is just total bullshit..
BULLSHIT!
Crunchyroll and other legal sites uses subscription polices to for its users making it more transparent .

But qdian use some Spirt stone
To complement the premium as result the money one would spent is lot higher a lot higher...
That's the thing I hate most getting cheated..
We all know people would get addicted to novels ( yes its a truth)
And qdian is trying to use the addiction for fast money making ...
If they want they could solve this premium nonsense in more standard approachable way.

Its like playing a PAY TO WIN GAME .
were no matter how hard we try we won't beat the game .

I don't hate qidan nor WW because I don't have the right...

Since its there property but I will say I hate their way of doing things

 

Mm, I believe the topic here wasn't "can writing be improved by an editor" but if Wuxiaworld maintains an "site-wide standard of high quality". The answer, to me at least, is 'yes'. 'Highest' is by definition a comparative term which means higher than everyone else, and I'd argue that Wuxiaworld is just that in the industry we are in - the highest quality Asian webnovel translation site. If you are using 'highest' to mean 'cannot be improved any further', then what you are really saying is 'perfect', and perfection does not exist in any industry.

That's why the whole 'even better' comment feels like a bit of a strawman to me. There are always things that you can do to make something 'even better'. Why stop at one editor? Why not get a line editor, a copy editor, a proofreader, and more? Heck, we can even say that we should go and get editors on the level of legends like Max Perkins; if I wanted the quality all-around to be at the 'highest', I would only use not just 'professional' editors, but industry-leading editors on every book, right?

Just because something could be 'even better' doesn't mean quality doesn't matter. You choose the standard you believe is necessary, and then you do what is necessary to meet it. Other sites have chosen their standards, and that's their business. I've chosen what I feel is a high quality standard for Wuxiaworld, and judging from the lack of complaints regarding Wuxiaworld's quality I'd daresay that I've chosen the right standard and that we are meeting it

Complete horse feathers. I never solicited donations because I never needed to (the queue never ran empty), and as soon as ad revenue was stable and close to donations I got rid of it later. I could have easily chosen to keep accepting donations, and at $80 a chapter and 400-500 chapters to go I would've gotten $40k in donations from the remaining chapters with ease (which I then translated anyway). When was the last time you gave up a guaranteed $40k?

Tell you what, I'll offer you a little wager. If you can show a screenshot of me saying 'please donate for our server costs' in even ONE chapter of CD after we put in ads after the site grew big, much less 'every', I'll donate $1000 to a charity of your choice. If you cannot, you donate $100 to a charity of my choice and offer me apology. What do you say?

 

Ah, your site certainly has a high standard all across it! I never denied that! ^^)/

Hmmmmm... Yeah, perfect is too much for sure, my point was more along the lines that on published books it is generally expected for it to go through at least one editor and a few revisions before publishing, but I think everyone knows that this is impossible when you make daily or faster releases.

Which is why I said from the start that HnM_Pete didn't have a point, because improving the work beyond what you already do is... Either unfeasible, or an absolute waste of time and money.

Essentially, there is no policy that makes the quality of the site as high all across it, but you make sure it is very high on all works anyway, otherwise you wouldn't have even hired the translator. Which is much more than enough.

 

This is my personal opinion but there has to be some form of social responsibility in the community as a whole. Reading is one of the best way of learning/improving your English with a degree of permanence you won't find from classroom lessons. This is especially so for countries where the standard of English is noticeably lacking.

The English curriculum in such countries tend to be lacking and focus more on rote learning and examinations rather than actual usage. In those cases, reading becomes more important than ever and given how much more accessible light novels/web novels are in general, such novels might just end up as gateway books to draw non-native speakers into the language. Now imagine for a second, if someone who just picked up the language or is trying to learn the language is exposed to some low-quality translation novel and takes it to be the gospel truth, what kind of damage would that cause?

That's why such matters shouldn't just be about money or hobbies, there has to be some form of social responsibility. I'm not arguing that everyone has to have perfect English but at the very least put in effort to make sure that you aren't screwing someone over for peanuts.

To a lesser extent, not realizing this causes our current standards to continuously drop. Focus on quantity by the readers is still the main issue but as for the TL side, it would be helpful if people realized this.

PS: Just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt.

 

Take this against me; but how about we making the authors post video talking the shit out of his stories instead, there's always a subtitle.

 

Do you mind if I steal this as a R-18 translation scene fanfiction plot?

 

If you don't want to read ,yes I don't have picture evidence ,because why would I bother with this 2-3 years ago.
If you want to read :
I am not one to throw mud on a person without a reason. ,but I will just tell you exactly what I remember.

You say "I could have easily chosen to keep accepting donations" ,but people who have plenty of money can sacrifice near-future profit for overall much more profit. At that time your job was working with politic relations stuff or something of the line. Wasn't your WW project a hobby that turned into something you wanted to keep investing yourself in? You are a smart person and the decisions you made were good enough to promote more and more your site and your overall good popularity.

After CD popularity exploded and so your (new) site as well ,and of course CN novels became mainstream ,you decided to recruit other translators and the works they translated on WW .Many agreed of course, because why not ,so much more potential readers for their work and $$ donations.

Most (silent majority) readers were happy ,others were not like me for a few reasons.
We enjoyed going to read on other sites ,because WW had a really big problem / Ads / and few other which turned us away.
The *Ads* problem wasn't a small one - from videos adds playing in background taking bandwidth to malicious intrusion ads.
One other notable problem was a crashes from being DDossed constantly.

But my personal gripe was how for each CD chapter ,you said that you need more donations / money / to keep the site afloat when the donation bar showed crazy amount of money.
So when one of the other novel translators decided to stop hosting the work they were translating on their site and move entirely on WW ,I was one of the few that expressed our disagreement.
Then I got angry when I saw you posting on the other translator site, like it's all fine and dandy as long as you bring in more profits. So I responded with a rant of course.
As I said in previous post ,yes I was surprised when next day you said in short " No more donations "

You can virtue signal all you like ,but please don't be a total two-faced person.
It reminds me of one thread on Reddit that claimed on x day Trump subreddit exploded with comments and popularity and OP claimed it was because of paid Bots ,but a few comments later people who remember what happened come out and say "That day Pulse shooting happened and only Trump's subreddit had information about it".

 

There are very few Asian novel translations that are as well-done as yours. For what are basically ad-supported translations, it's hard to complain about the quality. What about when you publish those translations as e-books? I've never purchased an e-book published by WW or any of its translators because when I compare the quality of the translations on your site to e-books from large publishers, I find them lacking. Do you hire an editor to clean everything up before you publish your translations as an e-book?

Also, I think you mentioned that you'll be implementing a crowdsourced editing thing on your site? Do you have any news on how that'll work or what your expectations for it are?

Edit:
Does WW retain or reserve e-book publishing rights for the translations of other translators on the site?

 

As I don't read anything from WW, I can only especulate on what I heard, but I think the quality of their e-books are a lot bigger than the online releases.

That is because I remember other threads in the past talking about making and selling those e-books, and someone (probably @Guan Zhong ) talking how a lot of work goes into making a translation into e-book, and they can't simply take their raw translation and put it on e-book and put it for sale.

... My memory on this is a bit fuzzy though, it's been a long time since I last read a thread about it. So take it with a grain of salt.

 

Yes ma'am, absolutely right. We overhaul the ebooks heavily, and not just with editing. ISSTH, for example, we're paying tens of thousands of dollars to get the ebooks into the shape that we want it to be in, both in terms of style and other things! That's why we're not trying to rush things and just push books out willy-nilly. We're trying to do it right when we're asking for people's hard-earned money!

 

I believe it's the first issue that someone is comparing a xuanhuan novel with wuxia novel in terms of 'flavor', writing style and content. Wuxia novels are slow paced but full of details while xuanhuan novels tend to be like repetitive content to waste time.

Bao you doing an awesome job.

 

The solution is simple, if a translation is horrible it should not appear on Novel Updates.


PS Least I forget. BURN THEM ALL!!
Where are the book burning kings when you need them? Tssk


To be fair a good number of the popular translators started as MTL according to their own words eg Rainbow Turtle.
Like in any industry, you vote with your patronage but given that many readers prefer to use pirate, lack of readers can prevent good translators from continuing since they assume there is a lack of interest.
MTLs can improve....right?

 

Only saw this now, sorry if I'm necro'ing, but there's another facet you haven't considered in this. Novels need individual attention, because they're written by different writers and have different styles. That can potentially die in a translation, and while that's not always bad(I edit WMW, there's a reason you didn't see infinite exclamations every chapter after a point) an overarching editing department would only make it worse. On top of that, there's surprisingly few editors available on the scene, I dare say even fewer than translators. Of course, when I say that I mean editors at a standard where I can confidently say they're not going to derp on the semantics of the translation without knowing it.

And therein lies the problem of editing a translation: you need to find someone who's not only good with the target language, but also understands well enough the semantics of the source. And honestly, that's something you build up. With the quality expected on WW right now, even the me that actually did manage to qualify to be an editor more than a year ago is someone we wouldn't want right now.

Given all this, most professional editors wouldn't want to touch a WIP novel with a ten-metre-long stick, the potential pay isn't really worth the kind of dedication it takes to keep everything working and up-to-date. Honestly, the best option is still one-man teams even when you're looking for quality.

 

we will wait...

already saw its

 

... And that is why I didn't at any point say I agreed with HnM_Pete's point?

I said that WW indeed deed nothing to assure that the overall quality of the site was as high as possible, I never said it was a good or even feasible idea to try that out.

The very fact that they go through a through editing whe making the ebooks already show that there is room for improvement on their translation, but the current translation scene simply cannot, and probably will not, have this kind of super rigorous site-wide quality standard.

WW's policy is probably as good as it can get, they have a certain standard, and nobody that is below the standard can work with them. This assures the quality of everything on the site is always pretty high, which is pretty much the best you can get on the current format.


But yes, you are right that a professional editor would probably derp hard when seeing the style of xianxias! xD

Which means... They'd probably not take the job.

 

No, I'm saying there's no TL scene where an overarching editor team would work. With the source language expertise you'd need for that, you're basically a translation checker at that point.

 

U can get a headache reading bad quality translation, even death

 

Commercialization has its pros and cons.

So far depending on who you ask. some may say there are more pros than cons. but ultimately I just want a good story to be accessible, whether or not it get official translation or non official translation.