Question Unwritten Rules of Novel Translation?

Happy Holidays everyone

I just want to clarify something, is it a written or an unwritten rule for novel translations that whoever TLed and released first gets the claim? Any inputs are welcome

 

is more about being a courtesy than a rule, since we are dealing with fans most of the time, not people that own the rights of the work.
and i do find people fighting for tl pretty stupid, this is just me, of course, since both tl's could do more with their lives than fighting over some novel to tl, is not like we lack fish in the sea for them to TL, thus unless we have extreme circunstancies i would just move on to new work , as this is my primary stance.
plus i'm aware that some works makes more money than others and thus some people may think that having another tl trying to take a bite of that may be wrong and be offended but if you don't have the rights to translate it anyway is all moody, people are free to do what they want to do.
if it was me; as the gentleman i'm, i would not do it if there was someone else doing it, unless i feel that i could do a better job, release better tl's, faster as well and even in those circumstances i would still think twice about doing it since as long the other tl's is doing fine job i would not enter that swamp since as i said before there is a lot fish in this sea, thus only really extreme cases i would do it!!
edit:
But i would not judge the person who does it as i said, is all moody if we are still in the fan scenery and unless the guy is not doing it as beef against the tl or the group the other guy is in, i don't see anything wrong with that as well, so as i wrote before as long the guy doing it have good intentions in mind and believe he can do better job and really do a better job, i'm happy for them as well.

 

you can always ask the current translator if you can translate the novel as they are slow or just join them to work together on it.
However in the case of joining: If you're planning on releasing the translation also on your own site, you should first ask the original translator if they are ok with it. There was once a drama about a translator doing that without any notice and in the end nobody translated that novel further for 2 years or so.

 

The two parties would need to discuss it if they are released close together. Say if both of them release the first chapter within two days of each other.

If you release chapters 1-5 at a regular interval and someone else releases chapter 6 immediately afterwards however, that is considered sniping. The other group is trying to take the first translator's readers. This is considered very rude and the readers will despise the new group if the translation quality is not up to par.

 

'claim' of what, if i may ask?

if it's title choice, then yes, NU will prioritize the chosen title of the first/original translator, until they went inactive/drop the series. then the other translator (if any), or the new one, can request for title change**.

** for new/takeover translator, title change request will only be entertained after they have released a few chapters with the new title on their site. not before they started.

 

I completely forgot about that practice, but it gets even more "legally" treacherous when the translators or even some authors do it too, release a chapter at the end of the grace period, even authors release a chapter just before narou marks their novel as inactive during x period.

 

If you ever feel like a novel like is taking too long and the translator is a dick, just release a machine translated chapter. In a few hours or days, the original translator will release 2-4 chapters in a row, when they haven't touched the novel for months or years.

 

do they have the copyright/license/author soul/etc?
are they doing a bad translation?
are they releasing 3 chapters per week of a 6K+ ongoing novel(that doesn't have even 1000 chapters translated already)?
is $$$ involved?

it has been seen before that 2 tlrs or groups shot at one title trying to release faster than the other, for both of them burning and dropping it at the end. (sometimes with all previous translations being deleted)

 

Ya, basically how it is in this and the manga scanlation communities. But particularly in the manga scene, due to there not being such a large supply of popular manga, "thievery" is still gonna happen. Either for the traffic popular series bring or because other groups do horrid quality speed scans. That same quality reason can happen here too, but with so many web novels, it's not often.

 

The unwritten rule among translators, at least as far as I've heard, is to wait at least 3 months of inactivity after the release of the latest chapter of a novel. If the current translator still doesn't update it by then, then no one would argue you if you take it.

A lot do this, especially for popular novels and it gets really annoying. They update like once every month or not even because they know about the 3-month rule.

 

I feel like this "rule" is only bc people think NU only accepts releases after a three month hiatus. (Iirc, if it's been 30 days without a new release or if the translator has done less than 30 chapters then NU will still accept it). Edit: Realized this sounded a bit argumentative, but I agree with you so idk what I was trying to say lol

Regardless of any rules I think it's polite to contact the previous translator (even if they haven't posted anything in a long time) with your intention to continue and wait a little bit so you can at least feel like you've tried. Of course, it's all fan translation (unless you're going for some licensed works O . O) anyways so arguably it doesn't matter but speaking from a translator's perspective it's nice to have a heads up.

 

I don't pay much attention to translator drama in general, but there is one strange rule that seems to exist for whatever reason. It's the one where a ton of groups leave Japanese titles as untranslated romaji. Some of the time, it's not too bad because they're short or otherwise easy to remember. But a lot of the time, these titles are either super long or are the 20th iteration of "Akuyaku". I don't know if anyone can tell what these are without looking them up or even care what the title actually is and just use some sort of short form instead.