Why are there more people translating

My favorite thing about this is that Military personnel in japan were recording anime on VHS and then goes back to the US and trades it for Battlestar galactica..

 

stellar transformation then encouraged ren wu xing to start coiling dragon which was a prequel or novel before stellar transformation and that eventially became wuxia world

 

Let me do the longer version of that

Spoiler

Translation first started with forums + pastebin links for their chapters, then it evolved to blogsites

Baka Tsuki was then created available to a community of hobby translator, but it was so slow, next chapters would appear once a month, a volume for a year or more, just as what "hobby translation" meant

Nanodesu came upon, a more structured community version of bakatsuki (it means, people there are organized but their works appears on bakatsuki too, they also take liscensing seriously, and does not do "fanfics", it felt more like a "scanlation group" for manga ppl), some does it for hobby, some does it for studying, but frequency releases is better

Mushoku Tensei era, this is the golden age where translation started to boom, someone translated the top webnovel from Syosetu, and it exploded, people started picking up more novels in Syosetu and as well hidden gems, it grew there and chinese novel(stellar/coiling) as well korean novels(moonlight sculptor/ark) appeard,

Bring forth Coiling dragon and stellar transformation era, chinese novel exploded at a much pace than other novels, the translation speed accelerated at inhuman level, many more chinese novels appeared, japanese and korean novel has been left behind

The boom gave an oppotunity to smart pioneers like ahoupdate to appear, which later on superseded by a lot more superior novelupdates.

however, this was the beginning of a darkside of novel translation community,

Donation *cough*Paid*cough* advance chapter,awful ads poping here and there, BAD Machine Translation and Unedited Machine Translation, and sudden re emergence of yenpress and stealing the sudden popular jp novels

Many of those hobby translator of golden era was negatively affected on those things, specially those who are really active translators who releases a large volume of update at high update frequency.
Ther was even a fight in community regarding the ethics of translation.... you never ask for money or donation wall on advance chapters, and MTL is not allowed to be vetoed as released translation.
One by one, our old generations japanese translators left, one of the highly affected novel is Mushoku Tensei, which i remember were left by BAD Machine Translation (machine translation, but edited by a someone that has zero knowledge on japanese, thus edited version produced an entirely difference sentence than what it actually mean, some even added few sentence themselves that was not in the original)
Old jp gen translator, left the community because of it
Japanese tl took a downfall, and jp hidden gems has disappeared, old hidden gems has been left behind (thank mr wujigege for reviving lots of them)

Now, paid advance ch,and mtl, became a norm, but the unlawful edited mtl is atleast gone(?)
also there were no "ad revenue" back then, but im totally fine with this one, its a bit of help we can atleast provide to our wonderful translators.

but a new dilemma had appeared,
chapters are now locked in paywalls,
Q People has been kidnapping CN novels, and even KR novels now too!

the history is repeating itself

 

Thank you for the history lesson. Perhaps because it is still a small community, not enough rules in place (laws in the future maybe but idts) to stop such atrocities from happening. Having to pay to read does sound awful but isn't that how books work too? You basically have to purchase books (but I get it, these novels don't belong to them and often, they don't have the official rights to translate)

 

Well originally, the novels being translated are from sources that also provides free reading.

just like wattpad or fanfic sites in english zone of internet.

but corporate genius felt like taking what was originally free for everyone, now locked in paywall, what would you feel?

i understand how this is an oportunity for the author themselves, and translator to earn money, but still... it just something that you feel sad about.

 

Huh? there are so many false informations here...

Main reason why Tony create NU is to established his domination in the world and place to keep his harem

 

that's true. however, what most newcomers don't realize is that at the beginning, translations were purely fan-effort- fans loved the original works and sought to share the novels to those who do not speak the language they were originally written. they didnt even get to monetize from their effort.
more importantly, when these works were translated into english, their reader population was expanded as well and gave the works greater sources of revenue.
my case in point is of course sword art online. sao just started out as a relatively short novel. its lore got expanded (i would even say bloated out of proportion) because the original ln became popular worldwide due to the efforts of the baka tsuki group

 

To be fair, Syosetu is exploitative.
It is a content farm for Japanese publishers.
That is why the publishers support Syosetu.
It is not exactly a free website when they earn from ads.
It is no different from Huffington Post or Bleacher Report in their early years.
Paying authors via views would not hurt their bottom line.
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/fe...ordable-housing-for-animators-matters/.119155

Also, as you pointed out, people underestimate how harmful edited machine translation by those with zero Japanese or source language knowledge.
Readers are not reading the story but fanfic...

 

I can confirm. Baka-tsuki was so slow in the early years. It took years to even get into different volumes for certain novels. I remember the worst being Kara no Kyoukai. It wasn't until the anime OVAs came out that it started getting translated at a reasonable pace.

By the time Mushoku Tensei came out Baka-tsuki was a well oiled machine. I think the web novel was fully translated within a year.

 

I'm pretty sure there is just not sure how far I would have to dig because I've never seen it before and I don't quite know where to look

 

Mate, you left out the champion that caused the second great boom; Legendary Moonlight Sculptor. Without it RRL wouldn't have become such a big part of the novel community

 

Oh i did mention LMS in there,

That was the moment where game elements novel had a boom in interest

I remember reading two volume of that in just a day, from midnight to midnight
Goodtimes goodtimes

 

https://forum.novelupdates.com/threads/how-did-you-get-into-reading-translated-novels.83588/

 

I remember bingeing on LMS and I think that was the start of my gaming novel/manga addiction. The Gamer may have played a part too (SAO barely) but I;m so glad so many more are appearingg

 

thanks! you're a life saver

 

If you havent read it, try Ark and Overgeared (be patient on the early part of overgeared)

 

It has gotten really over saturated. It's not just gaming novels coming out of Asia. Russia, Europe, and the U.S. authors also are making a lot of really bad gaming novels. If they were good I wouldnt really mind much, but everyone is just taking a few tropes that were done better by other people and just regurgitating trash work with them.

 

Overgeared might be my least favorite gaming novel, Grid sucks so much, and his story is really not believable at all. He might be the most unbelievable MC to me. While there are a bunch of bad tropes in gaming novels. Especially the god like MC that is done way too much, Overgeared tries to take one of the worst players in the game and make him god like because of a class that would really spell instant death to anyone that tried to use any of his class skills against actual good players. What makes it worse is that like LMS the game has been going on for a while at the start, and Grid becomes the king of plot armor. I would recommend Ark before Overgeared and I hated Ark.

 

I feel you,, I think I even saw a novel based off Pubg?? like its a fps how do you even make it interesting ( the ratings were terrible) and I don't mean AWM the bl novel but something else I never bothered to take a second look at

 

The only "new" gaming novel I'm reading right now is eFate: An Mmo Story. It's pretty good so far.