Webnovel.Forum

Gothic_Temptation See, you are again thinking that the old system works just because it works now and you do not see anything happening. Fan translators have always been doing something illegal, lawfully speaking, but it was a gray area since the copyright holder (Webnovel) did not enforce its copyright.

Now, Webnovel is beginning to strongly push into the international market. Things are changing from that. Just because no lawsuits have been made does not mean that none of that will happen in the future.

You can definitely call Webnovel a plague from a reader's standpoint since you are removing the power fan translators have and preventing them from making the money they could be making without the publisher or authors involved. But things ARE changing.

The community could have done anything and steered their own course without the copyright holders involved (2+ years ago), but that's no longer going to happen. Now, 17k and Zongheng, and many other Chinese online literature outlets know what's happening overseas. There is a push from the government to continue this momentum. The other publishers might choose not to put paywalls and all sorts of unpopular moves to kill Webnovel. That is definitely possible, and perhaps it's a good thing, giving Webnovel some competition, but I'm saying that the reign of fan translators is already on a decline.

And if you know the Chinese government, once they set the vision, the other companies will abide to the government's calling. So the other publishers will not stay silent for long. They might be doing their market research this very moment.

Pictures from that meeting:


This one below is a forum on copyright protection for online literature during the conference.

All the publishers involved in this conference:

Or you can see all the involved publishers at the bottom of the page. Every single big name publisher is there.
The website involving this meet: http://www.colpc.cn/

The above is just me saying that the climate is changing for fan translators and that they should be prepared for change.

In short, I'm telling you things are changing. There's no point being idealistic about how great the good old days are because things are changing right now.

This debate devolved from the fact that I'm saying that translators are the problem when it comes to picking up books. And this problem is common throughout the entire sector percentage-wise. Translators come and go all the time, but you insisted that it's a Webnovel problem. Do you know Webnovel has more than 300 translators employed? Just 20 books dropped is not even 10%.

Then you started saying that all of this can be avoided if we just go back to the old system, but I'm telling you that the old system will never return due to legal reasons.

ChupChup As this is a listed company, any modification to the backend (especially when it is tied to salaries) is greatly audited, so it's unlikely that's possible.

About the per chapter modifications, there's a huge worry that there will be abuse, considering how there have been abuse cases in the review sections. Sometimes, there might be people who do not know better and think a grammatical or vocabulary mistake is made, and they propose changes. The staff is aware of all these possible solutions, but it's not that simple to implement.

I personally am experimenting with ways to implement technology such that terms can be easily propagated from old translations for newer translations, but it's still in its infancy.

CKtalon So it seems that there are two reasons why dropped novels aren't picked up:

1. It's not popular enough, (according to WN?)
2. New TL are getting flamed because of the unfamiliar terms used by old TL, since a new TL generally won't read all previous chapters (because it wastes time for which they're not paid)

Since WN knows this why they don't try to improve their own system/model in order to give new TL easier time?
This should attract more new translators, readers and editors.

WN is changing the old gray era but you don't change this, the most problematic issue. When someone say those, you do the same, and don't do anything about it.

There're probably a lot of ways for improvements, such as
1. Introduce a voting system for all dropped novels, where each user can only vote once for only one novel. This should refresh every XX days to reflect if novel is still popular.
With this a new TL will easier choose a dropped novel.
2.
A lot of ways, one may be related to another:
- Introduce a glossary template, which should include all unfamiliar keywords/terms, and especially those which aren't in Eng dictionary, and they're grouped properly, such as:
all names, power levels, skills, abilities, places, special items, ... They should also have a RAW name beside terms.
- Each translator is required to fill this glossary during TL
- Readers may fill up this glossary, and earn free SS when ED/TL approves
- Introduce search/replace function for multiple chapters so a new TL can easily replace all old terms with one action
- Since a new TL may have needs to use its own terms, system should be able to automatically replace all terms between multiple glossaries
(because a new TL will have it's own glossary based on previous glossary and depending on TL choice it will automatically replace his terms with old terms or all terms in all released chapters with new ones)
- At least changes within glossary should be visible to readers when TL changes terms you should be notified by system automatically before reading new chapter.

CKtalon I mean a Glossary build deeply within System, for example
first translator was using term #1

RAW #1: 金丹
TL1 #1 term num XXXX 01: Golden Pellet
TL1 #1 term num XXXX 02: Golden Pellets

a newer translator is using
TL2 #1 term num XXXX 01: Gold Core
TL2 #1 term num XXXX 02: Gold Cores

Now, the new TL2 is translating as he likes, and when he wants to replace his own terms with old ones for consistency,
in this case a term "TL2 #1 term num XXXX XX" and all their associative terms are all automatically replaced with terms with previous TL1 #1.

Of course this is very simple example, one term has only two derivable keywords, for complicated terms there may be tens or hundreds of them. There're bound to forget include all so System could do a partial match from a Glossary to constantly notify the TL during writing.
maybe like this, to color terms differently

• already included Y/N
• term may be a associative match from included term num XXXX Y/N
• this is a suggested term which needs to be included into glossary Y/N
• ....

Not only because of the dropped novels, but TL are bound to change/temporary unable translate during the novel life cycle so there is definitely a need for something in order to keep consistency.