Webnovel.Forum

HeavenlyGardenia when it ain’t caught up the raws...yeah it’s SLOW

You've got to be kidding me. This comes across as one of the most entitled things I've ever heard.

This is why I quit being a translator. Dealing with entitled fans and readers was the most annoying thing about the job. I spent hours translating just one chapter, only to get hounded and harassed for being "slow". Catch up to the raws? Wtf? Who do you think you are? Just because you're a paying customer doesn't mean you have the right to drive translators like slaves.

Sythcake Try translating a chapter. It literally takes a few hours to do so. A short chapter might take about 1 and a half hour to 2 hours to complete. Longer chapters take 3-4 hours to complete (especially longwinded ones like Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei, which uses a ton of jargon, and f Zetsuen no Tempest, that was one of the worst series I tried to translate). Not unless you're lazy and just want machine translations or directly copy and paste from Google Translate.

Honestly, I don't know what people think translation is. You think translators can translate an entire chapter within a few minutes? Under an hour? Please, if you think you can do it faster or better, go learn another language and be my guest.

Tomoyuki I tried and I know exactly how you feel.. but then again, neither of us are actual translators. I know for a fact that professionals can translate on the fly. What would take others hours upon hours of struggle, they will complete, quite literally, as fast as their typing speed allows.

So when paying customers come out and complain
about the poor services they are provided, I don’t find them entitled. Who I find entitled though are the hobbyist that we call translators here. Lacking skill and without a shred of expertise, they charge no small amount of money for slow and quite often subpar translations and yet have the gal to come out here and call their customer ‘entitled’.

Fun Fact: Costumer is also a word and apparently stands for costume designer or some shit like that.

P.S. Jargon is not that bad when you can freely speak both langs, the real road blocks for translators are the references.) Be it to some obscure game mechanic, a fun character from another work or some popular joke from the author’s native village- you’d need to be an insider to properly translate most of that.

Sythcake Professional translators charge 12 cents per word for their translations. For a 2,000-word chapter, that's $240.

I don't think any translator in Webnovel earns $240 per chapter. That said, a few of the translators are...unprofessional, fake and incompetent. I've seen some chapters that are basically the translators copying and pasting machine translations and then pretending they did the work of translating. There is a clear lack of proofreading and editing in many of the translations.

The comics are better, but considering that they cost like 26 cents per chapter I'm not expecting high quality translations. But then customers seem to want cheap or or close to free translations, yet they also want fast and quality translations. But somehow they are not entitled, it's the fault of the translators charging them, it's the translators who are entitled when they ask for patience?

Let's put it this way. You are paying for the chapters that are already translated. You are not paying for chapters that have not been translated. The money you spent are on chapters that have already been translated, and not spent getting chapters translated faster. You're not paying translators to get chained to their chairs and churning out translations 24/7 until they catch up to the raws. You are only paying for stuff that are already translated. You are paying for chapters in which the work has already been done. You are not paying for work that has not yet been done but somehow you think it will be done in the near future.

Think of it like an hourly wage. You work 5 hours a day, get paid $2 an hour for a grand total of $10. Then suddenly your customer comes to you and complains that you haven't gotten tomorrow's work done. "Why haven't you gotten tomorrow's shipment done today? What am I paying you for?!" he yells. "I just paid you $10!" No. You got paid for today's work. You're under no obligation to finish tomorrow's work today just because he paid you $10 for today's work. Nor does he have the right to demand that you do another 5 hours of overtime today just because he already paid you $10 (and is willing to pay another $10 for your overtime). That's not how it works.

It's like what Neil Gaiman said in here: https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

Also, I don't know why you're talking about costumer.

P.S. Jargon is difficult to translate, especially if you have only received the bulk of your education in one language and not the other. For example, I will have to do a lot of research and checking for physics, chemistry or scientific terms in Japanese because I have never received a formal education in science in Japanese. Same with Chinese. Even though it's technically my second language, because I only Iearned science and math in English, I have difficulty translating scientific terms that are in Chinese. Just because you can freely speak both languages (which I can do for both English and Chinese) doesn't mean jargon isn't a problem. I can easily read the Periodic Table in English, but I can't possibly memorize the Periodic Table in Chinese.

I'm not sure where your translators who translate as fast as they type are from, but websites quote 200-500 words per hour as standard in the industry. Double it for areas where they are subject matter experts in both languages. That's pretty much max 20 words per minute?
https://www.pactranz.com/translation-times/

So for a standard novel here with 1200-1500 words per chapter will take just the translator 1-5 hours just for the translation. At 14 chapters per week, a slower translator may need 70 hours per week for that!
If the editor is putting in any decent amount of effort, than add at least 8 hours to that total. That's a phenomenal amount of work. And who knows how many projects each person is on at any given time?

For comics, don't forget about cleaners and typesetters who need to remove original Chinese text and overlay English on them. Although, for the works here, I do question if they actually hire typesetters with how often the words fall out of the text bubbles...

I think etvolare, former owner of Volare, gives an interesting take on translating and why it's a thankless effort: http://etvolare.com/so-you-want-to-be-a-web-novel-translator/
If you want it to flow well, it'll take a lot more effort than just regurgitating word for word translations.
Novel translators are awesome, and they should be appreciated, especially when they're being paid dirt for wages.

Sythcake When you mentioned jargon, I though that you were talking about stuff like “wazzup homie!”))

Are you mistaking slang for jargon? Jargon refers to very technical terms, complicated words and terms used by specialists in academia, scientific experts, etc.

An example would be "baryon acoustic oscillation" or a "continuum", or an event horizon. Lyman alpha line. Stuff that most readers wouldn't know unless they Google it. I mentioned Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei because the author makes up a lot of pseudo-scientific terms to explain magic and it gets tiring to read/translate them after a while.