As mentioned in the article, the writers of these romance and Yaoi novels are often young women who have no experience whatsoever with the topic they are writing about. Which is why they are so ridiculously laughable.
Does this ten year prison sentence in China affect Qidian's offering? If the writer can get ten years, can't an editor or publisher?
@CKtalon and Sparrow Translation, the novel "Spare me, great lord!" skipped chapters 294-298.
Chapter 293: 293、Meeting Little Fury Coincidentally! (Part 2)
293 is OK, but then it jumps...
Chapter 294: 299、Edge of the Storm (Part 2)
Chapter 295: 300、Goodbye, Qingzhou (Part 3)
So there's a lot of the story missing from the middle.
Misguided_Rooster What do people do to spelling mistakes after noticing them, in your home town?
The very first paragraph of the very first chapter of this novel has an obvious spelling mistake.
It's not a translation mistake, as such, as the author is supposed to be writing the novel in their native language.
Yes, the content of both of those chapters is the same, but chapter 165 has a visible discontinuity from 164, so I assume that's the chapter with the problem? But is the problem with the original author, or the translation?
These two chapters were pretty terribly translated, with many nonsensical and incorrectly translated sentences, as well as directly translated Chinese idioms. It's pretty obvious that the translator of those chapters hadn't actually read the novel, and therefore had no idea of what they were writing.
The translation of chapters 869-873 of Castle of Black Iron have been of exceptionally poor quality, with obviously nonsensical translations all over the place.
The translator is obviously using restaurant menu translation language for things like descriptions of administrative structures, which makes those sentences completely silly and nonsensical.
PLEASE re-edit these chapters, and make sure that the following chapters get back to the quality standards of the previous chapters.
The chapter Chapter 95: Taking Over of White-Robed Chief is clearly not the chapter that's supposed to come after 94.
The writing arbitrarily switches into a different part of the story, and starts talking about characters who haven't yet been introduced by only their name, as if the reader is supposed to know who that is, and what their role in the story might be.
Depending what you mean by "deep", you might take a look at "White-Robed Chief", "Spare Me, Great Lord!", "Carefree Path of Dreams", "The Path Toward Heaven", "Reverend Insanity", "Way of the Devil", etc.
I'm not sure about "White-Robed Chief" yet, there's a certain smell in the air that indicates that it might go full misunderstanding "romance" retard.
In its great catalogue, Qidian surely has a novel with a protagonist who reincarnates to 1950 and succeeds in getting into a good position in CPC, and later redirecting the Cultural Revolution towards a less destructive direction?
Since there are so many books where this scenario plays out for the previous Chinese dynasties, it would be a nice change to read a book with the same thing as those hundreds of novels, but with a more contemporary take on things.
Thanks!
LetThereBeMagic When we were discussing similar competing products on an open market, you brough up the hypothesis that apples and oranges aren't comparable products on the fruit market, which sounds like the accidental inversion of the obvious facts.
Did you mean to say that indeed, apples and oranges are competing products, and when your mother goes shopping for you, if apples would suddenly cost 10x more than oranges, she would definitely fill your fruit need with oranges rather than apples, instead of paying more, or going without for no particular reason?
Because that would seem to make much more sense, obviously.
ShouldBeStudying The scenario you're proposing, where "a few readers will pay hundreds of dollars for a few chapters" doesn't seem to be based on observable reality. Perhaps you would like to present some concrete observations of this kind of activity taking place in the low-end entertainment IP marketplace?
In a few years, when you graduate and enter the workforce, you'll find out that while you posit that Qidian has a team pondering content monetisation in the western market, people who work on such matters are just people, exactly like you and I, who have their own perspectives into the matters of their expertise.
In this case, I would bet good money that when we provide this sort of feedback to those folks, it's not entirely redundant, as some of us do have pretty good visibility into the western IP marketplaces.
I'm comparing a dollar spent on Kindle to a dollar spent on webnovel.com. From a buyer's perspective, because that's what we are.
You seem to have the misapprehension that the world owes a seller on a market, to buy at their first price, because they have costs, just like everybody else. Or that QI's investment into novel IP, which can be resold again and again, somehow resembles investment into perishable inventory that can be sold only once. Why don't you think about these things for a while before returning to the topic with more commentary?
A buyer's decision to pay 10 USD for a better return on market A, instead of a worse return on market B isn't a complaint, it's an invitation to investigate the market options for one's customers. On this planet, there are any number of people at any time who are trying to sell something without a clear understanding of what their customers' options are. Businesses who get stuck doing this usually end up bankrupt, and take their offering with them. I don't want this to happen to QI.
Sure, the novels have their hardcore fans, but in this market, compared to China's censored and limited entertainment market with WeChat payments, they won't float the boat.
For example, I just bought Peter F. Hamilton's book The Reality Dysfunction, 1200+ pages, on Kindle for $10 USD.
His work is professionally written and edited, the English is excellent, and the story isn't biased by ultra-nationalism or racism. Female characters don't exist just as a backdrop for male characters.
This author alone has a bibliography of over 20 full length novels, of 700 to 1200 pages each.
On webnovel.com, $10 USD would have bought me 500 stones, or 40-45 chapters. I've tried to emphasize the importance of quality in story structure and translation, but the quality on webnovel.com is nowhere comparable to, say, this author's works.
Please consider the market when you're pricing your product.
As someone who spends quite a bit on various entertainment purchases monthly, here is my feedback on the current pricing, based on my consideration of a few of the current premium-priced novels.
If I come back to a stockpile of, say, 500 premium chapters split across 5 novels, and the average price per chapter is 10 stones, I would need to spend approximately 100 USD to read them.
If the novels were well written with a high quality plot, good dialogue, and novel world building, this might be worth considering, but as always, everything is relative. These novels exist in a continuum of English-language entertainment which ranges from premium to webnovel.
An alternative way to invest that 100 USD in entertainment would be to get 5 premium Kindle novels from tier one novelists, at 20 USD per novel. Those are typically 400-500 pages long.
The middle ground would be the 3-5 USD self-published Kindle novels which are 300-400 pages, but can be hit or miss quality-wise. The worst of those are very seldom of poorer quality than translated webnovels. You can get quite a number of those for 100 USD.
Against this backdrop, my preference would be to pay 5 USD per month to access all webnovel.com novels. That would make sense.
In Library, the maximum / latest chapter number is frozen, and does not update.
For example "Gate of God" shows as 29/27, given that I've read the novel up to chapter 29.
Platform: desktop website.
Currently publicly available free MTL solutions compromise their potential quality for the cost of running each translation for fractions of a penny. If you budget 5 EUR or even 0.5 EUR per translation model evaluation, it's a completely different deal.
Every year, there will be more and cheaper and more complete data sets available for model training, it's never going to get more expensive. That's why I posted this in Spoilers, because translators need to prepare for what's coming.
Microsoft reaches a historic milestone, using AI to match human performance in translating news from Chinese to English
https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/machine-translation-news-test-set-human-parity/
