7.8 KiB
[Forge Frenzy] Market for novel translations
-
Author: u/Accord_ Chaos Legion*
-
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8e4gxp/forge_frenzy_market_for_novel_translations/
-
Score: 0
-
Created: 2018-04-22T16:51:03
Post:
[removed]
Comments:
u/Endovior [+3] (19 minutes later)
It's not a bad idea, but there are a lot of crowdfunding platforms out there. You also seem to be advocating for a very different structure than is usual for crowdfunding projects; it's usually the person who is making a thing that asks for money (which is then paid by people who liek their work and want to support it), instead of the person who wants a thing who pays money upfront (which can then be claimed by someone who wants to do the work to make it?)
If you're offering up-front money for translation work, it may be difficult to keep out people who just do a machine translation and then briefly edit the raw. Trying to ensure translation quality under those circumstances seems challenging... and any added overhead for people checking the work of the translators cuts into the money that ought to be paying for the work to be done.
Also, quite frankly, given that your business plan starts with trying to get money from poor people in poor countries, you might want to realistically consider whether that's enough of a market to be worth your time, or to fund the kind of translation that you want to read.
u/Accord_ [+1] Chaos Legion (27 minutes later)
You also seem to be advocating for a very different structure than is usual for crowdfunding projects;
Right, seems more appropriate a structure for this type of thing don't you think?
it may be difficult to keep out people who just do a machine translation and then briefly edit the raw. Trying to ensure translation quality under those circumstances seems challenging...
If I as a reader find the translation acceptable that's good enough, also the proof readers are invested in this since they payed money for the work, if they're not satisfied with any translation then no translators will get the money, this is the trust issue I mentioned
Also, quite frankly, given that your business plan starts with trying to get money from poor people in poor countries, you might want to realistically consider whether that's enough of a market to be worth your time, or to fund the kind of translation that you want to read.
I don't plan to target only poor people, I just pointed out a market segment probably unfamiliar to most people from the west. I can remember clearly sites that payed you fractions of a cent to click on ads and working in a sort of pyramid structure to "make money online"; captcha resolving sites are similar. Another untapped market is children in non english speaking countries who know english well enough and wish to work in their spare time but no one will hire them.
What I love about this is that it gives people the opportunity to earn money whenever they want based solely on the merit of their work and it's free market shaped so I have no idea how much money the market will agree on for translations in general, might be higher than we can imagine.
u/None [+2] (9 minutes later)
[removed]
u/Accord_ [+1] Chaos Legion (10 minutes later)
[Forge Frenzy]
Worth the Candle reference.
The trust issue isn't really that big of an issue but I didn't expand on it since there's a lot of ways to approach it and it's better figured out in practice imo.
I mostly posted this to figure out if it's an idea worth pursuing
u/None [+3] (18 minutes later)
[removed]
u/Accord_ [+2] Chaos Legion (30 minutes later)
You mean this sort of thing is done for free as in the translations are already done for free right?
I got this idea reading https://www.webnovel.com/book/6838665402001705 . While it is free the translation speed is not as fast as one might wish, not to mention there were periods when the translation was abandonded and got like one chapter per month. While these may be "free" for us Qidian pays for it and is making money from ads, I'm looking for a better monetization strategy
u/torac [+1] (3 hours later)
Qidian is a fairly new development for the online translation market, and a very unpopular one as well.
There are already enormous hordes of translators working at varying levels of consistency, quality and speed. There are already huge sites where readers can suggest new stories or vote for them. There are also large communities that translate movies, and most big youtube videos also have translated subtitles.
I really don’t see where your idea can add to that. You propose to make a contest for every work you want translated. This requires finding several translators for every single work, which seems a difficult task. Even then, you effectively have to gather enough money that all the translators are interested for a mere chance of getting the money. For that much money, you could probably just straight up pay for the translation of several works, instead of forcing translators to gamble on a single one, with most of them leaving empty-handed.
Lastly, I don’t see how this post fits the /r/rational subreddit.
u/Accord_ [+1] Chaos Legion (13 hours later)
Qidian is a fairly new development for the online translation market, and a very unpopular one as well.
I'm not a big fan of it either but I am a big fan of FMMC which is only actively translated by Qidian. This idea came as a solution to my hunger for more frequent chapters.
There are already enormous hordes of translators working
They're not working on FMMC though and I have no way to incentivise them to do that. One problem is that they can not legally do it because Qidian owns the rights, the other problem is that they might not know / care about the story... but they might care about money.
Even then, you effectively have to gather enough money that all the translators are interested for a mere chance of getting the money
The translation quality of FMMC seems poor enough that I think it's safe to assume most 16-20 year olds could translate at that quality, say we were 1000 readers pooling 100$ per chapter, does that seem like a lot of money to the readers? Do you think Qidian is paying more than 100? I don't know the answer to these questions but I intend to find out
u/sneakpeekbot [+1] (18 minutes later)
Here's a sneak peek of /r/noveltranslations using the top posts of all time!
#1: Upvote to Ban Qidian
#2: Japanese MC vs Chinese MC | 247 comments
#3: [CN] I Shall Seal the Heavens - Book 10 ~ Chapter 1614 { FIN }
^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^Contact ^^me ^^| ^^Info ^^| ^^Opt-out
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (17 hours later)
Well, the first problem you'd run into is that this would probably be super incompatible with copyright law.
Otherwise, I dunno. This isn't the worst startup/website idea I've ever seen, but I still wouldn't expect this to work out.