Why do translations take so long?

[myskaros]

@hiroto said in Why do translations take so long?:

Fair question is why J-Novel didn't ask for license earlier?

Is it really a fair question, though? It's easy to say in hindsight, now that it's a successful property with an anime adaptation, but think about the state of things just a year ago:

• JNC is a 2-year-old company that only recently announced they were going to print their own physical books.
• Ascendance of a Bookwork is a 20+ book series. At a rate of 3 months per book, that's at least a 5-year commitment to a series that there's no particular evidence will sell well to English speakers.
• As a company, looking at all possible outcomes, it's much more risk than reward. If the series happens to barely break even, now you're stuck with 2 choices: drop the series and lose customer trust, or continue to use company resources for 5 full years to support a series that currently breaks even, meaning over the course of its run it's more likely to lose money than not.
  • Even if it was mildly successful, remember, long series tend to lose money over time simply because so many people follow the first few volumes then give up/forget/lose interest over time.
• If TO Books were to give the licensed to JNC and it fails or JNC goes under, now a series they want to promote is tied up in a contract and they'll have lost any/all investment they had in western markets.
  • Even if it breaks even, again, TO Books will also have to devote resources to supporting JNC for 5 years over the course of the series for little to no profit.

To reiterate, hindsight is 20/20. When you can't predict the future, you can't make surefire bets, all you can do is your best and hope your successes outweigh your failures.

[stardf29]

@hiroto said in Why do translations take so long?:

Fair question is why J-Novel didn't ask for license earlier? Taiwanese and Korean translation were licensed much earlier and they are caught up or pretty close, so I'm sure they would have no issue on licensing if asked. US market is much smaller than those asian markets, so maybe the potential was not immediately clear to them. Also since J-Novel only announce license deal after first parts are already translated, meaning that they need to have a translator signed up for it. I wonder if the size of Bookworm scared off many translators, and we had to wait for the ascendance of Mr Quof to take up the challenge.

Maybe the announcement of JNC print editions was what ultimately allowed JNC to succeed in licensing Bookworm. Not only was the title announced a few months after print editions were announced (and shortly before the first print books were released), but the series itself got print editions scheduled rather soon. That suggests that print editions were part of the licensing deal, or otherwise what pushed TO Books to finally approve the license.

The other question here is, why didn't any other company (mainly Yen Press or Seven Seas) try to license Bookworm first. For that, I've got nothing.

[Quof]

The sad fact of the matter is that finishing the series really is a 4 year job at best, and nobody hates that more than me as I crawl my way through it. Just look at all the fan translators who have tried Bookworm - Blastron was pretty good, but it took him 3 years to finish just part 1 (and a bit of part 2). At his pace the whole thing would have taken 20+ years, which isn't to slay he's slow - translation itself is slow, not to mention hard, especially in Bookworm's case with it's elaborate worldbuilding. I'm doing the best I can here and all things considered it's a pretty solid pace compared to other places. A book every 2 months or so is basically blistering speed.

Hiring multiple translators to work on something at once makes sense to outsiders, but those actually involved in translation know that it's a minefield. Even hiring 2 starts introducing big problems like consistency, and the inevitable quality gap when one translator is better than the other. The English terms list for Bookworm is already over 100 terms (yes we've been writing down all the unique plant names that only potentially show up later) and we haven't even gotten to the heavy parts of the world building yet. It's already enormously difficult for a single translator to keep the hundreds of terms and localization decisions and character voices in their head for a series, much less two translators trying to synchronize on these subjects.

At the end of the day even putting 2 translators on Bookworm to hopefully make it go twice as fast would have pretty severe detriments to the quality, and you would still be waiting years for it to finish! Forget about throwing 3+ translators at the whole rest of the series - if 2 is bad, than anything above 3 is just a disaster. 5 translators certainly could finish Bookworm by the end of 2020, but the hit to quality would be indescribable. Even putting aside the consistency of terms, the quality of the writing and dialogue and character voices and so on would be absolutely all over the place. You won't find 5 good translators willing to do something like that, so you'll end up literally with the bottom of the barrel pumping stuff out as fast as possible. Even if 1 of them is great and puts a lot of heart into their TL, the other 4 will be bad, and now you're read 4 poorly written books for every 1 good one, at best, while terms are inconsistent and voices are jumping all over the place and style is different so each book you're thrown off... etc. I know that throwing multiple translators at something seems like a panacea that would fix everything, but you would really just be inviting a huge disaster.

I too find it unfortunate that it took 4 years to license Bookworm, but well, Bookworm is just another series. Fun trivia is that J-Novel initially just licensed the manga, and only licensed the LN at that time because when I asked for the manga I offered to do the LN as well, describing its pedigree. Although personally I was aware of Bookworm being a good series, and those familiar with Narou would recognize it as one of the more popular series on the site, it's ultimately just another series in a big crowd of series. Why didn't anyone license it in the past 4 years? As others have said, it's just because everybody was too busy with other licenses and Bookworm never caught their eye. It's sad but that's how it goes. There's really nothing more to it than there being a lot of LN series out there, and Bookworm not catching anyone's eyes. The anime would definitely have inspired someone to pick it up, so we at J-Novel were just a little ahead of the crowd (thank you friend of mine that recc'd Honzuki all that time ago).

Anyway, uuuh, to summarize:

1. Sure sucks that Translation takes so long. Feels bad man.

2. Multiple translators sure would suck harder.

3. Sure sucks that there's so many LN series that good ones can slip through the cracks, sometimes forever.

[Jon Mitchell]

@someoldguy
Ha ha ha! Curses! You found me out

[GoldenSun3DS]

@jon-mitchell

First off, I want to say that after the points made here, I respect J Novel Club a lot, and I'll probably keep my subscription and I might even buy all the current novels to support them if they keep up their current pace of translation. The issues with translation authorization times by the Japanese publishers isn't their fault or any other translation company's fault. I thought J Novel was one of the Japanese publishers intentionally drip-feeding the translation like how Nintendo treats Virtual Console releases.

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Nobody knew 4 years ago? Odds are, if it's popular in Japan, it'll be popular for English audiences, unless it is REALLY different culturally, which this isn't. If it's successful enough to keep getting more volumes, it's successful enough to be worth translating. I will admit that I only found out about this because of the anime adaptation and thus didn't know about it 4 years ago.

They're supposed to reach out to translation companies, not the other way around. And if they REALLY don't think it's worth the investment due to risk of not making the money back, they can do something like require X number of pre-orders to translate it and then only sell it digitally on Kindle or another distribution platform unless they get enough pre-orders for a physical print version.

They are losing money NOT translating it. Even if it's barely break even on the translation, that's a net positive overall (assuming they just contract out the translation and not license it to another company). The official English translation won't hurt the sales of the Japanese original because Japanese speakers will most likely want to read in Japanese. But even if some otherwise Japanese sales turn into English sales, they're still getting money from that sale.

The official translation won't really make it easier for Japanese people that speak English to pirate it because you don't need a translation to pirate the original Japanese copies.

And about scanlations:
They (author or publisher, most likely the publisher's fault) have absolutely no room to complain about fan translation if they refuse to translate it officially. They can't have it both ways. If they provide an official way to buy it in English, they can complain about fan translation. But if they don't provide an official way to buy it (or it is ridiculously slow taking years and years), the fan translation isn't hurting them because English speakers literally can't buy it because they can't read it.

Defending this by mentioning that other manga/novels are also extremely slow is a logical fallacy ("It's okay because they do it, too"). This is a problem with elitist Japanese publishers that don't care about English audiences unless they get a very favorable deal from a company like J Novel wanting to license it, but yet get mad at fan translations even when they haven't provided a way to officially read it in English.

This is even worse because a lot of anime is just treated as an advertisement for the source material and have no intention of completing the story in the anime or translating the source material for English audiences. So many anime just get 1 or 2 seasons and often end on a cliffhanger. Anime like Fullmetal Alchemist that actually get the story concluded in the anime are rarer.

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Oh, I just realized how extremely ironic it is that this series was not translated sooner (again, not J Novel's fault). The book is all about Myne wanting to get as many people as possible to be able to read her books that she's making, but the author or publisher didn't want to actually make these books more accessible until J Novel wanted to license the translation.

[myskaros]

@goldensun3ds said in Why do translations take so long?:

Nobody knew 4 years ago? Odds are, if it's popular in Japan, it'll be popular for English audiences, unless it is REALLY different culturally, which this isn't. If it's successful enough to keep getting more volumes, it's successful enough to be worth translating. I will admit that I only found out about this because of the anime adaptation and thus didn't know about it 4 years ago.

There are lots of films that are domestic flops yet sell gangbusters in foreign markets, and vice versa. Predictors just predict, they don't foresee. If we could successfully foresee what series would sell and what wouldn't, wouldn't you think we'd only license series that sell? Do you think the other companies out there license series they think are going to be failures? The one constant in business you can be sure of is that a business is always aiming to make money and be successful.

They're supposed to reach out to translation companies, not the other way around. And if they REALLY don't think it's worth the investment due to risk of not making the money back, they can do something like require X number of pre-orders to translate it and then only sell it digitally on Kindle or another distribution platform unless they get enough pre-orders for a physical print version.

You assume every company out there is run in the most optimal manner according to your own personal logic and standards. Many Japanese publishers are only concerned about the Japanese market and have little to no interest in foreign markets (Alphapolis, for example, who doesn't even have an international licensing department).

If you think you've got such a successful business idea, I urge you to start your own company and go out there and become a billionaire.

They are losing money NOT translating it. Even if it's barely break even on the translation, that's a net positive overall (assuming they just contract out the translation and not license it to another company). The official English translation won't hurt the sales of the Japanese original because Japanese speakers will most likely want to read in Japanese. But even if some otherwise Japanese sales turn into English sales, they're still getting money from that sale.

They lose money simply entertaining the idea. Research needs to go into determining if it's even worth their time. Then if the series flops, they still need to fulfill contractual obligations to provide materials and whatnot. Time is money, and every company pays its employees for their time spent doing work. Pretending that there's zero deposit and zero risk is willfully ignoring the reality of business.

[Rahul Balaggan]

@goldensun3ds said in Why do translations take so long?:

Nobody knew 4 years ago? Odds are, if it's popular in Japan, it'll be popular for English audiences, unless it is REALLY different culturally, which this isn't. If it's successful enough to keep getting more volumes, it's successful enough to be worth translating. I will admit that I only found out about this because of the anime adaptation and thus didn't know about it 4 years ago.

It is easy to say that if it was successful there it will be here, but this is a business and just saying stuff will not make anyone wanna license anything to you, and vice-a-versa. Take for instance sports manga, which bombed so hard in foreign markets companies pretty much stopped licensing them for close to a decade.

They're supposed to reach out to translation companies, not the other way around. And if they REALLY don't think it's worth the investment due to risk of not making the money back, they can do something like require X number of pre-orders to translate it and then only sell it digitally on Kindle or another distribution platform unless they get enough pre-orders for a physical print version.

That will never ever happen, that is literally the definition of bad faith, and no company would want to deal in bad faith. If any company demanded that X number of pre-orders no one would want to deal with them.

Plus this just goes back to trusting the company you are licensing to, it they don’t have a history and you can’t trust them why would they want to trust their IP to you? In the end that could damage their good name, look at how incredibly difficult it is to rescue titles for the Tokyopop days...

And about scanlations:
They (author or publisher, most likely the publisher's fault) have absolutely no room to complain about fan translation if they refuse to translate it officially. They can't have it both ways. If they provide an official way to buy it in English, they can complain about fan translation. But if they don't provide an official way to buy it (or it is ridiculously slow taking years and years), the fan translation isn't hurting them because English speakers literally can't buy it because they can't read it.

One of the most dangerous comments you can make on the forums of an official Light Novel translation company...

[GoldenSun3DS]

@rahul-balaggan Please explain to me how a fan translation can possibly hurt them if there is no official translation available. If I can't read Japanese, I'm not buying something in Japanese because that's like buying a bicycle when you have no legs.

I'm not advocating to pirate when there's an official translation available (not running at a ridiculous snail's pace). I wouldn't be here paying to read it here if I had that stance.

[Quof]

An interesting phenomenon is localization companies declining to license series that have been fully fan translated, since the existence of a full fan translation damages sales so much that an official version would often not be profitable. Which is an interesting thing to think about: Fan translations happen because no official localization is available, but then no official localization happens because the fan translation exists. It's a cycle of negativity that's pretty unfortunate, and I don't think there's an easy way out of it since there will always be less barriers to fan translation than official localization. So in practice it's not fan translations directly hurting them, but hurting them long-term by blocking a future translation.

That said I'm actually pretty sympathetic to fan translators since the alternative is just gambling on official licenses which may never happen regardless of the fan TL's potential impact on sales, and I hope that moving forward this will become a non-issue with close to all JP media being localized officially without westerners having to worry about gems getting left in the dust. That might be unfeasible but if the market keeps growing like it has been, maybe it can be a reality.

[GoldenSun3DS]

@quof Perhaps in such a scenario, if the fan translation is good, they could offer to purchase the fan translation from them in condition for them taking down and no longer spreading their fan translation.

But I don't know how that would play out with copyrights. Doing that might legally imply that they are legitimizing the unauthorized translation. But I don't know anything about how laws work. I've just heard that if companies don't fight to protect their copyright, they lose it (but I don't know how true that is).

[Jon Mitchell]

@goldensun3ds
Because licensing takes time and money. Contracts need to be signed, copyrights registered, professional translators/proofreaders/ editors need to be hired and then have time to do their jobs. Marketing teams, web professionals, advertisers etc. have to sell and e-commerce has to be facilitated to process transactions. Then there are whole other teams (and laws) that need to be engaged and dealt with if printing physical copies. And then after every sale, professionals keep track of royalties and make sure that they are paid. Fan translation sites (or scanilation sites or torrents or piracy sites) don’t care about any of that - if they put up poorly done and/or plagiarized translations so that they get your eyeballs to look at ads for boner pills —-they still get paid—-and the artists get screwed and legitimate outlets trying to sell legal copies ( and people who care about the industry and want to support it) have it that much harder—-because YOU think it takes too long?

[LegitPancake]

@goldensun3ds said in Why do translations take so long?:

@quof Perhaps in such a scenario, if the fan translation is good, they could offer to purchase the fan translation from them in condition for them taking down and no longer spreading their fan translation.

But I don't know how that would play out with copyrights. Doing that might legally imply that they are legitimizing the unauthorized translation. But I don't know anything about how laws work. I've just heard that if companies don't fight to protect their copyright, they lose it (but I don't know how true that is).

J-Novel Club has done that exactly twice, with Rokujouma and The Magic in this Other World is Too Far Behind. These were negotiated with Hobby Japan and Overlap, respectively, (both of which JNC has a very close relationship with) and it is very much doubtful any branch of Kadokawa or Kodansha would ever agree to do that with one of their properties. It is a very rare circumstance in which there is only one fan translator, it is actually professionally done (or at least pretty good), the translator is willing to "go pro" and drop all their past and ongoing projects and work professionally, a Western company is willing to take the risk and license it, and most importantly, the JP publisher is willing to even consider it.

[yumenokage]

@GoldenSun3DS @legitpancake you'd also need the fan translation to be of the light novel and not the web novel version (I don't know how common fan translations of one are over the other), or if it's of the web novel for the web novel to be close enough to the light novel to use as a base. Since the web novels often receive a lot of editing before being published as light novels and sometimes diverge entirely on plot at some point, an existing fan translation might not be usable for producing an official translation even if the translation is of good quality and everything else were able to be lined up.

But it is really nice when they are able to work something out like they did with Rokujouma and I'd hope they are able to do more things like that in the future when there are fan translations that meet the necessary requirements for conversion.

[jpwong]

Lets be honest here, if a company starts licensing anything they think might sell well, all you end up with is what happened to Tokyopop when they basically tried that strategy with manga. Let me tell you, it didn't pan out so well for them.

[Rahul Balaggan]

@goldensun3ds I went to sleep after I posted that but everyone explained why fan translations can have a greater negative impact on the LN culture outside of Japan.

[Village Idiot]

@legitpancake Also to add to this, both Rokujouma and The Magic in this Other World is too Far Behind's fan translators were:

• translating from the Japanese LN version
• were deemed to be high enough quality that the scripts just needed minimal changes along with a professional editor
• both projects only had one translator
• both were contactable

And this is just my view, neither attempted to profit off their translation.

There are very few series now that matches that description. Most are WN translations now, some series have had multiple translators working on different parts, and some of the old LN translators have flat out disappeared.

[Serah]

@goldensun3ds said in Why do translations take so long?:

And about scanlations:
They (author or publisher, most likely the publisher's fault) have absolutely no room to complain about fan translation if they refuse to translate it officially. They can't have it both ways. If they provide an official way to buy it in English, they can complain about fan translation. But if they don't provide an official way to buy it (or it is ridiculously slow taking years and years), the fan translation isn't hurting them because English speakers literally can't buy it because they can't read it.

On the one hand I have understanding for your stance. On the other hand no one but the author and creator of something should have the initial right to decide what is going to happen with their stuff. That goes beyond translation and more towards protection. For a simple example, imagine popular American novel X is translated and changed lightly in Chinese without the author or owner of the extended rights knowing. And then go further and make it being published somewhere else in the world, with the novel's author not mentioned but rather changed to a random Mongolian person. Said book becomes popular in Chinese speaking region before anyone noticing the origin of that huge fraud.

Despite all my love for certain works as a fan - as a fan it is best to respect the author's wishes.

To add some more to the ongoing topic: I do not think translations takes so long. If anything takes long it is all about the licensing, editing, and eventually popularity of something to go on. I personally dislike it that it seems a novel, game, manga, whatsoever gets only picked up by local publishers if there is a guarantee that there is an audience, without them trying to create an audience - to point out what I am saying. In Germany it is by far much harder to get your hands on stuff which seem too exotic, and the taste for stuff from Japan is just about to change from mainstream works towards something which had been considered niche for 2-3 decades.

Nowadays it seems rather fast to me, if a work is published over here 1-2 years after it had been released in Japan. This way we get more than often polished products with higher quality than initially offered.

@goldensun3ds said in Why do translations take so long?:

They're supposed to reach out to translation companies, not the other way around. And if they REALLY don't think it's worth the investment due to risk of not making the money back, they can do something like require X number of pre-orders to translate it and then only sell it digitally on Kindle or another distribution platform unless they get enough pre-orders for a physical print version.

I am not sure if that is an misunderstanding in perception - but I do not know the way you imagine here. Pretty much with every book I consider a jewel, written by a German author, is not getting overseas like that. It is always that a local publisher gets interested in some work and then contact the author and the original publisher. It saddens me, but because of that I am unable to share some great books with friends since they are unavailable in English. And the few exceptions which are made into English are released many years after the original release in Germany.

I commend your passion for the stuff you want to be made available as soon as possible in your region, but how much are you willing to pay extra for that kind of service?

On a fully unrelated side note - I am baffled that @Rahul-Balaggan actually gets paid for being a forums moderator... I did not know American forums have hired professionals.

[LurkingMcLurk]

@hiroto said in Why do translations take so long?:

Taiwanese and Korean translation were licensed much earlier and they are caught up or pretty close

The release dates for the first volume (not the license date but never mind that):

• Japanese
  Volume 01 = 2015-01-25
• Korean
  Volume 01 = 2016-08-11 (18.5 months behind Japan, and volume 07 was out in Japan)
• Taiwanese
  Volume 01 = 2017-08-07 (30.5 months behind Japan, and volume 11 was out in Japan)
• English
  Volume 01 = 2019-05-20 (52 months behind Japan, and volume 18 was out in Japan)

The release dates for the closest volume to today:

• Japanese
  Volume 21 = 2019-12-10
• Korean
  Volume 17 = 2020-01-08 (Came out in Japan on 2018-12-10, 13 months behind Japan)
• Taiwanese
  Volume 14 = 2019-12-09 (Came out in Japan on 2018-03-10, 21 months behind Japan)
• English
  Volume 05 = 2020-01-20 (Came out in Japan on 2015-12-25, 49 months behind Japan)

[SomeOldGuy]

@serah Rahul said he is an unpaid volunteer. Whether or not this is the norm depends on who you talk to. Microsoft forums generally have paid moderators, hobby forums rarely do. I'm a volunteer moderator on a forum for a software product, primarily because I was sick of the spam showing up on it, and the owner of the forum was busy keeping the program updated.

[Jon Mitchell]

@lurkingmclurk said in Why do translations take so long?:

The release dates for the first volume (not the license date but never mind that):

Japanese
Volume 01 = 2015-01-25
Korean
Volume 01 = 2016-08-11 (Volume 07 was out in Japan)
Taiwanese
Volume 01 = 2017-08-07 (Volume 11 was out in Japan)
English
Volume 01 = 2019-05-20 (Volume 18 was out in Japan)

The release dates for the closest volume to today:

Japanese
Volume 21 = 2019-12-10
Korean
Volume 17 = 2020-01-08
Taiwanese
Volume 14 = 2019-12-09
English
Volume 05 = 2020-01-20

let me add a data point, and make sure I understand your assertion

JNC becomes a company/ exists : approx 2016-10-01
7 or 8 volumes were already out/ selling in Japan when JNC was launched/ in its infancy (assuming that the Korean/ Taiwanese companies you site are publishers that obtain licenses from TO, the Japanese publisher) how long have they been around? How long have they had a relationship w/ TO?

in 2016 JNC was a tiny company, trying to build credibility and relationships w/ Japanese publishers in order to get licensing deals, and had not much of a 'track record' (yet)

as you noted - once JNC started releasing English translations (starting 2019/05/20) through 2020-01-20 they'll have 5 volumes released (and not just electronically, some of these will have had physical print runs by now). Let me make sure I have the math correct that's a volume released approximately every 50 days! (And these are pretty thick!)

So in comparison, the Korean company (who had access the longest) released 17 volumes in approximately 40 months? or one about every 70 days? (and the Taiwanese translation isn't much faster at every 60 or so)

the assertion/argument seems to be that JNC/ English translations 'take too long'?? looks to me that JNC is mopping the floor with 'the competition': 1.4x faster than the Korean company, and 1.2x faster than the Taiwanese one, AND JNC is typesetting/printing physical release as well! ... The question should be - Why are Korean/Taiwanese translations so slow? (Don't even get me started on comparing to other American/English speaking translation houses- JNC is on average faster/better than all of them)