Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.
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@shiny The only thing I thought was weird was that what you listed likely isn't possible for whoever is behind the account to personally implement and see it done (so is probably not something the rep can actually do), but in terms of asking them to pass it along as feedback to whoever will be handling all this it's perfectly constructive.
For the first part it's probably the best anyone can reasonably expect to be done, similar to how JNC (I believe) has the text available on the site somewhere for anyone who missed their print replacement program for the book that was printed incomplete.
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@gamen said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
@shiny No, sounds like you understood me correctly; just a failure of imagination on my part. I'd never think of trying to co-opt a company representative in one of their competitor's forums.
While @sevenseas are competitors with JNC when it comes to trying to obtaining a license, once they have that license Seven Seas have a monopoly over that title. It is important to the LN industry for there to be consumer confidence that LN publishers will not abuse that monopoly as many consumers will judge the industry based on the practices of the worst offenders. Some people may divert their purchases from Seven Seas to other publishers, but of danger to the industry are those who might stop buying LNs altogether (or who might be put off from ever starting to buy them).
I expect that the userbase for light novels outside Japan is primarily those who enjoy anime, and there are many people who enjoy anime who would enjoy LNs but not all of those people actually buy LNs. The success of every publisher in the light novel industry helps to maintain and grow interest in LNs. As such, the behaviour of Seven Seas impacts upon the reputation (and therefore customer base) of the whole LN industry.
Sam Pinansky said back in 2016 that: "The overall purpose of J-Novel Club is to create and grow a worldwide market for Japanese light novels translated into English" and that one way he would help achieve that could would be to provide a "forum to foster discussion and community building". In that spirit, I think that using the forum to discuss how Seven Seas can help regain consumer confidence in commercial light novel translations is quite fitting.
Stay shiny, y'all.
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@shiny Yeah, I don't know the market well enough to make any useful speculation; in a sane world the minor edits that Seven Seas made wouldn't merit much comment - so many little nuances are lost in translation in the first place, what's a few more? As long as the translation stands on its own as a story, I don't see a problem with the process itself.
Now, as I've already said I see representing the translation as the words of the original author as problematic - especially when changes are done without the intent of preserving the author's voice - but that's an industry-wide "problem" where I feel like I'm in a very small minority in seeing it that way. And I agree that some of the editorial decisions imply a certain lack of respect for the audience and the original author, and a betrayal of the fantasy that translation can perfectly reproduce the original story in English, and a reluctance to preserve the original story with all its flaws.
But I can't claim to have been particularly upset when I learned about the changes; more like an exasperated "I don't think you really had to do that...", and I don't plan on not continuing to buy Seven Seas' translations; I never had any trust they could deliver a perfect translation in the first place, only one better executed than an amateur (or worse, someone armed with only Google Translate and a thesaurus). ...Of course, I mostly detest anime so that's another way in which I'm an outlier. ...really not sure how one could enjoy anime adaptations and be worried about literal translations; they usually fail at both being faithful adaptations and standing on their own.
As for the forum aspect... I don't know; it felt like I was a guest in someone's home, and the host had their friend over, and another guest started pestering and harassing the friend. It just makes me vicariously cringe in embarrassment. ...but then had I been the 7S rep, I never would have injected myself into the thread in the first place so there's that.
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@wellwisher said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
an actual working channel of communication.
Working is a generous way to put it. I wouldn't place too much expectation on having real communication with the 7SE representative in this thread. It's not like JNC where Sam/Quarkboy can just saunter in over the heads of the community managers and speak frankly with his executive powers. Anything the 7SE rep writes beyond the canned pre-approved messages would likely have to go through seven middle managers and three committees in a fifty reply long email chain during which it would be stripped of all real meaning.
And yeah, that's likely also part of why other companies don't really engage in social media that much. The bigger the business grows, the further the person who handles the social media gets from the person who actually has the ability to give the answers and effect the changes that social media wants, and the more such social media engagement just causes more trouble than it's worth as every interaction turns into unavoidable stonewalling. It's been a long time since Sam personally managed the company twitter and Curiouscat.
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@microdynames The issue is we don't actually know if this is the case.
As in, we don't know if the Seven Seas representative is speaking (or posting) in their own capacity as an individual who happens to have some insight on the inner workings of the company, or if their every post has been vetted thoroughly by the PR department at Seven Seas to properly convey the official stance of the company.
Because if the posts are indeed vetted and pre-approved, that means the posts have weight as what Seven Seas intends to communicate. Which means we can analyze and pick it apart as much as we want, because presumably every word and nuance has already been considered by Seven Seas as a company to serve as an official press release.
However, if the posts are by Just Some Person who hasn't gone through strict scrutiny by the PR department, then we must be more lenient and forgiving, because maybe they can mis-speak or are unaware of the specifics of a developing situation, so we must allow them to correct themselves or clarify their meaning, rather than pin interpretations on every word.
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@microdynames Just to be clear, I do still tweet directly sometimes and like/retweet stuff. I just leave the normal advertisement and announcement stuff to others.
And curiouscat is not something I've touched in a while, got kind of tired answering the same questions over and over again. -
@sam-pinansky Yeah, I knew you still hopped in every so often, so I wrote "managed" rather than simply "used".
Incidentally since you are chiming in, would you happen to be able to confirm for @unsynchedcheese (since they mentioned it) and others whether the Seven Seas rep is posting here in a fully vetted and approved official capacity rather than being just a less covert version of /u/throwawaylnworker?
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@shiny said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
While @sevenseas are competitors with JNC when it comes to trying to obtaining a license, once they have that license Seven Seas have a monopoly over that title.
Weren't novels licensed by volume, or do I remember wrong?
I expect that the userbase for light novels outside Japan is primarily those who enjoy anime, and there are many people who enjoy anime who would enjoy LNs but not all of those people actually buy LNs.
If I had to pick either an anime adaptation, or the original light novel it's based on, I'd pick the light novel 10 out of 10 times...
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@korppi said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
@shiny said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
While @sevenseas are competitors with JNC when it comes to trying to obtaining a license, once they have that license Seven Seas have a monopoly over that title.
Weren't novels licensed by volume, or do I remember wrong?
According to this post from myskaros in June 2020: "when a new volume of an ongoing series comes out, it has to be licensed separately; and for long series, we don't license the entire series at once, just a small batch of volumes". So it's not only ever one-at-a-time, but nor are they guaranteed future volumes.
However, I assume that the existing licensee will usually get the first option for extending their existing license because when a translator (which I'm using as shorthand for the publishing company who have the license to translate the work) changes everyone loses out. The first translator would stop getting new volumes to publish, reducing their incentive to promote the first half of the series. The second translator would have to promote a series where the first half is translated by someone else. Customers might lose confidence in both translation. And other translators might become wary about dealing with a publisher which has a history of dropping translators mid-series.
I expect that the userbase for light novels outside Japan is primarily those who enjoy anime, and there are many people who enjoy anime who would enjoy LNs but not all of those people actually buy LNs.
If I had to pick either an anime adaptation, or the original light novel it's based on, I'd pick the light novel 10 out of 10 times...
I'm generally in the same boat. I tend to prefer the LN original to the anime adaptation. However, there are series I would never have read without the anime and I don't think I would ever have gotten into light novels in the first place if I hadn't been into anime.
Stay shiny, y'all.
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@shiny said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
However, there are series I would never have read without the anime and I don't think I would ever have gotten into light novels in the first place if I hadn't been into anime.
I literally only began reading light novels because I wanted to know how Bookworm continued from the reveal that
and wasn't patient enough to wait a week for the next episode.
My grasp on sanity remains absolute.
Oh, right, the poison, the poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco's poison. ...That poison?
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@thegrimlich Spoilers!!
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@waterdweller Apologies; that's a moment from about 10 volumes ago for me by now ^^;
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@darkwolf-psddcyt Unless things had changed, Kobo doesn't auto-update when a new ebook update comes out. You have to contact customer service and get someone to update it for you.
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@darkwolf-psddcyt Good to know that they auto update now.
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Funny thing happened, happened on a heated discussion of series with certain 'dispositions', which led to loading the wikipedia page for Kanokon (an anime that aired some years ago) for purposes of refreshing my memory of it, to the realization it was based on a novel series, to gaining the sudden tidbit by further reading that the novel once was licensed by Seven Seas(never released/license dropped?), to following a citation link to an old ANN thread about the announcement, to a certain comment by a certain adam_omega who's apparently a Seven Seas representative(at the time at least), and the true punch-line of this whole one-sentence paragraph;
Richard J. wrote:
Forgot to ask earlier, but what level of editing (censorship) should be expected with these releases? The one's I'm going for aren't exactly "chaste" series and lately it seems like everyone's starting to freak out over possible backlashes (pointless worry I think.)Novels don't carry ratings at all, so there isn't really anything to censor in the first place. But Seven Seas is against censorship as a whole.
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@bookmaniareader What I want to know is should I still be sending licensing requests then?
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@korppi Adam Arnold is one of the longest serving staff at Seven Seas. They have a habit of changing titles every now and then, I think he’s most recently listed as “Associate Publisher” (was previously “Editor-in-Chief”). I think he started with them way back writing their OEL Aoi House.
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@darkwolf-psddcyt Did you just buy on another platform? I'm in the same situation as you were in.
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@sirgiggles Just an update (6 May 2021) Kobo has the revised edition on their store
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User LoremIpsumVerb on Twitter went through the revised editions of Mushoku Tensei released so far(volumes 1-7) and posted screenshots of the differences;
Volume 1-3 comparisons old vs new;
https://twitter.com/LoremIpsumVerb/status/1383515304983109638
Volume 4-7 comparisons old vs new;
https://twitter.com/LoremIpsumVerb/status/1390288884328771584Also, a missing illustration was added back into volume 7, and another illustration was fixed in volume 9. Volumes 8-10 haven't been revised, yet.
And, I would suggest you don't read those comparisons at work, they can a bit, well...
