Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
-
@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
not allowed by whom? Is there some international body of linguists who police translation practices?
Translation rights are typically restricted once granted. Publishers and authors retain this authority and can enforce it through contractual rights.
-
@staylo67 said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
not allowed by whom? Is there some international body of linguists who police translation practices?
Translation rights are typically restricted once granted. Publishers and authors retain this authority and can enforce it through contractual rights.
For example, different publishers require the same author be listed in different ways, causing search failures - https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/8178/website-mistake-two-series-have-the-same-author-but-different-names/7
-
@Lily-Garden said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@unknownmat this why I have stayed away from Chinese light novels; I tried reading one once and I had trouble keeping everyone straight since the names were too similar!
The one I tried reading gave each character multiple names, which made them even harder to remember.
-
The author of Wortenia is such literatury windbag. I’m starting to wander which is worse being forced to read redundant content over and over, or someone like Im Del Yung who just cuts off.
-
I've got a weird one that comes up surprisingly often in LNs: The lack of good gender neutral pronouns in English! Especially when translating from a language where the phrasing might genuinely be ambiguous.
Alternatively titled: The overuse of gender reveals in LNs!
This comes up whenever the narration suddenly becomes coy about a particular character's gender. Everything is suddenly "they", "them", "their". And you just know that it's meant to be a big surprise when it finally gets revealed. The gender will just obviously be the opposite of whatever you might naturally assume. Unfortunately, what might have been a dramatic reveal in the source language hardly merits an eye roll in the English translation as it was spoiled from the beginning by the language itself.
I'm currently reading The Brilliant Healer’s New Life in the Shadows and there's this villain who is only ever seen covered by a grey cloak. Thanks to the sudden jarring use of gender neutral pronouns, I am confident that the villain is actually a villainess. And she will probably join his harem. Sigh. I've only finished volume one so far and have no fore-knowledge. If I turn out to be wrong I'll report back here, but I doubt that will happen.
-
@unknownmat It doesn't help that in those kinds of series the MC ends up being the only decent male character. So any decent new character invariably ends up being a girl that'll be added to the harem. And that includes decent male characters, because they usually just end up being cross-dressing girls.
Any new male characters start off as jerks where they either run the beatdown gauntlet to become an occasional friend or they're permanently eliminated. If they aren't jerks, then they're usually mob characters that the author doesn't bother developing.
All that to say, depending on how an author uses their characters, gender reveals aren't all that revealing...
-
@endoftheline That's fair. The way the characters react in-universe led me to believe that the reveal was meant to be shocking, but maybe no readers on either side of the planet are actually surprised by most of them.
I liked how Sylphiette's reveal was handled in Mushoku Tensei. With careful writing and a disciplined narrative POV the narrator's confusion can become the reader's, and there is no need to hide the pronouns. By contrast, omniscient third person narrators just don't lend themselves to such surprises very well.
-
Ok, I've got a new one (typical disclaimer: May have already been covered):
Little kids cannot fight adults and win. I don't care if you have magically enhanced muscles. I don't care if you have combat experience from a previous life. A four year old will never defeat a grown man in a fight.
I'm currently reading The Beginning After The End. The story is actually much better than I expected. The writing is way above average. The characters actually have interesting personalities that bounce off one another in amusing ways. And the story pulls off the almost miraculous feat of including actually likeable mascot characters. But very early in the series the author makes this mistake where, at four years old, the protagonist spars with his father or fights with adult bandits and yet doesn't have his ass immediately handed to him. Huge eye-roll.
One more silly example, I'm embarrassed to admit that I really enjoyed The Three Ninjas when I was in elementary. To a kid, the idea that Ninja skills can put you on par with grown FBI agents or trained fighters is understandably appealing and makes for fun cinema. But the reality is that size and reach and strength and endurance are like 75% of any fight. Ninja techniques will almost never overcome this advantage, and certainly not against trained adult fighters.
-
The story about the noble in ruin. It was interesting how he tried to save himself. And then bam! He was suddenly king of his own territory and has lots and lots and lots of followers?
I don't get it. Why not just skip the whole 'ruin' thing if all you want is to have some kid rule a territory and have everyone fawn over him. And then name the series 'Rise of a king' or something. -
@RobD said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
The story about the noble in ruin. It was interesting how he tried to save himself. And then bam! He was suddenly king of his own territory and has lots and lots and lots of followers?
I don't get it. Why not just skip the whole 'ruin' thing if all you want is to have some kid rule a territory and have everyone fawn over him. And then name the series 'Rise of a king' or something.Marketing. New authors often copy popular trends to get more people to try their work and to hopefully get published. It's also why it has the silly tacked-on but barely-there reincarnation / maybe-isekai part of his origin.
-
@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Little kids cannot fight adults and win. I don't care if you have magically enhanced muscles. I don't care if you have combat experience from a previous life. A four year old will never defeat a grown man in a fight.
It would be more believable if they had the kid using tactics and a projectile weapon. But they also default to sword-fighting and hand-to-hand combat for some reason.
-
L Lily Garden referenced this topic on
-
So I've recently worked through Reincarnated as a Sword, and overall rather enjoyed it.
But the author does one thing that really annoys me. Namely, dialogs involving lots of characters during action heavy scenes (think a multi party brawl, for example), where the dialog ends up looking like this...
...She used the momentum to launch a horizontal swing, knocking the Blue Cat towards the other combatants.
“Heavy Slash.”
“What?!”
“Urgh!”
“Hiyaaah!”
The swordsman Yuan and the lancer Yosh took the main brunt of the hit......With multiple back-to-back unlabeled dialog sentences consisting mostly of indistinguishable onomatopoeia. I have no idea who said what, and even if I did, I'm not imaginative enough to understand the practical difference between a "Urgh!" and a "Hiyaah!".
Light novels often depict scenes where multiple parties interact. And some handle it better than others. For example, by giving each character a speech quirk, it can be clear who's speaking without excessively adding "X said", "Y said" everywhere.
But Reincarnated as a Sword is maybe my least favorite example, where it's not only unclear who's speaking, but also the speech itself is just visual noise that does nothing but distract from the action.
