75 pages for 150 dollars? Really? (AWE)
Hi, I'm currently doing a sponsorship for A will eternal. I don't know if this is the standard for the other novels, but really it's just robbery. How can you justify 75 pages for $150? If you are fluent in chinese, it would probably take an hour at most to translate 1 chapter. Remembering that actual books, which are 500+ pages of much higher quality and standard of writing, cost on average 25 dollars, how the fuck can you justify that an extra 75 pages of a very easy to translate book is 150 dollars? Like what the hell, 150 dollars should be enough to buy all the chapters. I understand that piracy is an issue and yadda yadda yadda, but honestly, how is this justifiable? This author probably has ~25 people paying him 150 dollars a month for two hour workdays....
Assuming the author works two hours a day to translate 2 chapters (which are effectly 2 pages each) lets guess his monthly return on that alone.
Assuming he has 20 people paying 150, 20 people paying 100, 25 people paying 50, and 50 people paying 20:
Thats 7.25k for the month. Considering he works 2 hour days as he only releases 2 chapters a day, meaning that the chapters for other people is backlog, on average he works a total of 60 hours a month
7.25k / 60 = 121 dollars per hour. And that, in my opinion, is on the conservative side.
I understand that translating is hard work and that they have been doing it for free for many years (except most have/had patreons and what have you) but this is ridiculous. You cannot tell me that someone translating wuxia part time deserves $120 per hour. The author needs to either lower costs for all chapters or release content more rapidly. He is doing good work, but he doesn't deserve the same salary as an orthodondist or a university professor for fucks sakes. He is translating wuxia! It's fun to read, but its oh so easy... I'm sure wuxiaworld is enjoying all the cash and what have you, but let's be real, this is straight up robbery
Assuming the author works two hours a day to translate 2 chapters (which are effectly 2 pages each) lets guess his monthly return on that alone.
Assuming he has 20 people paying 150, 20 people paying 100, 25 people paying 50, and 50 people paying 20:
Thats 7.25k for the month. Considering he works 2 hour days as he only releases 2 chapters a day, meaning that the chapters for other people is backlog, on average he works a total of 60 hours a month
7.25k / 60 = 121 dollars per hour. And that, in my opinion, is on the conservative side.
I understand that translating is hard work and that they have been doing it for free for many years (except most have/had patreons and what have you) but this is ridiculous. You cannot tell me that someone translating wuxia part time deserves $120 per hour. The author needs to either lower costs for all chapters or release content more rapidly. He is doing good work, but he doesn't deserve the same salary as an orthodondist or a university professor for fucks sakes. He is translating wuxia! It's fun to read, but its oh so easy... I'm sure wuxiaworld is enjoying all the cash and what have you, but let's be real, this is straight up robbery
Comments
Easily, $2/chapter is a very fair price in my opinion. It is, it gives the highest amount of advance chapters available. In other words, all of the chapters. What the hell kind of numbers are these? You seriously think this would EVER get popular enough for those numbers to be even close to realistic? I don't think even the raws would ever reach that level of popularity. Have you ever translated before? Have you even watched deathblade's videos about translating? If he only works 60 hours a month, then why did he have to quit his job to translate full-time? Your entire argument is based on assumptions that are clearly wrong. This one really triggers me. It's just not enough that he's already one of the fastest translators out there, he has to be faster, just for you.
All of that to say, you're wrong, deal with it. Have a nice day.
If you find the prices too high, you can find likely minded people and get a translator for yourself (you will find out that you need to pay per word not page and the prices are really fun <span>
Deathblade left his main job just to take more time to translate, I don't believe you can translate anything worth reading in one hour. He sometimes discuss with us for hours which term sounds nicer. There is also 600+ chapters that he translated and he must remember the terms he used, persons that come up again and again etc.
I personally don't really care how much a translator earns from this work. It would make me happy to see DB earning big money, there is nothing wrong people earning good money for a good job. The world is seldom this fair.
In the end if you think you don't want to give that much money, you can try a $10 sponsorship. Before you paid you already knew how much chapter you would get, why are you angry now?
Now, as for your argument about paying for the chapters, I'd agree with you that $150 is to much. But that would only be if what you were doing was buying the chapters, your not! Your giving him a donation of $150 so as he can spend more time on translating. As a thank you he's letting you access his work early.
Also, just as a comparison, when I was translating full time I was on $65 an hour, so you getting all those chapter for $150 is a bargain, stop being ungrateful.
another example, a colleague of mine was hired to translate a Japanese light novel series, she charged $200 per volume, and got it.
There are languages where you can translate good quality work in an hour. German to English is usually fairly easy, and even machine translations are somewhat intelligible due to the fact that there's only a few hundred years of divergence.
Chinese is not one of those languages. Same with Japanese and Korean. To make those languages intelligible to an English ear they essentially have to be completely re-written, which takes vastly longer. Wuxia World distinguishes itself from the rest of the translation community by providing a higher quality of translations.