Hello so this will be my first post here but hopefully the first of many. I’ve been lurking the r/lightnovels/ subreddit for a while and I follow quite a few translations there. I’m currently based in Taiwan and have been spending most of my time improving my Chinese. Recently out of curiosity I tried reading ahead of some of the novels I was following by using a combination of what I know and a few different pieces of software to facilitate the process. Lo and behold I found that I could read entire chapters in a relatively timely manner with, approximately, 95% competence in what I was reading. After I saw Ren’s success with his donation system, I immediately began to consider spending a good deal of my time translating in order to help support myself. I hope I don’t sound like a greedy pig when I say this because I know that the majority of translators, out of the goodness of their heart, do it for free. But I’m willing to spend 6-8+ hours every day of the week doing this and I love the idea of doing something I really enjoy and being able to cover some of my living costs. So with that said, I’m another new translator looking to translate something but also with a few additional questions.
1.
I know that there are of course legal issues in translating publish books such as Jinyong and Gulong books but how do web novels work? Is it standard practice for the translators here to first ask the author permission to translate? Is this the case for both unpublished internet novels as well as published ones?
2. Because of the structure and style of the literature, I prefer to translate/read web novels. I have found 17k.com and hjwzw.com and I’ve been slowly browsing those works while reviewing recommendations and previous requests from this forum and reddit. However although I can (slowly) read Chinese I’m not particularly good at using the computer interface to type it. Nor am I well versed in using Chinese internet keywords.
Are there any other chinese web novel resources I should be looking at? Are there any other raw sources?
3. The Author, IEatTomatoes has an excellent style for web novels, but I don’t know much about him. I know the majority of his popular works already have active translators and I do not plan to poach any projects from other translators regardless of how often they translate a chapter. However I’m not entirely sure where to find his raws. I glanced at a couple of the translation threads of his work here and couldn’t find a link.
Where does he host his work? Does he any other work worth translating that is not currently active? Are there similar styles or authors I should take a look at? Also I believe the exact style I’m talking about is a long story line w/ short chapters (3000-5000 characters) and a strong sense of power hierarchy and character power progression with many cliff hangers or at least chapters that end with a strong sense of anticipation.
4.
Does anyone here use a Chinese-English Bitext program? Something where I could reference the context of past translations of certain Chinese “words” with their English counterparts? Anybody use a terminology manager of some sort?
5.
Finally the most obvious question is: suggestions/votes for translations? I hate to pollute the forum with more posts like this but it can be difficult to tell what is currently active or what has a lot of interest in the forum sometimes.
I’m currently reading
网游之天下无双 and
凡人修仙傳. The second one is from the recently posted recommended reading thread and the other is another VRMMO novel. They are written in very different styles. I’d like to read 10-20 chapters ahead of whatever I would be translating to ensure I choose appropriate translations for certain terms or descriptions. Again I plan on putting a lot of time into this, putting out 2-3 chapters a day depending on chapter length and writing style. I’m sorry to disappoint the community, but I’m not looking to work with another translator on a collaborative project. I know that there are many projects that readers would like me to accelerate, but this is not my personal goal. Thank you everyone who read my annoyingly long post.