Wow. I knew sales numbers were low, but not that low. Is it normal for games sales numbers to be eclipsed by the number of people pirating the game? I can understand why Sol Press were so frustrated by it if they have similar numbers.
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Mangagamer freelance translator: Why I'm no longer working with Mangagamer
- Thread starter Chairmanchuck (另一个我)
- Start date
I think you hit the nail on the head. The stuff MangaGamer put out are a niche of a niche. Porno games. Those sales numbers make sense when you realise what they're putting out. In a way underpaying their translators is probably the only way they can profit enough to stay open.
Which means if the public pushed them to start paying a reasonable rate it could result in, if not death, than a big decline in their output. Which sucks for fans but is the right thing to do to assure workers getting paid properly. It's going to be hard to convince the dedicated niche MG has to put pressure on them though if it means getting less games.
Maybe MG should expand their area of expertise to non-porno games but it's probably hard to do business when you have that on your portfolio. I'd like to support their efforts but nothing they put out interests me.
Our World is Ended is the worst proofread game I've played in about 15 years since the bad old days of Natsume's mid period Harvest Moon releases.
Even worse than usual at it is almost an entirely pure VN with only branching decisions. It's all text and very poorly proofread at that.
Only in the VN industry as far as I know. All things considered, it's a miracle that VN localization industry is even a thing.
This is so fucked up but not surprising. Imagine being paid so little to translate the garbage that MG mostly brings over, which apparently isn't the most profitable kind. I imagine bigger niche video game publishers are better but not by much.
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This isn't even exclusive to visual novels unfortunately, translators are just flat out underpaid in a lot of industries, crunchyroll and funimation are pretty bad about this as well, they have even less excuse when you look at how big their operations are and the money they bring in
That's what I've noticed. I do tech writing, and when my stuff needs to be translated, it's usually done by hiring an external translation company.
It's not uncommon to see these places charge five digits to translate a manual that's a few hundred pages long (not as much text as you might think because manuals have a lot of diagrams). I don't know how much the actual translators get, but these translation places do charge a lot, and there is quite a lot of demand for them because most companies don't have the internal staff to release books in multiple languages themselves.
That sounds about right. At that point, you are paying for project managers, translators, proofreaders. Translators and proofreaders that translation companies outsource to still don't make that much. The companies usually take a large cut and find a translator that is somewhat competent but who can offer a low rate.
Your company can probably post that sort of translation job on ProZ (a translation job board), find a really good and experienced freelance translator, and subsequently save a ton of money by cutting out the translation agency. There's a lot of qualified and excellent translators on ProZ. It's a win-win situation: your company would save substantial money and the freelance translator would still make way more than he/she would get through a translation agency/outsourcer. I don't know the exact rate that translation agencies take (I avoid translation agencies), but a lot of them pay their translators peanuts.
Of course, it can be risky. You might hire someone completely incompetent. It also requires a bigger time investment as you aren't just handing the work to the translation agency and having them sort out all the details.
a different perspective from a Sol Press editor
Those numbers don't make sense to me at all. I am a part-time freelance translator (JPN->ENG), and the current project I am working on pays 4-5 cents per character depending on repetition, and even that is considered half of what is normally paid (I am new to the gig so I don't mind). The company apologized to me in advance for not being able to pay more, in fact.
What a load of capitalist shit. It's the exact same type of argument a corporate apologist would make in defense of other industries that exploit the passion of workers, such as the Japanese animation industry. Mind you, the Japanese animation industry isn't the only one that profits off of such exploitation.
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Not sure what kind of company you freelance with, but I am sure Mangagamer and some of the other companies mentioned in this thread are able to pay the low rates they do because they tend to work with younger freelancers who are invested through their own enjoyment of vns/games/anime/manga and want more people to experience them.
Considering the editor also brings up how vns are not money makers, this sounds less like a different perspective and more like the other side of the coin.
Fucking awful
tl;dr for anyone who doesn't want to read this is a while bunch insults being thrown at being thrown at freelancers who complain by calling them liars and are untrustworthy while saying localization companies should be given the benefit of the doubt.
I'm probably the only one who thinks what he said isn't that unreasonable (except for the direct accusations aimed at freelancers).
Because this makes a lot more sense. It's not a matter of a different perspective, but the other side of the coin that's also trying to make a living out of publishing visual novels.
It is a different business. Webnovel is losing money and hasn't turned a profit and they dont care. This is the start where they invest. Webnovel is a subsidiary of Tencent so money isn't a issue. They do underpay translators btw. As in 0.02 cents a word or so. They pay per chapter basis and it is 40$ around and chapters are 2k+ words usually. Even the other sites you read on its not rosy. Source? I have worked 3 years in online translation scene and left it recently. Its a field filled with youngsters translating for less and eventually burning out.
Even webtoons like line webtoons dont pay well afaik. On line webtoons in joining as a translator section it is written they r taking fans of the work and compensation is not even mentioned.
Np. Additionally ill add that translators working under webnovel dont own their work so if they leave they lose their work. This is different from the 'normal'. Translators do own their work as it is their creative work even if translated but here they contractually sign that right away. Lastly the 20 chapter releases you see per week trust me arent the best translations as you cannot provide quality work that fast but then again if you are seasoned reader you must have realized that these novels arent so good as well... More like fast food of novels with same tropes repeating without end. A guilty pleasure
You're right in that it's not that simple, but word count is important as a rough way to gauge the volume of work required for a job. So translation places do start calculating rates by word or character count.
What can sometimes happen is that additional costs may be added to this x-per-word fee to account for factors that require extra work, like the text being translation-unfriendly in some way, or images that have text baked into them.
I think you're being a bit too harsh.
If I remember correctly a couple of years ago CR translators in europe were being paid 60€/episode, which is nowhere near a good pay but hardly comparable to 1.75$/character.
Considering that most of those translators would probably be ex-fansubbers/people learning japanese in college I think it's an acceptable first job.
The real problem is being paid the same regardless of the difficulty of the episode (and you can't even compain if stupidly hard work like Occultic;Nine ends up with gibberish all over the dialogues).
Ohhhh, I see. So it's not set in stone and it can vary a little per project. That's nice to know, thank you for the info.
I think the part of this comment most puzzling to me is why you think working for a "hentai company" somehow makes it okay to receive far below minimum wage for your highly skilled work?
I guess what I'm confused about is the expectation of high wages for something so incredibly niche. Yes, it's skilled work for sure, but that doesn't mean that every gig is going to pay (or be able to pay) top tier bucks. Someone should absolutely walk away from that if it's not worth the time. It is what it is.
Seems kind of shitty to blame the workers as opposed to the company paying ridiculously low wages
How am I blaming anyone? If someone wants to translate manga or visual novels, that's great. But if that gig isn't paying what you need, then you need to apply your skills elsewhere. Not everything pays what you need (and yes, sometimes it's laughably low). And if that's the case, then walk away, which is what this person did. That's not possible in every situation, bu it is here.
This is from professional translation places that do things like corporate manuals. I'm not sure how different it is for game or media translations.
For him to blanketly discredit translators that speak out against companies is pretty fucking egregious.
It's also worth noting that this guy works for Sol Press, which is supposedly one of the worst paying companies in the business (source).
As the saying goes, 'if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys'.