Please allows novels translations as original content

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FreemenMuaddib

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As you probably know, Webnovel, the Qidian western foothold, is recruiting Fan Translators for dropped projects, with a retribution of 30% revenue share. An insult to the fan-translators scene and another trick for the chinese giant to gain control of the web novels market, strangling both authors and readers. This would be completely unnecessary if instead of following the Qidian evil ways, Scribblehub would start featuring translations as original content and implement FanTranslation Groups pages, with integrated Patreon support, and let them compete in the translations quality and speed of the same novels. This worked fine for legal sites like Rakuten VIKI (Drama licenses are paid, but translations are made by fansub groups for free), because there are huge amount of people waiting to help translating. They just need their work to be recognized under a fangroup name, to be able to compete fairly and to have their page able to collect users feedbacks. It is psychology 101 guys...
 
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Deleted member 45782

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There's NovelUpdates for translations though...
ScribbleHub is for those writing original stories.
NovelUpdates for translating stories.

Translating stories don't count as original content because you didn't come up with the story in the first place, instead you are translating someone else's work...

That is different from those who actually are writing their own story, even fanfic is them writing a story...

Why call an original work someone wrote original if a translated story is also counted as original when they are translators, but not the original authors in the first place?
 

lnv

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As you probably know, Webnovel, the Qidian western foothold, is recruiting Fan Translators for dropped projects, with a retribution of 30% revenue share. An insult to the fan-translators scene and another trick for the chinese giant to gain control of the web novels market, strangling both authors and readers. This would be completely unnecessary if instead of following the Qidian evil ways, Scribblehub would start featuring translations as original content and implement FanTranslation Groups pages, with integrated Patreon support, and let them compete in the translations quality and speed of the same novels. This worked fine for legal sites like Rakuten VIKI (Drama licenses are paid, but translations are made by fansub groups for free), because there are huge amount of people waiting to help translating. They just need their work to be recognized under a fangroup name, to be able to compete fairly and to have their page able to collect users feedbacks. It is psychology 101 guys...
There is so much wrong here I don't know where to start.

1) While no one likes Qidian's practices, they do own rights to their own licensed works. Having translators translate the works in themselves isn't evil.

2) Putting up translated work as originals would be deceptive and may even be illegal even if you own a license, unless your license gives you full ownership of the title

3) If you are gonna pay licensing fees for the content, you would end up paying Qidian anyways since they own the license. And Qidian may choose not to license it in the first place. I mean why would they when they have their own site?
 
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Deleted member 45782

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There is so much wrong here I don't know where to start.

1) While no one likes Qidian's practices, they do own rights to their own licensed works. Having translators translate the works in themselves isn't evil.

2) Putting up translated work as originals would be deceptive and may even be illegal even if you own a license, unless your license gives you full ownership of the title

3) If you are gonna pay licensing fees for the content, you would end up paying Qidian anyways since they own the license. And Qidian may choose not to license it in the first place. I mean why would they when they have their own site?
Yup. Qidian is most likely the one with license.

Translating a story DOES NOT count as an original work. If translators count what they have done as original work, what do the actual authors of that work count as?

You need to have license and permission from these authors, or it can be a whole load of problems too, when hosting and allowing people to write translations directly onto your site.
 

namio

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As someone who is part of fan translation groups, this kind of things is what threatens the existence of grey area free translations. With the intl fandom growing, things are already getting back to Weibo and original novelists and thus copyright holders. Do you know how many bullshit fan translator catfights already made several authors almost ban fan translations? If allowed and SUPPORTED in this site, especially when SH is a sister site to NU, I really don't know what kind of message it would send. Especially given it would, in a sense, give the possibility of centralizing monetized illegal fan translations. I don't think sites like jjwxc would be happy.

Just fucking appreciate the fan translations you have man, at whatever speed they're churned out. So many teams do it for free, go get another hobby. I feel like I can't escape this dumb tiger of "all hobbies must be monetized" and the idiot crocodile of "once a week is SO SLOW ugh what's the translators doing". I swear this is adding years to my solid 56, and I'm only the English editor...

There are sites that actually negotiate translation licenses and thus have a paid model. Don't remember them off the top of my head though...
 

AliceShiki

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Webnovel hosts official translations. Most other sites host fantranslations... Fantranslators don't compete with Webnovel, they're not official.

Also, Webnovel pays their translators, most fantranslators do it as a hobby without earning a cent from it... You can't really compare both.

Also, Scribblehub already allows people to host their translations here, and it also allows you to put links to your patreon if you so desire... What more do you even want?
 

Tony

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As you probably know, Webnovel, the Qidian western foothold, is recruiting Fan Translators for dropped projects, with a retribution of 30% revenue share. An insult to the fan-translators scene and another trick for the chinese giant to gain control of the web novels market, strangling both authors and readers. This would be completely unnecessary if instead of following the Qidian evil ways, Scribblehub would start featuring translations as original content and implement FanTranslation Groups pages, with integrated Patreon support, and let them compete in the translations quality and speed of the same novels. This worked fine for legal sites like Rakuten VIKI (Drama licenses are paid, but translations are made by fansub groups for free), because there are huge amount of people waiting to help translating. They just need their work to be recognized under a fangroup name, to be able to compete fairly and to have their page able to collect users feedbacks. It is psychology 101 guys...

Sorry but Scribble Hub would never do this so I'll lock this thread.
 
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