The danmei fan translation community is slowly dying
I talked about this with a friend on Discord, but I thought I’d share this here as well:
Good human translations are being bought by official English licensors, and these licensors are requiring the fan translators to take down their fan translations from their websites. This leads to the English danmei fandom having no access to the novel at all until they can buy the official translation, which is not always possible because of either costs, shipping/regional restrictions, etc.
Because of the news that JJWXC is planning to release their own English site, human translators have made their translations private to avoid getting a copyright warning. Many translations are now only accessible if you’re part of some closed Discord server or Twitter circle or if you happen to stumble across some obscure Carrd. This makes well-translated danmei hard to find.
The translations that are easy to find are linked on NovelUpdates, but most of them nowadays are either poorly-edited MTL or straight-up copied from Google Translate (e.g. all translation links of I Became a God in a Horror Game on NU are just edited MTL.)
What’s even more insidious is that these MTL-ers try to pass off their “translations” as human translations and dare to lock advanced chapters behind a paywall when they didn’t even edit them much. (I can tell. I used to edit MTL too.)
So now, not only do we have less access to good translations, we’re also locked out of shitty translations.
Edited MTL is not inherently bad as long as you put in the effort to check for accuracy and consult native speakers when necessary. I worked at a CNovel translation company before, and some clients would even ask for machine translation just checked for accuracy by editors. But the MTL-ers on NU don’t do this. They just correct the grammar a bit and then call it a day.
So yeah, it’s a shitty time right now for the danmei enjoyers who don’t just read the mainstream novels.
I was really frustrated when I found out that one my favorite apocalypse novels, Wasteland and Sabbath (whose book cover is the middle image on my pinned post), got its title mistranslated as Sabbath on Wasted Land. I skimmed through the first chapter of the translation to check how it was, only to be even more disappointed because the translator had also wrongly explained the meaning of the protagonist’s name. His name is Sabbath/An Xi (安息, literally meaning “peace and rest” but it also means “sabbath.”) He was named as such because he was born on a sabbath. The male lead, on the other hand, is named Wasteland/Fei Tu (废土, which also means “post-apocalypse”). It’s the name Sabbath gave him because he reminds him of the outside world. The title is literally just the protagonists’ names together, but the “translator” still completely missed it.
