Rule 3 Addendum - Translations of Others' Works

[Renko]

Good, considering how easy it is nowadays to web scrape and auto-translate a fic.

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So the whole thing is just going to be "whack-a-mole" when it comes to figuring out whether a fic is actually a TL or not.

 

[Vanbers]

When talking about a fanfic, you'd be fine if someone, without your consent, took yours and translated it into Russian, Indian etc, irrelevant if that was a properly edited translation or not, and posted it somewhere while paywalling an advanced 25 chapters.

You made the whole fanfic for free and someone is definitely making a profit of your work, without notifying you. Heck, the translator might be making MORE money than you depending on their audience. You'd honestly be fine with that?

I've seen the situation of translators aggregating a dozen fics and putting up hundreds of chapters behind a temporary pay wall when the OG writer/s just posted their fics, some monetized some not

Edit: if the original writer agrees to all stipulations, including the existence of a subscription service and all that it implies, I would not have any problems with it

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TL;DR For fanfiction? Yeah, absolutely. It's an audience I'd have zero way of reaching or interacting with, I'd just want mine linked to and them not claiming they made the whole thing. Other than that, who cares. Hell, it's unlikely I'd ever even find out, because I have zero interaction with foreign internet, let alone incredibly niche parts of foreign internet like fanfic sites.

Non-TL;DR:

...And how many people are profiting off of Worm fanfiction?

Wildbow made a whole-ass world and setting for free, and these people are just taking his work, changing it a bit, and making money! How awful! How terrible! Someone should stop them!

For original works, or ones they plan on translating themselves, or something like that, sure, I get it, but the fanfics is where my line is drawn.

It's a fanfic. You don't own it, because if you did it wouldn't be a FANFIC it'd be an original work. People translating it into another language without permission is kind of a dick move, but not all that immoral to me tbh, because it's fundamentally more or less victimless. For translations, it's like... nobody in that other language was, in any way, shape, or form, a potential customer to you if you had zero plans of translating it and they can't read your language. There is no 'missed sale' or 'stolen sale'. Unless it's an original work you were planning on selling/translating/publishing/etc. But Fanfics? lmao, nah.

All of this also being fanfic, means that you don't even own the property to begin with. So not only is it all happening to an audience you have zero intention or way of reaching, it's happening using a property you don't even own.

So the whole thing is just going to be "whack-a-mole" when it comes to figuring out whether a fic is actually a TL or not.

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Admittedly it'd be kind of funny to see something like "this story is too chinese-coded for my tastes, banned and deleted" happen to a story someone's writing.

 

[Alaabalanalah]

what about translated fanfics? Can they even sue someone translating their work I wonder?

 

[Zanderion]

Free speech is the principle that if A wants to say/write something, and B wants to listen to/read it, C has no right to intervene. Disregarding that principle is censorship. Censorship is bad for several reasons:

-it's a restraint of trade which causes deadweight loss, and the deadweight loss can be extremely large for information because the cost of transmitting it is generally much less than the value of having it
-democracy is of far less use if the populace is ignorant or misled; a populace that does not know what is going on cannot judge its rulers effectively
-and most generally, the longer the list of banned things is, the less humans can flourish, the more work it is to know all of them, and the more power priests lawyers can arrogate to themselves by knowing it.

There are some cases in which free speech causes large-enough problems that censorship is the least-bad option. It's still censorship, though, and you should never forget that.

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You reminds me of the one time someone on SV compares locking a thread because some posters were making trouble with warcrimes.

I wonder if this rule can be applied to images cuz I certainly didn't ask the original artist on whether I can post them

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One Word: TOUCAN

Considering that the translation quality of novels I've seen on QQ is effectively just Google Translate, you are not losing out on anything by going to the raw's and running the google translate add on.

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I've tried reading some raw japanase webnovel on syosetsu using GTl. Its quite readable, really. Its even better when I tried using some AI.

Haven't try it, but I've heard there's even browser plug-in to do that.

 

[Muscles McMuscletin]

Holy Thanos snap of translation disintegration

 

[icekid]

Honestly im happy just for the fact my front page won't be spammed by that one guy mass updating like 12 fics at the same time

 

[Azraelith]

Honestly im happy just for the fact my front page won't be spammed by that one guy mass updating like 12 fics at the same time

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This. Dude was decent but needed to chill.

Part of why I'm happy is because of how… alike, for better or worse of a term most translations feel.

Oh no! I've been reincarnated as an ebil villain I had better be ebil in a good way!

Oh no! I've been reincarnated as a monster! Let me help everyone and prove I'm still human ignoring any and all instincts that should be over taking me, etc.

I was reincarnated as X but I don't want to do that so let me do Y.

Typically they boiled down to lawful good protagonists with paper thin personalities, no real concept of thought and two brain cells fighting for third place. And almost anathema towards Andy thing sexual beyond handholding.

As I stated earlier, low effort/quality; high traffic. Anyone truly upset about this needs to remember potential plagiarism as well, unless the author is deceased. Plus… I mean if I wanted to read poorly written Chinese I'll go read a fucking manga.

 

[Bludflag]

Suggesting people should go learn a whole different language just to read some shitty badly written fanfics is, uh, it's certainly something, that's for sure.

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My reading is that the addition only cares about original works, not fanworks (fanfiction was just given as a point of comparison for one paragraph). Aside from that, you can MTL something and get almost the same slop, sans some basic editing? Some specific pirating sites go as far as to include the possibility of adding a personalized glossary for the sake of things like unique names etc.

Censorship (through a number of laws they pushed) and lawfare (in general, even without a "legitimate" case) is commonly used by monopolies to maintain their position.

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But those are irrelevant because even if we move to an ideological discussion of remuneration, the standard would be the universal declaration of human rights, which specifies that your work should be protected (i.e., writing fiction should be afforded legal protection that would save you from economic loss).

That's like an author ordering all their books burned (even private copies) and stories/works memory holed because they changed to minds or want to rewrite and make new sales out of that (or some other inane reason).

To participate in culture is to accept that the fruit of one's labor shared are thence part of culture. Attempts to then attack culture shouldn't be considered acceptable.

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Attacking culture is perfectly normal according to what you just described though? The research on alphas in wolf communities was deeply flawed and the author of it spent his own time and effort to fight the aftereffects of its unintentional popularity in culture. Consequently, I don't see why "culture" is sacrosanct in a static, archived sort of way; as a living document, it should allow for the possibility of revision (not in a despotic / tyrant manner, but rather for edge cases where someone genuinely makes a mistake such as in scientific observation or where one's rights would be infringed on).

This genuinely feels like people missed about 80 years of discourse on human rights.

 

[mizerie]

One Word: TOUCAN

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Thats a hilarious incident when you look back at it but it must be chaotic during the time that its happening.

 

[Chastity]

It's a fanfic. You don't own it, because if you did it wouldn't be a FANFIC it'd be an original work.

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You do, in fact, own the original parts of the fanfic.

Consider Master of the Universe/50 Shades of Grey. Master of the Universe is a fanfiction based on the original work Twilight. It is clearly a derivative work.

50 Shades of Grey is basically Master of the Universe with the names changed - according to Turnitin, it has an 89% similarity index. No one could possibly imagine "getting away" with publishing a derivative work that's 89% similar to a copyrighted text!

Yet, not only did E.L. James publish 50 Shades, Hollywood gladly took the material and made multiple movies based on it. Why? Because E.L. James owned the copyright to the parts of Master of the Universe that were hers. Dialogue, description, character interactions, etc, were hers, even though specific details (such as the character Edward Cullen) were not. By removing the original author's copyrighted materials, she was left only with the parts that she owns the copyright to - which is also the vast majority of the text, just as it would be for somebody translating a Russian-language Worm fanfiction.

 

[FeatheredSerpent]

OK, after reading the announcement and the discussion (a mistake in hindsight), here's my opinion that no-one asked and no-one cares about but I'm gonna post it anyway:

This seems as excessive as slaaneshi cult.

Weren't there already a procedure in place to remove copyrighted shit if rightful owner comes knocking? Why was it not enough?

I am deeply upset about the implementation of this add-on to the rules. This doesn't come off as a "in the works" change, but as a targeted, gut reaction to cover the site's ass.

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Yeah, seconded. Feels like this part here

It is also thus a liability to the site

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is the important one. What spooked you, people?

On other things mentioned:

Re: poorly translated slop
Let's be honest here for a moment. Yes, honest in the internets, wild, I know.
It never takes more than half-a-hundred words worth of reading, even if that, to recognize shitty MTL story as such. That is if the title alone is not a dead giveaway which it usually is.

If you choose to dig in anyway, whatever consequences it inflict upon your psyche— you have only yourself to blame.

Re: what measure is a translator
As someone with first-hand experience I feel it's worth mentioning that people that think that doing quality translation is not "adding anything" to the work are very much wrong. (Or maybe they're right for translations between distinctly related languages like Spanish-Italian, IDK but I doubt it.)

Even for something as simple as a manual for a dishwasher it's more than just putting it through MTL and calling it a day, translating a piece of good literature without substantial loss in quality is no easy feat even with all the CATs you can pet, and while legal liabilities complicate things with original works of fiction, the fanfic author that didn't bother with explicit "OK" from the owner of the original* don't get to T-pose from moral high-ground over translator that did the same to him as long as appropriate credits are given and no actual plagiarism** is involved.

If you don't want your work to be internationally recognized you shouldn't have written it that good.
*- or outright disregarded "not OK" like with ASOIF.
**- plagiarism by definition, not "the spirit of plagiarism" as interpreted by @JadeKaiser.

Hell, it's unlikely I'd ever even find out, because I have zero interaction with foreign internet, let alone incredibly niche parts of foreign internet like fanfic sites.

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And yet sometimes people from those "incredibly niche parts of foreign internet" follow the trail of [link to the original author] and join your immediate reader base.
It's sometimes shocking how many familiar usernames I see in some threads around here.

 

[Fry]

What about translated fanfics?

Because, as said:



Profiting from *FANFICS* isn't really allowed, so translating a fanfic should be, at least, more fine than translating an original work.

Anyways, understandable rule change, if one I find a bit annoying since there's some of those stories I like.

But are translated fanfics okay? Like, do they count?



That's kind of why I'm asking about the fanfic thing. Because I really feel like outright fanfics should be different. That's not an original story, it's a genshin impact fanfic.



Novelupdates is a shitshow nowadays, fam.

Like, Webnovel and Wuxiaworld have gone full insane on things, to the point that iirc you can't even just read shit freely, you have mobile-game style stamina/gems you gotta use to unlock chapters, at least last I checked a few months ago.

Novelupdates doesn't even seem to link to sites hosting the works anymore, or give any actual links to translator sites. Or at least they changed their layout slightly from when I used it years ago because it's fucking worthless now.

I found out when I tried to look on Novelupdates for links to a story I read ages ago, and found that while it lists the translation group, and the number of chapters translated, it doesn't have links to jack shit anymore.

Fucking webnovel ruined all ability to read shit, man. I refuse to use that site our of spite.

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I just checked and they only changed it so that you need to be logged in to click the links. Weird choice on their part but I'm pretty much always logged in there so it's not much of a problem to me.

 

[Chandrak]

Personally, I approve of this change. There's a big difference in my mind between transformative works and to what amounts to reposting without permission.

 

[darknessfalls]

When talking about a fanfic, you'd be fine if someone, without your consent, took yours and translated it into Russian, Indian etc, irrelevant if that was a properly edited translation or not, and posted it somewhere while paywalling an advanced 25 chapters.

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I'm pretty sure Indian isn't a language. That's like saying Chinese is a language.