An Urgent Appeal on Behalf of the "I Want All Your Money" Fund
There's a "woe is me" sob story version of events that I won't get into here, but I'll let you in on one aspect of how things are going for me. It's not directly health-related for once, although if you're good little boys and girls, I might regale you with tales of my colonoscopy. It's been a funnnnn year.
Partially thanks to some serious problems that have cropped up of late, I'm getting to the point where my business is falling apart. At the moment, it's looking like I might have to essentially be the company pretty soon. If and when that happens, I can't do all the work myself, and the profit margins are no longer high enough to even pay someone minimum wage to help me. Hell, I'm not making minimum wage right now. I had to agree to pay the majority of President Bigly's tariffs just to keep my most important customers. The second that the de minimis exemption was retracted, virtually everybody cancelled their orders until I offered that. It's a similar story with prices.
In essence, I'm heading slowly, but steadily in the direction of "financially fucked", and thanks to credit card companies suddenly being the morality police, all my backup plans are no longer viable. Does anyone have any ideas of what I could do to supplement my income before that income becomes literally $0? I've considered armed robbery, but my face looks fat in tights.
Long shot but maybe move to the US? I don't know where most of your customers are but if you don't have to pay tariffs to Canada it might be worth paying the extra shipping costs, and if you get citizenship you get to vote for a president that isn't retarded. If you just want something to pad income, try fiverr. good luck bud
ReplyDeleteMoving isn't an option, for reasons that are part of the sob story version of events. There's a lot more to it than what I just described. I'm ideally looking for something that would allow me to supplement or possibly replace my job, while still leaving me time for translating.
DeletePeople have told you for years to set up a Patreon or crowd funding page.
ReplyDeleteI'm aware of that, but my stupid morality got in the way. I didn't need extra income, and asking for money didn't sit right with me for a combination of moral, philosophical and legal reasons. That's why I always kept Patreon and SubscribeStar in mind as a rainy day backup plan, but was reluctant to actually take any money for doing this. I don't know if you've noticed, but I may be an idiot.
DeleteNow it's borderline too late. There are only around 20-30 people who still come here. And I certainly didn't foresee the credit card companies deciding they were going to ban absolutely everything they could get away with. Even stuff as tame as incest is subject to demonetization; meanwhile, I've translated snuff scenes where people orgasm from having their bones liquefied. But hey, at least those characters weren't related to each other.
So if I did a Patreon account, it would need to be for something disconnected from this blog entirely. Something either a lot tamer, or non-pornographic in nature. And the only ideas I have swirling in my head are ones that would get me banned under the new regime. That's why I'm trying to figure out if there's something specific that I can do for people that won't get the rug pulled out from under me.
You could translate regular doujin. There are people who translation requests
ReplyDeleteThat's a good idea. Although, I would have to avoid doing any doujin that's related to a series I'm not familiar with, which is to say practically any series at all. Does anyone make serious job-replacing money doing that? I've noticed AI taking over that field more and more, to the point where it feels like few people bother these days.
DeleteDoujins moe is still around. And even though there is ai out there its not verry good not a lot of ai translated doujin are in circulation
ReplyDeleteWell, the problem with AI translation at this point is not so much inaccuracy as it is heavy paraphrasing and misinterpretation. The core issue is that if you need to use an AI to do the work, you probably don't speak enough of the language to recognize the mistakes and correct them. I saw one gallery a few months ago where the title didn't make sense because the AI had bullshitted something about dreams, and when I looked at the original, it seemed to be using Yume as a character's name. So it did a basic and reasonable misinterpretation, but the person who compiled the gallery didn't even know that simple word, and so completely missed it.
DeleteThat said, manga translations seem to be particularly guilty of heavy paraphrasing, even in human translation. And I'm seeing more and more cases of late where machine translation, flawed as it may be, is a useful tool against malicious or incompetent human translators. For instance, I saw what they did to the subtitles in Panty and Stocking, and it drove me up a wall. The AI might get things wrong by accident, but it's preferable to the humans who get things wrong on PURPOSE.
I think dlsite hire translators as well. As for patreon. Theres also subscribestar (even if it kinda sucks atm) but generally you can sorta distance what you do from what you show on patreon. Where the content itself is just links to a megadrive etc. There's also boosty I think. Ive seen some 3d artists do stuff thats against patreon TOS there, in the form of sharing links to other sites like mega. The artist wgqhs f. ex.
ReplyDeleteThere's also Kagura games, shivarune etc, who translate hentai games. I personally like Kagura games, they usually have good translations and uncensored stuff. But I cant say anything regarding what they pay their translators etc. Im sorry, I can only make suggestions but dont know enough of the industry to give the best advice.
DLSite looks easy to get into, but from what I can look up, I can expect to make a couple thousand dollars a year if I'm lucky. Shiravune seems to contract out, so I would need to be in the industry already. My concern with trying to join an official localizer is always qualifications. As I've mentioned on occasion, my listening comprehension used to be passable, but after working so much with text, it's atrophied to basically nothing. Apparently this makes up a huge chunk of a Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which is one of the most basic requirements to be a professional. In addition, I've heard about job exams which quiz you in part on recognition of Japanese pop culture references, which is another area where I would fail miserably.
DeleteI've heard all sorts of things about Patreon over the years, including that they can ban you for doing things off-site which are against their terms of service, even though those things don't have any direct connection to what you're being paid for.
Those are all unfortunately true. All I can say is that you lose all chances you never take, so it could be worth to try. Tho mb. preparing a bit and brushing up on old skills etc might be good too before you hand in applications.
DeleteTo jump on the translation bandwagon, last I checked some of the bigger scanlators for regular manga/manhua would pay staff. It wasn't exactly common, but it did happen. And it seems like every manga scanlation group is looking for translators.
ReplyDeleteAnd, as somebody said already, you also offer services on a by-page basis. I doubt you'd be able to live on it, but with AI translated slop slowly becoming more prolific on Ex, the amount of people who do good work taking "bounties" has only increased. And, well, at least some of them must be paid for.
Another thing you could check for would be AI Evaluation companies - places like DataAnnotation, Alignerr, TELUS Digital. Basically you'd be looking at AI work and evaluating/ranking it so they can further tune the translation models.
I've never heard of those companies. I looked at the Telus one, and it's full of cryptic job listings like Personalized Internet Assessor, Associate Principal of Application Strategy, Scatalogical Dipthong Purveyor, etc. that I don't think I could get in a million years. Alignerr seems to have some easy-looking mind-numbing jobs, and only some of them require me to live in India. Thanks for the tip. I'll consider it.
DeleteTranslating and typesetting doujins are the best bang for your buck.
ReplyDeleteYou do know groups out there charging 3.5 USD per manga page.
I'm not aware of those groups, as I don't pay much attention to the doujin scene. I did a manga translation as a test once, and I didn't like it, but things may come down to that.
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