New update on the Rentry page.
I'm really sorry for the delay on this one. I wasn't planning on being too candid, but this release has been so late that I think I owe everybody an explanation. In brief, I haven't gotten anything done whatsoever for almost all of the last month, because I've had to spend the majority of every day visiting my father in the hospital. He's been diagnosed with cancer, and this has kept him bouncing around throughout the healthcare system—including a stay in the ICU, and a subacute ward where he was surrounded by inattentive nurses and mentally ill patients, like the one who had to be physically restrained because she kept eating her own diaper. So adding that on top of the previous problems about my business slowly falling apart, I will probably have to start going the "desperate begging" route very soon.
Following up on the previous posts, these are the most immediately viable options I've either been given or thought up myself:
- Get a Boosty/Buy Me a Coffee account and hope they don't bother to moderate it
- Get a Patreon/SubscribeStar account and attach it to a completely separate blog and identity, then bullshit some generic, low-effort, mass-appeal product
- Do videos on something like YouTube or Twitch in spite of having no discernible talent
- Get an account on Substack or something like that and bullshit some written content
- Get what looks to be a potentially very high-paying (but equally unstable) work-for-hire job with a shady AI tuning company that I don't trust in the slightest
- Try to enter the doujin translation world and dramatically overcharge people for commissions
- Accept commissions for RPGX scenes, and then feel guilty about it
I'm still accepting suggestions, if anyone's got any better ideas. At the moment, I have very little time to do anything, so the less effort I need to put into it, the better. Technically, the least effort would just be getting the Boosty account and putting it on this blog, so I may do that. But they apparently don't want pornography at all, which means that if they were to start moderating more strictly, I could have the rug pulled out from under me. They apparently just updated their TOS, and it's the first time I've ever seen one of these sites ban "hypertrophied genital anatomy". That's pure jealousy, right there.
Provisionally, I'm thinking of maybe going the separate identity/Patreon route and churning out mass-appeal crap. I saw one particular VN which has simplistic writing, an uninspired concept, and the most generic-looking AI art imaginable—and it's raking in $8000 USD a month. If I could get something like that going, I could more than compensate for my life going down the toilet, and probably still have time to get VN/gacha content done over here.
The massive problem about going "legit" with doujin translations or even RPGX is the AI boom: MTL sloppers have become a completely invasive species and translation has become even less of a reliable income. Add to that it needs some skills in cleaning/typesetting/redrawing.
ReplyDeleteRegarding going Patreon with slop, the market is likewise poisoned, so for one that has any success you find dozens filling space. Also, most of them are from countries with less living expenses than Canada (you're a leaf, right).
Doing something with "soul" (like finding an artist with a artsyle compatible with pseudo-Lilith content and doing your own take on TA/KS) would not probably get the proper monetary returns.
Maybe you can hit Fakku or another one of those fuckers, if they aren't already MTL'ing everything. But I fear the best route is a real life job.
Best of luck with your father.
I agree that manual translation is a dying art form, and is going to become decreasingly necessary or profitable. It'll be a niche thing, the way that fan translations in general have become niche in the wake of corporations licensing everything. I'm really talking about doing a token project which would serve as a nudge-nudge wink-wink totally-not-a-tip-jar-for-the-translations, while also possibly attracting a little audience of its own.
DeleteYou can do what zone tan is doing with ECCHIcation.
ReplyDeleteI've never even heard of that, but I can't think of anything they don't seem to have covered already.
DeleteHow fast do you translate a RPGX scene if you lock in? Was mostly thinking how much you'd charge for one scene. If you charge too much, people won't be interested, and if you charge too little then you will just spend too much time for too little return.
ReplyDelete"indie" translating in general just seems to pay too little as a main thing, you can do it whenever you have free time to get some extra funds, but as a sole income I think you'd just have to work all day every day to make even almost a living from it.
If you do show that you can translate doujins well with typesetting, redrawing (if needed) and everyhing else that goes along with it, then I'm sure you could get work from randos that just really want their favourite untranslated doujin translated.
You do have a way with words, so maybe a collab with someone providing art for a vn or rpgmaker could work out. Huge risk obviously, people in general just suck and might run off with any winnings.
It's rough though. I with you and your father all the best and I hope it works out somehow.
I likely couldn't do it fast enough. Scenes vary wildly in difficulty. The Christmas Asagi scene was one of the worst to do, because it was full of things left to assumption or interpretation, details that didn't quite add up, words or phrases which didn't translate very well even if the meaning was obvious, etc. Some scenes are just like that. That sort of stuff slows me down, because then I have to start having internal deliberations, like, "The best translation is this word, but people are going to misinterpret it because it also has this other meaning, but if I use this other word, you lose that nuance, and it's too similar to this OTHER word that's been overused already, and..."
DeleteI was thinking that if I did a crappy VN or something, I could start with AI placeholder art, and get an actual artist if it reached the point of being profitable. It's only intended to be an excuse to avoid the payment processor regulations, anyway. If the people from MasterCard don't even tolerate incest, then they would have goddamn heart attacks if they ever had to play a Lilith game. Which doesn't sound like a bad idea, frankly.
I feel like a Patreon or donation site would work well if you just went into one of the Taimanin discords and advertised it with your past works. You don't really need to be weird and hidden about the games your translating either, since Patreon isn't going to play them to know what's in them. Patreon gives you a warning anyway, so if worst comes to shove, you just change the Patreon description or game list to something else. Just say you're translating eroge or even just VNs, then list the patches with their official game names and you're fine. Patreon isn't doing due diligence on that level. They only get artists because they can easily SEE what's being uploaded as images, and even then, there's plenty of artists that get by with Patreon never noticing.
ReplyDeleteI take your point, but technically, all they would need to do is cross-reference the games with their VNDB entries.
DeleteMan,reading about your problems suck, hope things will look up soon. Unfortunately, I don't have enough money to buy you and keep your in my cellar as deformed translation troll curio for my well-heeled guests to gawk at.
ReplyDeleteOne venue you might be able to try is to become a translation reviewer youtuber (or maybe some different title). You take scenes from games or anime and then compare what is said with how it is translated. For example, a few years back, breath of the wild released. It turned out that one line was the exact opposite of what was written in japanese. You could explain the japanese original meaning, and even point out where you think the translator went wrong.
Or you could mine the million mistakes/fanfic translations in fire emblem games. It doesn't have to be of bad translations either. You can take good translations and discuss the choices made and what meaning was lost because translating is never perfect.
You could sell it as a "this is what is really said" video for diehard fans of the series, an impromptu japanese lesson by pointing out interesting grammar bits for japanese learners, and explain choices that could be done either way.
No one would be the wiser your "japanese translating youtuber" patreon is a slushfund for japanese porn translations.
Not a bad idea, although it sounds more involved than I would ideally like.
DeleteThere's this artist I follow, and she has a Boosty account with two subscription tiers: basic and advanced, with the latter "granting access to a private Telegram channel, as well as 16+ and 18+ art". I'm not actually subbed to her, so I'm not sure how exactly she does this, but it might be possible for you to use Boosty for SFW previews and such and keep 18+ stuff somewhere that doesn't give a shit?
ReplyDeleteThere are some artists I'm aware of who try to get around content scraping by giving a password that unlocks the content on their website. I could potentially do something like that. I'm reluctant to deal with Discord/Telegram servers just because I don't have the time or interest to moderate them. Of the two, which would be more appropriate for something like this?
DeleteI'd say Telegram? Discord is really just a chatting app with different kinds of rooms. Telegram can do that too, but it can also do channels which serve as a one-way feed of posts by the channel's owner, though it's possible for subscribers to chat in the comments to each post. Kind of like what you have here on blogspot, except in a format that's oriented more towards scrolling. And you can just disable the comments entirely to avoid dealing with moderation.
Delete