Would you be willing to pay for Moonlight Sculptor novels?

Hi guys, since the Odd Squad translation is going very slow, there is always another option of paying for a professional translation of the novel.
It takes around 2-4 thousand dollars to translate 1 volume. So considering there would be enough people to cover the cost of translations, the books could be translated this way.

On average it would take 200 to 400 people willing to pay $10 for volume. Less people if they are willing to pay more.
Me for example, I would easily pay $50 per novel. But not everyone can do that. Let's not forget that there are 32 novels and counting.

So i just wanted to know how willing is this community to invest into translation.
Who knows, maybe we can actually do this.

So. would you guys be willing to pay for translation of Moonlight Sculptor novels? And if so, how much?

Asking this on the forums of a team that is already translating this is a little bit....
And anyways, its probably near impossible to pony up a couple thousand dollars and then put it into the hands of a person that everybody trusts not to just run away with the money...

as for payment, for something like this there are websites (highly trusted ones) where you pay the money in, it's held by the website, then when the deal is complete, the translator/service provider is paid. I forget exactly what this is called, but it's not too hard to find out. Basically, the website is given the power to arbitrate disputes relating to payment, but since the money is already there, the translator doesn't get stiffed, and the money gets returned if the translation doesn't happen. We could all pay in to the one account, but no one could take the money out.

There is however the issue that volunteer translators are getting semi-disrespected. Still, I'd be happy to pay $5 a month for a new MLS volume, starting with volume 6.

So what's going to happen to the donation money if halfway somebody notifies the author or some other owner of the copyright and they shoot down the idea?

raga wrote:as for payment, for something like this there are websites (highly trusted ones) where you pay the money in, it's held by the website, then when the deal is complete, the translator/service provider is paid. I forget exactly what this is called, but it's not too hard to find out. Basically, the website is given the power to arbitrate disputes relating to payment, but since the money is already there, the translator doesn't get stiffed, and the money gets returned if the translation doesn't happen. We could all pay in to the one account, but no one could take the money out.

this might actually work !! , it's perfect !!

-----edit ---

but they request much more then a good deal with someone who simply knows korean !!

raga wrote:as for payment, for something like this there are websites (highly trusted ones) where you pay the money in, it's held by the website, then when the deal is complete, the translator/service provider is paid. I forget exactly what this is called, but it's not too hard to find out. Basically, the website is given the power to arbitrate disputes relating to payment, but since the money is already there, the translator doesn't get stiffed, and the money gets returned if the translation doesn't happen. We could all pay in to the one account, but no one could take the money out.

There is however the issue that volunteer translators are getting semi-disrespected. Still, I'd be happy to pay $5 a month for a new MLS volume, starting with volume 6.

Are you thinking of something like the website Kickstarter? I doubt that would work well. Anyone that pays wouldn't get anything physical out of it, not to mention that it would be over a hundred thousand dollars for all 32 volumes. Even if it does somehow work, there's still the legal issues with copyright.

I dunno if such large scale tasks (as translating whole novels) are appropriate, but why don't we try a crowdsourcing tool, like Amazon Mechanical turk (But from what I see only americans can give tasks but people from all over the world can do them)??

But I don't know if copyright issues will crop up (They most probably will).

There are multiple problems in this...

First, it would violate copyright because someone's making a whole lot of money from something that's owned by someone else. If we can get it translated without having to get money involved, then we might as well focus on attracting free-working translators, not money-paying fans.

Second, as it's been mentioned, paying such a large sum of money to someone we've never met is dangerous, especially since OSS would be responsible for all the fans' money. Even if we use the "safe" website that's been mentioned, it's all foreign territory and it's a pretty big risk on account of the money.

Third, it's very unlikely we'd be able to raise anywhere near that much money. We may have hundreds of readers, but only a handful bother to post comments. Even fewer would bother to give us their money. Furthermore, if we manage to get, say, $500 in donations and can't get people to donate any more, we'd be stuck with the money. Well, unless we can track down everyone who donated and send it back to them; I'm not too experienced in the ways of money transferring, and that's probably possible, but it's still probably a hassle.

Blique wrote:There are multiple problems in this...

First, it would violate copyright because someone's making a whole lot of money from something that's owned by someone else. If we can get it translated without having to get money involved, then we might as well focus on attracting free-working translators, not money-paying fans.

Second, as it's been mentioned, paying such a large sum of money to someone we've never met is dangerous, especially since OSS would be responsible for all the fans' money. Even if we use the "safe" website that's been mentioned, it's all foreign territory and it's a pretty big risk on account of the money.

Third, it's very unlikely we'd be able to raise anywhere near that much money. We may have hundreds of readers, but only a handful bother to post comments. Even fewer would bother to give us their money. Furthermore, if we manage to get, say, $500 in donations and can't get people to donate any more, we'd be stuck with the money. Well, unless we can track down everyone who donated and send it back to them; I'm not too experienced in the ways of money transferring, and that's probably possible, but it's still probably a hassle.

That's what Kickstarter.com is for. You start up a project and people can "invest" in it. If it doesn't reach the required money goal, all that money that was donated is sent back to those that donated. The main problem is that all those projects generally offer something for each donation, whether a physical copy of whatever they're doing/making, or being put into the credits if its a movie, given a small lookalike character in a comic, etc.

The easiest way would be to request permission of the author and see what occurs.
What might bypass the legal system... Would be for a college club to create a translation group... Club gets xxx in funds. Club sets up website with money exchange... For every xx dollars donated you receive xx% back upon typing your initials as a sponsor for the group. Thus the money exchanged falls in the form off gaining "sponsors" rather than payment. All this is far to confusing to actually occur and thus I say to OddSquad.
Is there an option of donating to the translators/scanners/etc of a specific piece so that they might "purchase better equipment" to speed up the process or at the very least encourage them.

Would you want to see someone making money off of something you put years of work into?
Once money gets involved it's going to get difficult, the people getting the money could even end up in jail or at the very least would have to pay huge amounts of money themselves for violating the copyright law. Yeah, some authors are fine with their work being translated to english but that's only as long as there's no money involved. But the truth is most authors can't stand the idea of someone distributing their work. Most artists are left starving while someone else goes and uses their work to gain profit. You should be able to see that would make anyone spiteful.
In some cases contacting the artist/writer has ended up in more drama than it had to. In most cases the books don't really even belong to the writer, they belong to the publishing company. So even if the writer would be okay with it, do you really think a publishing company would allow something like that without getting any profit out of it themselves? As long as the translations stay under the radar, it will still be fine. But risking that and going on a money-hunt to get the chapters/books faster compromises the whole free translation community.

Well this could actually lead us to another topic, which would be scanlations and online readers for manga. Often times you notice scanlators going nuts because of their work being added to manga readers before the 12-48 hours they have set.
That happens because scanlators put their own money and hard work into publishing that one chapter and most of the time they get no profit of any kind out of it. Most scanlators rely mostly on donations, some get ad revenue. However manga readers get massive amounts of money from the massive amount of ads they have on their sites and they also get a big amount of traffic the faster they upload. So in the end it's all about greed.
Now you must be thinking, "Hey isn't that the same thing scanlators do to the foreign authors?"
Well, what actually happens is that scanlations usually cater to small amounts of people, they purchase the original copies and they get no profit out of their work. Usually. However manga readers pick up their work and put them up for the world to see, while it might make some people buy the original book. What catches the author's eyes first is the massive amount of ads. They see money rolling through to people who in their eyes don't deserve any of it. And who do they blame? Obviously the translators.
With no translations those pages wouldn't exist.

So as you see, once money gets involved things get difficult. It's risky enough as it is. Scanlation teams break the law as it is, if they get money involved it will only get more difficult.
From fans to fans. That is the only thing we can hide behind at the moment, so honestly... I wouldn't get any money involved if I wanted to keep reading things I like.

Hmm,

This discussion went waaay off topic. I was asking how many people are willing to pay for the novel they would like to read. What I see instead is all these fears and insecurities, saying things like "it can't be done", "the author will get mad" and the like.

If there is a will there is a way. If all of us started thinking of ways to make this possible instead of finding reason why it can't be done, the paid translation could very well be done in the future.
So far though, only one person agreed with idea of paying and said how much he would be willing to invest. Which is a pity. All the rest were coming up will all kinds of problems and solution for this project. It's way is too early for this. It's all meaningless if there is not enough people willing to invest.

Anyway, I would like to hear if there are any people willing to invest their money to read the novel they love.
If all you have to say is how it can't be done, then please don't bother posting here.

I think I can safely assume that the people who don't think it'll work do not want to donate their money to a lost cause.

Forums are for discussions, and if you don't want discussions, then put up a poll and don't look at the comments. Whether or not people want to pay money is something that depends on a whole lot of things. That's why people are posting their thoughts on whether or not they think it'll work out, and thus whether or not they'll invest in it. It is most certainly not "off topic".

Anyway, if all you want is a yes/no and how much money would be donated, then set up a poll instead of telling off the people who put time and effort into explaining their thoughts on the idea of paying to read LMS chapters. And if all you want are positive comments on how it'll work, and you shun the possibilities of failure, then, well, I worry for you.

post-translated volume donations concept.

I think I would rather people donate 10 dollars to charity instead of making some scammer rich with this idea.

In general I think it's a bad idea.

But this is also a bad idea too:

Osennecho wrote:The easiest way would be to request permission of the author and see what occurs.
What might bypass the legal system... Would be for a college club to create a translation group... Club gets xxx in funds. Club sets up website with money exchange... For every xx dollars donated you receive xx% back upon typing your initials as a sponsor for the group. Thus the money exchanged falls in the form off gaining "sponsors" rather than payment. All this is far to confusing to actually occur and thus I say to OddSquad.
Is there an option of donating to the translators/scanners/etc of a specific piece so that they might "purchase better equipment" to speed up the process or at the very least encourage them.

The thing is like manga's the author generally has no control over these things like translation. That is up to the publisher. Basically NAM Heesung's publisher is Rok Media. You'd have to request permission from Rok Media.

But like I said, this whole thing is a bad idea. If it were worded "donate", then that's a whole another issue.

I would be willing to pay around 5-10 dollars for each volume

Astral100 wrote:It takes around 2-4 thousand dollars to translate 1 volume. So considering there would be enough people to cover the cost of translations, the books could be translated this way.

Sometimes, certain issues take precedence over all other factors. In this case, paying 4 thousands dollars per translation is very wrong. Thus, it should NOT be done.

It would be better to put the project up on one of the translation sites such as Baka-Tsuki or bring in a commissioned amateur translator that may be willing to work upon novels. Some of the scanlators have indicated that on their websites. You should go to the Cove of Translators on e-hentai and see if anyone knows korean there. Short of that, you'd have to look at any of the translated manwhas and see about contacting the translators for those. But if Odd Squad continues to stick to its required policy of going it alone, then that will not work.

Hey guys,

I haven't been on a while and know I'll be going a little off track from these discussion of translation here, but it IS about legal issues I guess and I'm too shy to make a thread of my own

Anyways, I've never done any webtoons or comic of any sort, but wanted to try it. I'm also a terrible story teller so I started using LMS as my story ^^ But since the story does not belong to me, am I allowed to post anything I've done? Can i put my name on it? It's fan art, but since I'm also using the lines and english words.

I know I don't have to post it any where, it was really just a hobby anyways, but it might be a shame if it just sits in my computer. I've only got until 1/4 or so of the first chapter and its not really coloured yet. If anyone knows please tell me about all the legal stuff, you guys as translators/scanlators may know a little right? Also if anyone wants to see anything so far you can PM me ( though I've never used that either so I'll ave to figure that out too), unless it's okay to just post it on =)

* one more thing, i really wish i could copy and paste on your site instead of re-typing all the lines i know that prob has to do with copyright too?
lebby

@lebby
there shouldn't be any problem. that's what Fair Use for....i think

@lebby:
In general, if it's non-commercial and it's not harmful to the copyright holder, then it should fall under fair use. As far as I know. Just make sure to credit the original author. =)

The thing about not being able to copy and paste is to avoid people trying to steal the translations and put them up on other novel-reading sites. Which means OSS would have less of a hold on the translations, and if someone decided to try and make money off of it, OSS would be in trouble for copyright violation, so yeah, it's sorta linked to that.

Awesome! Then maybe I can post it somewhere on the forum when I am done colouring my first chapter =) My drawing isn't that great but that way people can us it if they want. I'll prob be posting it in the gallery section? I'm not sure whats best

I would be willing to pay for moonlight sculptor novels, but I don't think we should pay for a professional translation. Instead we should try and get the series and other light novels picked up by AmazonCrossing.

Finally I was not lazy enough, to make this account.

And yes, I would definitely be willing to pay for the volumes to get translated, as long as its not an outrageous price. And I bet theres a lot more people out there who would also, just that they are too lazy to post here; took me 2 months to finally decide to post this .

Just a slight heads up. The author of LMS has posted on his blog that he has noticed the recent online activity in regards to English translations of his novels. He has stated that although he does have an English distribution contract he will not pursue free translations until at least volume 5 is complete due to the fact that problems with the distributor have indefinitely held up printing after volume 1.

There is an addendum to this however. He will immediately take action if he see's anyone making a profit from the distribution of translated copies. Note: He is not saying that you cannot pay professionals to translate the novels, just that you can't charge people for the translated product. As long as this principle is kept however, he has said that he will not be too fussed, even going so far as to say that he might give official permission for translations of volumes past number 5.

Just a heads up from a passer by.

(registered just to deliver the news).