January 2021

So I’m starting a new series that isn’t being translated on NovelUpdates already! Also, most of the chapters are shorter than a short Slow Life chapter!

Well, the first series was for my own entertainment more than anything else, so I don’t consider it too important that I can’t put it on NovelUpdates. Even if I keep to the normal schedule, I won’t finish it til sometime in 2022, but that’s better than 2026!

Well, the new series will hopefully get caught up in mid-November 2021, depending on whether the author starts writing some long-ass chapters. I define a double-size chapter at around 190-240 non-blank lines. Anything above that is getting manually split into parts.

I’ve got fonts, comments, scheduled releases, multiple series, and website themes. I may look into making the settings link into a floating button or working on margins, but those are lower priority. Main priority for January is getting a series on NovelUpdates, then building better summaries for previous chapters, then more auth options for comments.

I’m trialing a new strategy for translation, I run a chapter through both Google Translate and DeepL and save both. Then I edit them both together into a single consistent chapter. If this works well, I’ll grab the $7/month DeepL Starter yearly account. I’m not averse to paying for something if it makes my life better. Ask my Opal Ice Machine how much I use it if you’re curious.

After using DeepL for a few chapters, it’s not very good. It’s noticeably worse than Google Translate, though it does catch a few situations where Google Translate spits out nonsense. I’m not sure if it’s worth paying for. For the moment, I’ve discontinued doing the double sets of machine translated chapter, I noticed DeepL was giving out too much nonsense. So this experiment is over for now.

Another strategy is to do more of the verbs after dialogue statements. I’m working on building a word bank of alternate ways to say ‘said’. I’m not going so far as to start adding the verb part when there isn’t anything in the original… not yet at least.

My current process yields a fairly direct translation, well, I’ll combine sentences into distinct paragraphs. I’m not really doing much ‘restructuring’ of the text, just trying to group distinct ideas into paragraphs instead of having each sentence be its own paragraph.

I’ve added in my first character with a distinct voice, meet Captain Douglas of the Kaiou. It just felt weird to have a captain that speaks in perfect English that is happy that Alfred isn’t an uptight noble. So he uses some slang and simpler words. If it’s hated, I can turn him back to speaking the same as everyone else.

And I wrote the wrong year for the date on some Slow Life chapters, derp. It’s 2021 already! Only one chapter got caught on it, sorry 107.

I continue to work on improving my workflow, now I have a small script that generates the chapter markdown files with the correct front matter. That means I won’t forget to put in next/previous links, or have them pointing at the wrong thing. You get better at programming by using it as much as you can to make your life easier, well Alfred would say that using magic, but you get the idea.