Asian Fan Translation Trends 2018

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I: The state of affairs

II: Exponential growth: Chinese projects soon to overtake Japanese?

III: Efficiencies of scale? : Dominance of multi-person translator groups

IV: The 200 most popular words in novel titles

V: How long do you have to wait for the ending? a.k.a time to completion

VI: Top Original Publishers

VII: Licensing

VIII: Random Statistics and Conclusion

傲风 An Unyielding Wind V01-S10-C02 “Central Cloud City”

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Random Statistics and Year Conclusion

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  1. How many current projects does a translator have on average? 3
  2. What is the most common year a project was originally published?
    2016 with 567 projects.
  3. What is the number of “abandoned” projects? (not updated since
    2018/01/31 and status incomplete) 1285
  4. What is the most common day to start a translation project? Monday
  5. Who is the author with the most translated works? Kamachi Kazuma,
    author of  A Certain Magical Index and other light novel series.
  6. The most common word in novel titles? “World”, which occurs 226
    times, followed by “god” and “love”. See the word cloud for others.

Conclusions
Exponential growth of projects, many new licenses, and Chinese projects might just outnumber Japanese ones by this time next year.

Part VII Licensing | Table of Contents

Part VII Licensing

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Licensing Party 2017 2018 Rank Change
Qidian International 72 142 0
Yen Press 45 52 0
Gravity Tales 12 46 5
Wuxiaworld 27 34 -1
Volare Novels 19 29 1
J-Novel Club 11 27 3
June 19 19 -3
Tokyopop 19 18 -3
Viz 15 15 -2
Seven Seas 9 13 0

Qidian International and Yen Press are still the biggest licensees this
year. A near doubling of Qidian International’s licenses push it far above
every other licensee on the list in terms of growth. Gravity Tales
jumped up five spots, pushing Wuxiaworld out of the top three.

Part VI | Table of Contents | Part VIII Random Statistics and Conclusion

Part VI Top Original Publishers

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Original Publisher 2017 Works 2018 Works Rank Change
Syosetu 471 600 0
Qidian 368 527 0
jjwxc 133 347 0
Ascii Media Works 125 133 0
17k 80 106 0
Kadokawa Shoten 75 88 0
Munpia 72 86 2
zongheng 60 81 -1
Fujimi Shobo 74 77 1
Media Factory 69 75 -2

Note: This values excludes all works with more than one publisher as it
would be double-counting. Green indicates rise in rank, red a decrease in rank.

The top 5 publishers remain the same as last year, though all except
Ascii Media Works show significant growth. Despite the dominance of
Syosetu and Qidian, the publisher with the highest increase is jjwxc, a
Chinese female-oriented webnovel website. Munpia is still the only
Korean publisher on the top 10.

Publisher descriptions

(Please help me improve these! IE focal audience, specializations,
interesting history)

Syosetu: Japanese webnovel website (with both male and female sections)

Qidian: Chinese webnovel website (mainly aimed at male readers. Has merged with Chuangshiand Yunqi.)

jjwxc: Chinese webnovel website (a.k.a Jin Jiang Literature City, mainly
aimed at female readers.)

Ascii Media Works: Japanese magazine publisher (the company publishes
multiple forms of media)

17k: Chinese webnovel website (mainly targeted at male readers)

Kadokawa Shoten: Japanese publisher of novels (and other media)

Munpia: Korean webnovel website (with both male and female sections)

Zongheng: Chinese webnovel website (aimed at male readers and has
recently spun off its own female-oriented website)

Fujimi Shobo: Japanese lightnovel publisher

Media Factory: Japanese lightnovel publisher

Part V How long do you have to wait? | Table of Contents | Part VII Licensing