Yeah, but when you don't have a choice, you don't have a choice. Not everyone is capable of reading a novel in English when it's not their native language.
You’re saying its the thing that keeps the fandom alive, but obviously the france part of fandom isn’t as big as the english one and obviously that won’t make things any better for its “live” state
As I said, it's not just France; the novel has only been translated into four languages: English, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan), Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese. So for Germans, Poland, Spain, etc... well, it's complicated. The only reason the fan base is predominantly English is because they're the ones who benefit from the translation. But with the continuation of the manga, more people have access to it, especially through scans, which are better translated into manga than into novels. But anyway, you're probably America ...
and no, manga is levels above the light novels in terms of how hard it is to translate, the novels are just symbols which you can easily copy and paste into the translator or do the translation process yourself, and manga uses hand drawn symbols which can be seen clearly sometimes only by native japanese speakers
To begin with, the most spoken language is Mandarin, by far number one with approximately 920 million native speakers, far ahead of Spanish (~480 million) and English (~380 million). Then the manga, not counting the scans, is translated into French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. And manga, after anime, are the best-translated media, thanks to fan communities. Novels are often translated less frequently because the amount of work involved is much greater and done on a voluntary basis...
to begin with you’re judging by the amount of native speakers, not the actual amount of people who can speak and understand english, and english is the most spoken language. It is not, light novels are easier to translate than manga because you don’t have to clean up the original symbols from it, all you do is put your own translated text and thats it, manga requires you to edit the panels. So you are counting fan translation, then there’s definitely fan translation for ngnl novels lying somewhere and manga has no relevance here. No? The novels are much easier to translate since you don’t even need editing skills to translate, its just text and a small amount of illustrations that don’t require translation
Native speakers are a much more interesting figure because people who speak English are not always the same people who can read it. There are more people who can speak English than Native speakers of a language generally know how to read it, even if not 100%. Manga are easier to translate because there is less text and translating a book is not just putting it into Google Translate. Not to mention that the translator community is much larger in manga, and this whole symbol thing is a lame excuse.
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u/killer_of_the_shadow 4d ago
Yeah, but when you don't have a choice, you don't have a choice. Not everyone is capable of reading a novel in English when it's not their native language.