Level Eater - Chapter 62-b

First of all, no, this is not a chapter for those hoping it is.

TL;DR I’m taking a break, and I’m reducing the pace to two chapters per week after that.

Hello, readers!

This is Fall, the current translator of the web novel Level Eater.

I made this post to announce that I will be taking a two-week break from the translation, and furthermore be reducing the chapter release frequency to two chapters per week due to personal reasons.

While I will not be sharing what exactly those reasons are, I will at least say this: I’m not gonna have as much free time in the foreseeable future — and I’m starting to lose my motivation for translating.

As you may or may not know, I am currently doing this project to supplement my self-study of the Japanese language, so I barely use online machine translators — only on the very long, complex sentences, but even then, I just use it so I can understand how the sentence should be read, and sometimes machine translations just don’t make any sense. This means that I translate slower than a translator assisted by say, DeepL or other translation apps. Still, I like this way better since I can learn more from every sentence and paragraph.

Long story short, at first, I was very excited to finally be a part of a translation team and learn thousands of new vocabulary!

However, all things come to an end. At some point, translation just lost its spark. I wasn’t learning as fast anymore and began to lose my drive – I don’t want to put in 90% of my free time into it anymore.

As you know, the team used to release three chapters per week. This was all well in the first arc because the chapters were shorter and I could finish them in less than five hours – I was doing one chapter per day! Which was why, we could sustain the scheduled M-W-F releases back then.

Now, with the chapters having an average length of 1800-2000 words, it takes me anywhere from four to seven hours to translate just one of them… It started to feel more like a part-time job now than a hobby… And as I said, I am gonna be losing my free time, it will no longer be sustainable to keep a 3 chapter/week pace with my speed.

You might be asking, ‘why do you take that long?’

It’s not about reading the chapters, understanding the events, and making sense of them, no. I can read one chapter in less than an hour if it’s just that (my Japanese reading speed isn’t as fast as English, yes). It’s about rewriting the story in a way that would sound what I deem to be natural in English, without altering too much of how it sounded like in Japanese, all while still trying to keep the ‘poetic’ element to it.

In all honesty, I could keep the pace with the assistance of machine translation, and it would also make it worlds easier, but the perfectionist side of me says no. Reading pure machine translation takes the fun out of it for me – it starts to feel robotic, and I imagine I’d even begin to hate it if I go down this path.

‘Why take a two-week break, then?’

Again, personal reasons, don’t want to share the whole thing, but the reason for this break is related to my academics. And maybe I’ll take the time to refill my translation fuel tank (I’m an attack helicopter, remember?)

I think that pretty much sums it up.

Thank you for reading Level Eater up until now. I’ll see you all in two weeks.

— Fall