

There is a lot of great series translated by folks like Baka-Tsuki - so, why
do series take forever to end up over here, and for that matter, once they're
licensed - how come some releases are so spread apart?

  * _Spice and Wolf_ used to be a 6-month release cycle from Yen Press - it has been reduced now but this is still quite long
  * _The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya_ , _The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan_ , and others also find themselves on strange timelines.

Does it really take that long to translate or is there something else here?
I've heard things like they're licensed one at a time and they gauge sales
before going on.


CC BY-SA 4.0
2013-11-18T17:58:56.423
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2019-04-17T03:53:44.933
2019-04-17T03:53:44.933
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question
light-novel-production
Why do so few light novels make it over via timely translation?


Light Novels are indeed harder to translate, but that isn't the real cause for
their delay. The market for LN is really small outside Japan for a number of
reasons so companies aren't interested in publishing them unless they are for
very famous franchises (like Haruhi), and even then it's very risky.

As I said, translations and edition arent the reason _per se_ , but that also
affects. Translations in sites like Baka-Tsuki, while being done with lots of
effort and having lots of stages for correction and quality check, doesn't
quite fit the quality expected for a commercial release. Even in Baka-Tsuki
the translations takes lots of time to be published, corrected and polished,
so you can imagine how long that would take for a commercial-quality release.


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2013-11-19T10:08:47.507
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2013-11-19T10:08:47.507
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answer