I'm A BallerGod of Life

生活系男神

Oh, well when I was researching Nyoi-Bo studio I found this on glassdoor.

Pros: Work was frequent at first, staff seemed nice.

Cons

Work dried up without word after about three months. Assignments I was asked to take on were far below the rate I was told for the first project (which was already well below market rate).

The translations are often well below readable English, which requires extensive editing and rewriting, so we're required to essentially be ghostwriters and the result is extremely low pay considering the amount of work we have to do. If translators make repeated errors, it is the editor's responsibility to explain the errors to them, essentially making us unpaid English tutors.

Management has a ridiculous ratio where 97% of the chapter must be unchanged from what the translator supplied. Again, given the low standard of the translations, this is an impossible threshold to meet. If we do not change more than 3% of the text, then there is a lot of repetition and unnecessary padding in the text. Furthermore, if the chapters don't pass an ambiguous quality check, they are sent back to the editor and we must fix them. So this puts editors between a rock and a hard place.

Another ridiculous management policy regards cursing. Cursing in novels is nothing new. Hundreds of thousands of novels are published every year with curse words in them. But management requires us to replace any "vulgar" words with symbols, like @#$%. Furthermore, they refuse to give a list of what exactly is considered vulgar. I was told that a legitimate medical term for male genitalia was considered a curse word. These guidelines are not only archaic and in complete contradiction to the rest of the publishing industry, they are also extremely vague.

I was told the rate for my first project would be $5 per chapter. There were apparently several editors per project, which meant little to no continuity among edits. I was then suddenly being asked to work on chapters for different projects and it wasn't until they were completed that I learned they were between $2-3 per chapter despite having the same word count. It's bad enough $5 per chapter was already well below market rate, $2-3 per chapter was even worse. The average rate for freelance editors is $0.01-0.02 per word and with an average word count of 2000 words per chapter, Nyoibo is paying at best a quarter of a competitive rate. And given the poor quality of the translations, editing a single chapter sometimes takes roughly an hour or even longer, which means they're paying less than the US federal minimum wage. I could literally make more money working at McDonald's.

Nyoibo also does not pay your wages every month. Instead, they require you to have earned at least $200 before they will pay you. Given the low wages and lack of work, this means I have not yet been paid for any of the work I've done.

They also require editors to use an app called WeChat for communication purposes. WeChat is a Chinese messaging app with serious security flaws. Cybersecurity experts have said that WeChat uses zero encryption and conversations both inside and outside of China are flagged and stored in a database connected to Chinese security agencies. WeChat also uses a sophisticated censorship algorithm to automatically identify combinations of keywords in messages and online articles that it then blocks. So we do not know if our messages are even being seen.

Just today I logged into WeChat to find that I had been removed without any notice from the editor group. Given that I have not been contacted in some time about editing assignments despite being told that new book contracts would be sent out soon, I can only assume that I have been removed from the company.

They still have not paid the money they owe me