When a Snail Loves Announcement

Hello everyone,

It has just come to our attention that there is a lot of disrespect going on towards Qidian as they have picked up When a Snail Falls in Love. Thus, we will now be addressing matters that we did not talk about previously. The first few points are the most important in addressing this conflict.

It’s up to you, whether you want to read the rest or not.

In the future, please be careful with your words and STOP operating on misinforming information. To ensure that this does not continue and to respect the original author, we will be taking down our WASFIL translation.

Click the Read More line if you want to read in more detail.

Sincerely, the meraki team

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First of all, yes, Qidian’s group is the official translation group of the novel. Although we sought Ding Mo’s permission, we never heard back. We were always just a nonprofit fan translation group. If we had ever gotten permission we would have let you guys know immediately.

Secondly, please make informed accusations when you are accusing other translation organizations of stealing content. When comparing our version of WASFIL to Qidian’s version of WASFIL it definitely doesn’t look like it has been plagiarized and there is no way to accurately measure whether content has been plagiarized or re-edited.

Finally, we ask that you stop voting Qidian’s work of WASFIL down as there is really no reason for them to stop translating it. If anyone should take down their work, it’s us, and today, we would like to announce that we will also be taking down our translation and Tiffy’s translation of WASFIL from our blog. This will hopefully reduce further and/or future confusion. We also hope to respect the official translators and the author of the work.

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Now that we’ve gotten that all cleared up, I want to trudge into less objective territory and talk about meraki more specifically.

I’m sure some people may be asking a lot of questions about meraki’s actions and here, we are going to address some of those questions individually.

Why didn’t meraki do anything when they saw people voting down WASFIL?

Irisu originally brought it up to the meraki community that Qidian had started voting on novels to pick up, and one of those novels was WASFIL. To be honest, at first the staff was freaking out. After thinking it through, however, I realized there wasn’t much we could do about it. Qidian is indeed the official publisher of WASFIL and they own the rights to it. The author never responded to us. Therefore, we did and do not have a right to post our content in the first place.

I have heard about and personally seen Qidian copying other people’s translations but this translation team wasn’t copying translations, according to what I saw previously. There weren’t any ill-intentions going on. I’d say there wasn’t much we could do unless either they confronted us about taking it down (which we would do gladly), or if something else that we didn’t account for happened to the translation on Qidian (which is this).

We never took special tabs on Qidian’s progress with WASFIL and we never really checked Qidian’s translations since most of us are not big Qidian reading people. For me, it’s the personal choice of novel versus the fact that it’s Qidian (which is something that a lot of people probably avoid it for).

We never knew this was going on until otwentyfirst brought it to our attention. Thank you for letting us know what was going on so that we could address it otwentyfirst!

Wow I guess meraki is just suuper biased against Qidian, right?

Actually no. Although I (geeky) saw Qidian copying volarenovels’s translations firsthand, merakitranslations is completely different from volarenovels. We have different foundations, policies, and volarenovels has official partnerships and is going through a lot of great expansion in their site. Since we are not a corporate translate site, we try to make decisions from a logical standpoint and resolve things in a nondramatic way.

Meraki actually posts reviews on Qidian novels, and we have a few avid Qidian readers in our midst. Obviously a few readers and staff members cannot speak for the entire corporation, but the point is, we strive to make decisions that will hopefully be better in the long-run and avoid drama while we’re at it.

Why didn’t we take it down until now?

As stated before, we didn’t know this conflict was occurring, and we were kind of waiting to see what Qidian was going to pull- if they were going to do anything at all. Since Qidian does have a bad reputation as well as the upper ground, we were going to just react to whatever situation ended up being created versus doing anything to ignite the drama first.

Did meraki want to take credit for having “original author permission”?

No, we never wanted to take credit for having “original author permission” according to how otwentyfirst described other readers. We never stated we had original author permission. At the most, we stated that we are trying to GET original author permission, which is always a struggle when the only way you can contact an author is through weibo. Guys please read content and please don’t distort information like this in the future. This has happened a lot of times but with something this important, you really need to be more careful with your words.

The following are few messages to the meraki fandom family that the meraki staff would like to share with you guys.

I am fully aware that within the people who advocated for WASFIL to be taken down from Qidian, there were non-fans of meraki as well as fans of meraki. This message is for the people who read a novel or short story on meraki and felt the love that we try to share with others.

Fans are representative of what they support in a lot of ways. A lot of the time in the entertainment world, how fans act definitely has an impact in how other non-fans see that celebrity. Instead of being extremely discouraging and negative to other translation groups, even if they are Qidian, it is important to always have a very positive image.

Please DO NOT be the misinformed fan that we see all the time who flare up due to mere rumors. Do not come to complete conclusions after a rumor, DO NOT ASSUME, and please ASK if you do not understand the situation completely. If you do not understand a situation 100%, that means you can ask us! We are always here to provide accurate and objective information about what is going on.

If you really love our novels and you support our site, spread the love that we gave to you. Use it to fight against the anti-fans of Qidian who tarnish our reputation by relying on misinformed details. Some of these people trying to vote down WASFIL might not have even read WASFIL before. Who knows?

I hope that in the future, issues like this will be handled more maturely. Thanks guys.

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Few words from shl:

I would just like to add that, as a translator on WASFIL, my motivations for translating were:

1) I had enjoyed Tiffy’s translation of the earlier chapters

2) I wanted to know what happened to Xu Xu, Ji Bai, Yao Meng and the others, and how the novel ended!

3) I thought it would be great if non-Chinese readers could enjoy the novel too.

Plainly and sentimentally put, it was to share the love, which is always what Meraki aims to do. There was never any intention to gain fame, stir up fan wars or to infringe on anyone else’s rights. I’m sorry that the situation has come to this, and I can’t quite see why it is impossible for different translations to exist (it would be interesting to see the differences!), but I also believe we should respect the author and the official translation. I urge you to do the same.

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Thank you for reading through everything (if you did). We will be taking down our translation of When a Snail Loves to reduce further and/or future confusion and to respect the author and the official translation. I repeated that three times throughout the entire article so I hope you folks get the reason for deleting WASFIL from our site.

Thank you for all of you guys who stuck with us throughout the entire novel translation! We love you guys a lot ❤ Qidian has a super great translation of WASFIL, so go check out.