Why is this artist's doujins cursed to only get shitty MTLs?

Base +6, Vinatea +19

coz trump crashed the economy and nobody have the money to commission humans anymore. duh.

Base +9, Cocassu -7

The economy is shit all over the world and seems like things will only be shittier with the expansion of data centers.

Base +6

Speaking as a casual/occasional translator, I'd say the English-speaking online hentai community has done pretty much everything it can to drive away translators over the past couple of decades. If I had ever felt much extrinsic motivation for things I do you might never have seen any of my work on this site. (Actually not true. Many of my previous works were already here when I started posting. I just wouldn't have bothered posting anything myself.) I certainly wouldn't have kept at it given the community's response.

I quit wasting my time editing images a while back. Occasionally someone would edit for me. Most of the time I just took down all indications I had a script after some jackass posted a dramatically inferior product. About half of these were MTL. The others were variations of poor/uninspired work.

This weekend MTL of the next item I was thinking about translating appeared just before I started it. (Good thing I opted to bump something else to the top of the list...) I lost all motivation to translate the MTLed one. I've also seen gallery comments saying translators were refusing commissions for things that already had MTL, and I believe it. I suspect my way is a much more creative process than average, but I still believe any halfway-decent translator (i.e. someone with proper grasp of written English (much less common than you think) and at least a little talent for writing dialogue and such) will lose interest in things they know someone else already did. It's hard to make a worthwhile translation when you can't bring yourself to care.

Base +7, Eden of Shirock +6

I'm not a translator so maybe I just don't understand, but why do people lose all motivation to translate something that's gotten an MTL

If the MTL is somewhat decent quality and not too different from a real translation then I get it, but when it's absolute shit and annoying to read - as sadly most are - surely that would motivate you to translate it even more than before. I'd think this is the case especially for someone who does it for a hobby and doesn't take commisions.

So is there something about the whole thing I'm just not getting or what? Because I find real translations get more view and higher ratings then MTLs too when both exists.

Base +3, Cocassu +7

I wasted a lot of time typing and deleting things before I decided to stop. I won't try to explain creativity. If you don't get it, you're not alone. Creative people are the weirdos, the lefties, the loners, etc: a very small portion of the human population. (Some people also believe there's a strong correlation between creativity and dyslexia, which I find extremely likely even if I haven't personally encountered scientific literature supporting this idea.) The muse is fickle. A slight nudge in the wrong direction and a creative person won't even feel like starting a project, much less finishing. Any effort to force things won't help at all (the infamous "slump").

When I'm searching this site, I don't stop to read translated materials (beyond a sentence or two I might pick up from the thumbnails in the moment my eye passes over them while checking art and tags). I either seek out the original version of a work, or skip it entirely. The likelihood of me reading an English version and redoing it because it sucks is effectively nil.

It usually takes me a couple of hours to write a quick translation of a 20-30ish page comic (more for dense/complicated things). Image editing takes dramatically longer. (e.g. the two Hijiri Tsukasa titles I've done, both of which took multiple days' worth of my time for the absolute minimum of work I could even pretend does justice to the original. That's why I stopped editing.) I generally don't feel like spending that kind of time redoing what somebody else already did, even if it sucks (and frankly, if I redid every English version that sucks, including ones where people I worked with insisted on "improving" my script, I'd need to redo almost all of the English titles on e-hentai).

Base +7