"Just fine", as in they're not making up lines, not forgetting to translate things, and not mis-translating anything. "The talk you don't want your parents to give you"? The guys doing that just straight up didn't even try. There was a line (among many) so egregious, a second guy came in to prove that they didn't even run it through Google Translate. That's definitely not "just fine". Enough people understand the language on this forum that eventually someone is going to point out issues.
Does this mean that "sniping" can be okay, under certain circumstances? Or is it even still called "sniping", at that point?
Is there a mistake tolerance? How many lines or pages have to be mistranslated or completely jacked up before it becomes a "rescue" or what have you?
There's no point in having this hypothetical argument when I, and I assume you, have yet to see a snipe that's of higher quality than the alternative despite having had less time dedicated to doing it right.
I wouldn't call it a "snipe" because the translation job was originally for another audience on an entirely different site, but the /a/nons currently scanlating
Yofukashi no Uta had started uploading typeset translation posts ahead of Tonikaku Scans (who labeled it as 3/5 in their priority at the time) until the latter dropped the project, citing Viz's simulpub (an aggressively bad """adaptation""").
The scans were of similar quality for the time that they were both posting (i.e. there was the occasional unsubstantiated accusation of poor translation on the /a/ scan's part, and the one time anything specific was discussed, it turned out Tonikaku quick-edited their upload to agree with the /a/ scan), the prime difference being that the ones behind the /a/ scan were (are) posting faster and more regularly-- no doubt, partly because it's the
only scanlation project that all involved are working on.
And that's what I'm not fond of in your explanations: seemingly, you're unduly assuming that slower chapter releases are
necessarily the product of painstaking effort and a desire to "do it right", when that could be one of many reasons-- if it
is one. You're running specific characterizations of the "main" and "sniping" groups for a hypothetical manga, beyond their being the first to work on it.
Right, and snipers are no more motivated by quality than the main group.
Except when they're in fact more motivated by quality than the main group.
If you've ever paid attention to scan wars, you'll realize that the second guy to upload gets a small fraction of the attention. I had some guy try to take "Kusanagi-Sensei is being tested" out from under my nose. I went and shot out the entire rest of the manga, down to the ending, and let me assure you, they got basically (And often literally) no engagement. People binged through the chapters, which limited discussion on both of our uploads, they got no attention, and we were forced to burn through the buffer we'd so patiently made so that we didn't just waste out time pissing into the void.
We ended up losing, even when we "won".
I sympathize with having your plans disrupted due to unforeseen actions by someone else, but are you saying that you didn't take satisfaction in scanlating something you (presumably) enjoyed to be accessible to an audience that would have otherwise been unable to enjoy it? If the other English translator(s) turned out an ultimately inferior product, did you not take satisfaction in turning out the superior one?
To answer your question (though, I don't know where you mean to drive):
Have you ever scanlated a manga?
I haven't gone through the whole process of scanlation to produce a translated manga chapter for upload. From what you've described, you absolutely have more experience than I do.
However, I
have proposed a retranslation of a small Twitter manga because the translation given was bafflingly bad. Learning that the official ""adaptation""" for
Yofukashi no Uta is actually awful has encouraged me to often compare the raws, non-corporate English scanlation, and Viz adaptation when I can in order to see if there's any discrepancies to investigate. That's led me to realizing other bumblings by Viz, depths of the dialogue that either initially escaped me or any of the other translators, and even the occasional bumble by the non-corporate scanlators. I've also
occasionally done backseat translation editing for the odd upload here or there.
...really, it's mostly backseat translation editing from me-- but it's because of those experiences that I find it difficult to wholly sympathize with your position. In those cases, I took pride in being able to produce translations I was confident in (or analyses involving key translations), regardless of how much engagement they got. Granted, my experience is largely different than one who participates in an entire scanlation process because I'm more interested in
testing what's presented to me, but I wonder if a scanlation group can't be fundamentally happy with 1) making a work they like more accessible, 2) doing something that not a lot of people can easily do (translate manga), and 3) possibly doing it better than the other people trying the same thing because they have superior expertise.
That said, this is also about a bit more than "sniping", for me: it's only when multiple translations of something exist that I'm able to spot potential discrepancies worth investigating, because it's not the
raws I have in front of me when I click on a new chapter upload on Mangadex. If Tonikaku Scans dropped
Yofukashi no Uta because of Viz's licensing and simulpub, and nobody else had or would pick it up because it was licensed, I'd be fucked over with an aggressively poor translation. There are manga I've unwittingly bought that were published and translated by untrustworthy companies and people, for which no alternative exists because everyone backed off from it after it was licensed, even if it's well known that the publisher in question is bad and contracts aggressively
trollish translators and adaptationists. There are times the only scanlator for a chapter or manga produces plausible but still majorly inaccurate work-- the "normal" and
only group (not counting the few interjections by the notorious SSSSS) for the first 120 chapters of
Rent-a-Girlfriend was also one that took unaccounted-for liberties with their translations that haven't been concretely challenged to this day, and probably never will be (to be fair, it's published by Kodansha, so its corporate translation has almost certainly been in good hands).
I appreciate multiple scanlations in the same language for those reasons. That's mostly where I'm coming from, apart from the vagary of the "sniping" taboo in practice.
