Ah, the myth of scanlations and pirating. Unfortunately, many people overestimate the real impact of pirating (or scanlations). People who won't buy it, will NEVER buy it. People who want to buy it, will probably buy it regardless of scanlations existing or not. Thus, no one will buy it. Only people who like it enough to buy it, and have the money to, will buy it.
So no, you don't lose money from scanlations. You just don't. Stopping scanlations won't increase sales.
From an economics standpoint, books are luxuries. Which means only people with money for them will buy them, not to mention books themselves are considered a "collectible" type of luxury. Scanlations don't affect the "demand" of a luxury item. But they are essentially free marketing tool for people to buy a luxury item. In essence, Scanlations actually drive up demand for a book, otherwise, its people who won't buy the physical copy will just go to a book store to read it without buying it. Physical manga a commodity with a stratified demand at a price point break. In economic model terms, scanlations actually shift the demand curve up. Without them, it will either stagnate or go down (because as we all know, lack of scanlations or releases actually shift the demand curve downward), since manga sales are based on amount of consistent readers or collectors.
I would insert a economic model, but too much work for something no one cares about but me.
That, and "official translations" are quite terrible and of shitty print quality. The don't even include the book cover that EVERY JAPANESE volume has, on only have a crappy paper back cover, for 20 f*cking dollars, which is why I always import japanese or other asian language versions for half the fucking price of an english one, in which I quite literally need the scanlation to read, an preserve the japanese version as a collectible.
Case and point: Nearly 75% of all yen press translations are absolutely shit. Viz for the longest time had the worst fucking localization. And the now dead tokyo pop was probably the worst translator of all. Amateur MTL's were better then these guys.
If anything, its the translation companies that take away from potential sales for making it soo f*cking expensive at a shitty print quality.
But, just ripping raws of the japanese manga is bad though. Its only 6 or 7 dollars in japanese yen for a typical manga volume, which by my standards, is more or less affordable, rather than 20 dollars for a f**king crappy "official" translation, that exclude all the stuff that comes with usual volume releases like afterwords, art, covers, etc.