This time I have to side with Deus Vult, for pretty obvious reasons I think. Lately, and for reasons unknown to me, a lot of people have picked up scanlation and "translation", as they call it. But what the hell some are plain unreadable. Machine translations, or maybe not machine but direct translations with little to no context adaptation or localization (which is really freaking important. Go ahead and read Yen Press's Spice and Wolf version, then read any fan translated one. Just how much more enjoyable it is to have the characters characterized by their manner of speech, and this manner of speech actually parallelized towards something simmilar in English, not just adding the occasional "-desu" or whatever that looks completely out of place and tells nothing to a person not deeply familiar with Japanese and Japanese dialects). WHT is stamping low quality releases that don't actually go through an editor. And with "an editor" I mean a person who in their life has read a truckton of well written English literature and whose only purpose in the translation process is to make the final result just feel good. Deus Vult is also lacking a good editor, but at least they try and their result doesn't look so bad.
I know a lot of people who don't care about localization and characterization, or the correct use of language at all. They can and should enjoy the faster release rate if it's offered to them, for sure.
As for me, I would love if Deus Vult kept doing what they do, and I will surely wait for their version. I'm not in a rush (I'm an Index fan, we learned to wait for quite a lot), and as a wise man once said, a late product is eventually good; a rushed one is forever bad.
Also, I don't think Deus Vult holds true justice here either. Yes, well, WHT is "contesting their territory", but they are free to do so. What they should not be free to do is to butcher the translations. I'm not well versed in Japanese so I can't be a judge here: there have been cases where I have read two versions of a translation and the things were conflicted enough to tell opposite stories. Someone was obviously murdering the translation there, and that person should not be allowed to translate at all, for they are literally destroying the source by telling a story the author never intended to. But actually, and comparing both translations, Deus's does look a bit more right, both in the use of English and in the correctness of the translation (based on context only, which is not reliable at all, but again, I don't have any other way to judge).
What I would do is to allow people to rate the group in every work they participate in, and in any dimmension the evaluation can be done: Redrawing, Cleaning, Typesetting, Quality of the Translation, Use of English, Grammar, etc. I know it's a lot of work to compile this for every work out there, it's mostly useless because most works get done by one group at a time, and whatnot. But it would allow us readers to judge the scanlators not only based on their speed, which seems to be the only thing anyone cares about.
