Out of the chest from a former scan-translator

[LucasFuji]

Hi all. I'm just want to vent out a little bit about why I don't translate anymore. It was ten years ago that I started to translate manga from English into Portuguese. Translation and manga are my passions, I used to love to do it! But 3 to 4 years ago I stopped doing it very often, and it has been 2 years since I don't translate a manga at all.

I miss it a lot. I really loved to translate manga, I think translating is my favorite hobby, and although I don't like lettering and editing, I can handle this part, hehe. I've tried to do it again, but I'm almost 30 years old and I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. I feel like I'm doing piracy and it could harm a lot of people, including me, the artists and the Brazilian publishing houses.

Then, I've tried to become a professional book translator, but the book market in my country isn't very lucrative, so there aren't many open positions, and foreign publishers charge more money for the licensing rights than we can make with the sales of books... Obviously I don't want to harm the artists, but the publishers don't make it easier to work with translation, and what are their contribution to it? They want to leech on the market.

I think that's why I don't feel like translating anymore. I really wish I could support the artists, but the men above them don't care about creating jobs, only about creating instant profit for themselves.

I started writing it looking for a reason why I miss translating, and the main reason is that I don't want to harm the artists, but I hold a lot of grudge against some people. Thanks for reading.

 

[plsnobully]

I personally don't think it's harming the artists or authors in any way. Over 90% of the people who read manga on websites like this don't even know Japanese (yes, I pulled that number out of my ass but seems likely).
If you search "manga online" or "read manga", you get linked to aggregate sites before getting linked to the official translation websites.

Spoiler

And, its not like these aggregate sites don't steal or should I say host these official translations. So even if the scanlation community wasn't around, the people who don't buy membership from Viz or CR would still be reading manga for free, they would just have access to fewer of them.
Also I've seen plenty of people in comments and whatnot who buy hard copies of manga they like and get it shipped from Japan to support the authors, after reading translations made by fans.
Do let me know if I'm wrong about anything.

 

[Hakatri_Gin]

Nah, manga and comic collections are too expensive so the people who do buy them do it so after reading them online, just go to any convention and you will see people buying original merchandising after getting into anime by piracy, those works that have been licensed and forbidden for translation simply lose a ton of popularity

The only reasonable solution to your dilemma would be to convince a publisher to use the fan translation as an official one, or to translate stuff from portuguesse to english, but then again, its not easy at all

 

[LowSanity]

@LucasFuji
As i'm from country with shitty economy and i'm not wealthy, i have quite simple way of thinking 'bout it.
Ppl can pirate if they want, just buy what you really like. That way you can support artists that you like while avoiding bad series.
Every manga that i rated 9-10 is on my shelf. I was looking for single missing volume of Blame! for good 4 years, now it's comlete.

 

[leyuen]

I don't have a probelm with supporting a author but if there is no official translation there is no point in buying a manga thats in Japanese that I can't read.

The problem with official translations is that once the translating company gets the rights and annocunce that they are gonna be the official translator of a manga they make you wait several months to a year to even release the first chapter then after that it gets inconsistent from one month to two or several, at that point most people would lose interest or even forget about it.

Then there is censoring, I can't count how many times official translators have change text to suit their countries culture.

One last thing, manga that gets a official translation don't really get popular most of the time unless the manga gets an anime adaptation and the anime gets popular, while manga with fan translations get popular easily without an anime. Popularity helps on wether a manga can get merchandise and be sold.

 

[Sleeper]

I will freely admit upfront that I'm speaking from an uninformed place, but I think scanlation is one of those "necessary evils", but even that term seems overly critical. "Reasonably appreciated misdemeanor" would be a closer approximation to how I feel about it. It goes to what a few people have already said: a lot of these series would never see an official alternative-language release, were it not for scanlators and "pirates" bringing it to the attention of their audiences in the first place. From my perspective, though, that's not the whole picture, either.

When it comes to official releases, there's often two general approaches to it: "crank out a quick, reasonably accurate translation for the sake of money" or "translate with the intent to retain the spirit of the original, even if it's not a word-for-word translation of the source text, also for the sake of money." I, for one, tend to favor the latter, and in my experience, quality scanlators (of which your definition may vary) tend to strive for adhering to the spirit rather than the letter. So while I would very much like to support the original creator, I would much rather do it by reading a "pirated version" first, and then buying the original Japanese once I've assured myself that I enjoy the content (I've done this on several occasions already), than to read what I deem to be a soulless/subpar English official translation, and never buy the official product because of a less-than-stellar reading experience.

That's just my two cents, though. Thank you in advance for your time.

 

[Holo]

It's one of those badly kept secrets, but the english publishers do rely on scanlations to gauge what is popular and what isn't. After all, they have to make a profit and they are only going to license titles which have a good chance of selling well, and they judge this (partially) from how popular the scanlation is. Not that they would ever openly admit this.

 

[Sem]

I'd honestly be more supporting of the official translations market if they supported more website based functions. Not only is the cost of physical manga sometimes hard to justify for series that I kind of only sort of like, but I don't have that much space. I don't want a physical book unless it's a series I'll enjoy rereading over and over. Also sometimes English prints just suck. I've been collecting some series in Japanese because the print quality is nicer.

Shonen Jump's catalog is great and easy to use and the payment system is something I can support, but I'm just not a big Jump fan anymore. I'd also be pretty happy with Korean webtoons based systems where you pay to access new chapters. Or just sell me the whole dang magazine in the weekly format it comes in anyway but put it online instead of giving me a stack of paper I have to recycle.
I'll always find a way to support the series that I really really love, but the ones that lose out are the manga I only kind of enjoy. If they streamlined the process, I'd gladly throw money at those ones too.

 

[Bunny-Blue]

I have plenty of physical Japanese language manga (that I can't read very well) that I ordered because of how much I enjoyed the unofficial scanlations and I wanted to support the mangaka.

The truth is, if it weren't for scanlators bringing these series to my attention, and making them available in English, I would never even know my beloved mangaka's names, let alone buy their original lanuage manga.

Also, I think most scanlators work on a policy of dropping a series once it has been licensed to encourage readers to buy the official releases. In my opinion that's pretty fair.

 

[dokkotak]

@LucasFujii
for me personally, the moral dilemma you spoke of wasn't too bad... because i ended up buying most of the books that i translated, when i could. and yes, it does help when you can read it in the original language. kinda pointless buying those books if you can't read it... but hopefully you would be able to (because, you would be translating from that language).

another way of looking at it...
the benefits of more people reading / becoming aware of or familiar with the artists' works via scanlation outweigh whatever losses are supposedly claimed.

 

[LucasFuji]

Thanks for every reply, I have read them all and I agree with them all. Yet, I'm not feeling like translating again (yet, at least).

I wish that it could be easier to buy manga. I'm not a collector, so I don't mind in storing comics and books. It's been a year that I stopped buying physical books in favor of my Kindle. And although Kindle is not good to read comics, the Kindle PC App works well for comics. I don't know why the authors and publishers are so old-fashioned about not trying this business model.

Also, some manga are very expensive in my country, it's been years that I don't buy any, I can't buy.