Paraphrasing Official Releases Ruling?

[Lobuttomize]

So the rule is "Using the translated script of an official release as the basis of a scanlation is allowed only if the script has been re-translated into a different language." but I was wondering at what point it becomes a scanlation basically. Like what if I were to crack open a thesaurus on an official chapter and only change some words? What about rewriting all dialogue in a style I find more apt based off of the official release? What if I took the official Evangelion manga and made Toji sound less retarded and uploaded that? Not trying to walk any legal lines and get the site in trouble but it would potentially help get the chapter count on some mangas up if you think some version of this is ok

 

[ununseti]

I'd assume that it's similar in principle to the core ideas behind the Wikipedia close paraphrasing guidelines.

This site already operates in a legal grey area, so I think we'd really prefer to avoid stepping on the toes of the official publishers, and plagiarizing their translations would kinda do that. You might be able to get away with it if you change enough, but in general, taking an existing piece of text and then trying to tweak it to make different enough isn't a really effective approach. Even if you use a thesaurus to swap out words, the general sentence structure will remain too similar, and besides, this can end up making things sound more stiff and awkward. I wouldn't say it's impossible to make something acceptable this way, but you'd need to be very diligent about making everything sufficiently different.

It's a lot more work, but it's far safer to build an original translation from scratch, because it's far less likely to be too similar to an existing translation this way imo.

Translation isn't a straightforward deterministic process, and there's an art to it. So there's lots of room for variation here. For example, just look at how many times Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been translated.

 

[Sleeper]

I have to agree with Ununseti on this one; as much as I can understand the logic behind what you're asking, and have even thought about it myself before, I tend to look at it as, "I'd rather have MangaDex, even if it's missing chapters of my favorite uploads because of official releases, than to risk not having MangaDex at all due to C&D orders."

Same deal with the "art" of translation: the only unfortunate thing I find about having to steer clear of stepping on the toes of publishers is that, depending on your tastes...sometimes the scanlators do an arguably better job. One of the series that immediately come to mind for me is Tejina Senpai. I was having enough fun with the series that, when the scanlations stopped due to being picked up by an actual publisher, I was glad to support the work by legally paying for it. And then I read it, and something just kinda...got lost in the transition. It wasn't necessarily that it was a bad translation per se, but it didn't have the charm of the scans I'd been reading up to that point.

Still, tangent aside and at the risk of sounding overly cautious, I think it's safer to just let sleeping dogs lie when it comes to doing scans of officially translated works.