@Spoonikle As a translator, I can say you should never ever donate to ANY translators. At MOST, if you want to commission certain translations that's your business, but donating and regularly? Pointless. It is extremely cheap to buy manga. Magazines for new chapters range from 3-7 dollars an issue, with the same amount for bound volumes. Further most raws are freely distributed, meaning you as a scanlator probably do not actually need to spend any money on it. Finally you shouldn't be earning money on what is illegal. As someone who does this stuff, I do it for free to expose the series that I like. Give your money to the people actually creating what you like.
You also have to be extremely naive if you think manga, which is a niche market, should somehow have a thorough translation realm outside of Japan. To do it legitimately, you have to put time and money into translation, typesetting, cleaning and redrawing on occasion (assuming there is text written into the art, by hand) and you have to do this for how many manga? Every one of them? The industry is an enormous one in Japan. Even with a worldwide effort of scanlator hobbyist, not every manga is scanlated. Now, add the prospect of business to the mix, and you'er asking for manga that will probably fail to have all of that same effort put into it. It's extremely unfeasible. If you think it's actually feasible you're completely unaware of how many manga are complete in the first place, and how many are presently being serialized. This isn't like anime. For anime, you can transcribe and translate a 23 minute episode and put it in a file and bam, that's *about* all that's needed (it's also possible to get the script if you're acting legitimately, making translation even easier and even possible to do before an episode airs). Finally the amount of manga compared to anime, especially currently airing compared to currently being serialized, is a FAR and away difference.
tl;dr spend money on authors, not scanlators. If you genuinely like what you read, that's where your money can go. Don't think you can't affect the industry either, foreign markets HAVE impacted mangas' survival before.
If you just don't want to spend money that's your business, it's just when you do want to spend it, but not in frankly the best way you could that I have to say "Yo bro, hold up". On a side note I'm okay with the idea of donating to MD since 1) they provide a service 2) they make it easier to actually host translations 3) it actually does cost money to run 4) they don't sit around doing nothing, instead actually regularly improving their site and 5) by virtue of being centralized/having recommendations, even obscure series can get exposure. It's a lot better than posting some random manga on a wing and a prayer to a blog or something, and hoping a few people might read it.
