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NEWS: 4 Japanese Publishers Sue 'Mangamura Successor' Sites in the U.S.


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lys



Joined: 24 Jun 2004
Posts: 1006
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 17, 2019 8:42 pm Reply with quote
Hi y'all. I am a professional manga letterer and work full time for several US publishers. I can guarantee you I am at LEAST as passionate and crazy about manga as any scanlator. I've got thousands of volumes sitting around my office in both English and Japanese. I work all day and most nights to make the titles I work on look really good for readers who are willing to pick up the books my publishers sell. I keep an extra eye out for errors and inconsistencies that might slip by my editors, because I care about the finished product even when it's something that's not my role. When I finish work for the day, I turn off my computer and pick up more manga to read for fun...

I don't love the idea of people suggesting that we should just harness passionate fans' energy and make them work for free or for cheap so that we can all read more manga for free or cheap. Even if that's something they might've done as a hobby, it's not a sustainable way to run a business, or to guarantee high quality results. It devalues the work that I've spent the last decade learning to do well. There are publishers that use low-cost means to get manga translated/lettered and distributed on several (legal) digital platforms, but the folks I know working for them get paid poorly, and that passion isn't enough to keep them doing their best work when they're being taken advantage of by the industry and when other fans seem to believe their work doesn't deserve a livable wage.

It makes me as sad as anyone to see professional work that isn't done well, but whoever is suggesting that that's the norm, I am skeptical you actually read much professionally published manga in translation.
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Crispy45



Joined: 23 Sep 2012
Posts: 363
PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 1:44 am Reply with quote
kotomikun wrote:
Pro translators are surely more skilled than the average scanlator, but the company's desire to crank out as many titles as possible at a just-good-enough-to-sell level, on top of extra concerns involved with publishing and printing and censoring and marketing and whatever else, makes for a lot of inefficiency. In the end, all people really want is manga in a language they can read; the need to make money by doing that creates a ton of extra steps. Legal digital manga would help, but getting an industry to change how it operates is a huge struggle in and of itself... CR Manga still has only a few dozen random titles.


Considering a lot of professional translators got their start doing fan translation, I don't think it's fair to say they're more skilled. The only difference between a professional translator and a fan translator is the former is being paid for their work. A number of fan translators have jumped shipped to do it professionally for a variety of companies and I don't think that suddenly causes their skills to magically improve.

Agree with you on all the hoops official translations have to jump though. I've yet to see a big fan translator purposely censor or change something just because they didn't like it. Professional translations have to abide by not only age ratings but also fandom and societal pressure to censor something offensive in a work that fan translations don't have to worry about. In cases like those I feel the company looses the right to complain about piracy since they're not offering a good product.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 8:59 am Reply with quote
lys wrote:
Hi y'all. I am a professional manga letterer and work full time for several US publishers. I can guarantee you I am at LEAST as passionate and crazy about manga as any scanlator. I've got thousands of volumes sitting around my office in both English and Japanese. I work all day and most nights to make the titles I work on look really good for readers who are willing to pick up the books my publishers sell. I keep an extra eye out for errors and inconsistencies that might slip by my editors, because I care about the finished product even when it's something that's not my role. When I finish work for the day, I turn off my computer and pick up more manga to read for fun...


That's awesome, and thank you for your hard work! I'm curious, if you don't mind my asking: do your bosses apply a lot of pressure to get work done fast or on a tight schedule? Or do you work so hard simply because you love the work you are doing?

Quote:
I don't love the idea of people suggesting that we should just harness passionate fans' energy and make them work for free or for cheap so that we can all read more manga for free or cheap.


Same here. I want to be clear that just because I'm talking about a crowdfunding sort of platform I am certainly not advocating that translators be paid any less. If anything, I'd like to see more money in the pockets of the people doing the translation. That was one of the reasons I floated the idea of translators also earning royalties in addition to their normal pay in the older thread about MangaRock shutting down.

Quote:
It makes me as sad as anyone to see professional work that isn't done well, but whoever is suggesting that that's the norm, I am skeptical you actually read much professionally published manga in translation.

Honestly I see very little professionally translated manga that I think was badly done. I see far more problems with fan translations than I do with pro. In my experience, pro translated manga seems to be of consistently high, but rarely exceptional quality, whereas fan translations run the gamut from awful to truly exceptional. The reason I am talking about some kind of system involving fans is because of speed. We can see, empirically, that fan translators often come up with their product within a day or two of the Japanese release, while often times pro translations can take weeks or months. That delay is what makes many people use pirated fan translations instead of waiting for a legit release. If the industry can solve the delay problem then legal releases can compete with pirated ones. A crowdsourced system can also open up the possibility of translating that manga into new languages it was never available in before. Instead of a company having to budget a lot of money for a complex release plan in a new country they simply let the internet machine do its thing: fans get the manga they want to read in their language just as fast as piracy, and everyone involved (translators, publisher, mangaka, etc.) get paid. The fact that some fan translators work for free currently is not meant to be the model of the new system, rather it's a proof of concept: if they're doing great translations for free as it is, then that can only get better when they are paid for their work.
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Somewhere



Joined: 27 Sep 2013
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 1:33 pm Reply with quote
'just as fast as piracy' implies some not-legal stuff happening along the way to getting it out before the Japanese street date.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 2:05 pm Reply with quote
Somewhere wrote:
'just as fast as piracy' implies some not-legal stuff happening along the way to getting it out before the Japanese street date.


My idea was for the fan community to get the raws on the Japanese street date, just like they do now. The only difference would be that the publisher gets to approve the translations before they go live, at which point the translation goes live for viewers and royalties are paid to the publisher (and perhaps the translator as well). The whole point of the proposal is that it would be legal and operating with the publisher's approval; if not we're just wasting time talking about another form of piracy.

Basically, take what sites/apps like MangaRock, Mangamura, etc, are already doing except that instead of random translations being hosted by a pirate site, only publisher-approved translations would be hosted, and the proceeds go back to the publishers and the translators rather than pirates.
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Somewhere



Joined: 27 Sep 2013
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 2:49 pm Reply with quote
To be clear then, your idea is specifically targeting the less popular series outside of the usual tentpole titles then? (ie vast majority of series of existence, but in aggregate are not what drives the majority of piracy traffic)
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 3:15 pm Reply with quote
Somewhere wrote:
To be clear then, your idea is specifically targeting the less popular series outside of the usual tentpole titles then? (ie vast majority of series of existence, but in aggregate are not what drives the majority of piracy traffic)


I wasn't thinking of "targeting" anything specifically. Just set up a system that works like this:
-App and website; free with ads or it could be ad-free by paying a subscription fee.
-Manga raws (Japanese) are published
-Anyone who wants to can make translations and submit them for approval.
-The manga publishers review translation submissions and either approve or reject them. Rejected submissions are not accessible; approved ones go live on the site as soon as they are approved and then other people can read them.
-Live submissions earn royalties for the publisher and the translator


So really, it's just taking what Manga pirate sites are already doing, but legalizing it by giving the publishers the authority to approve translations, and by paying royalties back to the creators. There would be no "targeting", just allowing the fan community to do their thing legally. The result would be there would likely be lots of submissions vying for the popular titles and relatively few for obscure ones.

That's the basic idea, anyway. Of course, the publishers who would run the site/app could certainly choose to release pro translations under the same system, but the basic idea that I had was to work with the fan community rather than trying to fight it. I think the fans will take it upon themselves to translate older or obscure titles that the publishers wouldn't want to spend time or money working on, and they will do it without any financial demands upon the publisher.

Most publishers tend to try and promote whatever titles are currently hot, which makes sense from their perspective--as you put it, the "tent pole" titles. If they are going to invest time, money, and effort to translate something for a foreign audience they would be wise to pick a current major title as opposed to older finished titles, or obscure ones. Allowing the fans to get involved means there's no up-front outlay from the publisher at all. The only thing they have to do is put raws online and then have someone review potential translations for approval. They don't have to risk any kind of cash or time outlay that may not work out. If they approve a new submission then it starts making money for them right away with zero risk. If someone translates an old or obscure manga and few people read it then there's no harm done.
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Somewhere



Joined: 27 Sep 2013
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 3:41 pm Reply with quote
What's the rough time frame you have in mind for the period between raw publication and approved submission going live?
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 4:06 pm Reply with quote
Somewhere wrote:
What's the rough time frame you have in mind for the period between raw publication and approved submission going live?

That's a big variable, really. The real answer is "as long as it happens to take". It really comes down to two separate things:
-how fast the translators work. Today's fan scanlations for popular manga often come out after a day or so (roughly 24 hours). Of course for more obscure titles it can take a lot longer for something to be translated since the publishers really have no control over when random people decide to do the work. Whenever the next chapter
-how long it takes the publisher to approve the translation. And that's a potential problem. Theoretically it could take a long time for something to get approved if it has to go through multiple layers of bureaucracy. Or it could be as simple as the next business day after the submission arrives.

Really, whether or not such a system succeeds or fails would largely depend on that 2nd point above. The translation speed is no different than that of existing (pirate) sites. However, the longer it takes a publisher to approve a translation then the more attractive pirate sites become to the user. Publishers would need to understand that and make sure that they work to check submissions on a timely basis.

If the publishers understand the business model then I could see that popular titles could go live in just a few days...perhaps as short as 1 if everyone is really on the ball, but 2-3 days (ish) would be more reasonable. Of course, if they release their entire catalog on such a system then some titles are going to get a ton more attention than others. It may be months or years before someone decides to translate some obscure 1-shot from 1973, and approving that translation is probably going to be a lot lower on the priority list than approving the latest chapter of a mega-hit.
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Somewhere



Joined: 27 Sep 2013
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 5:04 pm Reply with quote
What's our standard for popular here? Because at the absolute top end of popularity (ie the series that drive the bulk of traffic to pirate sites in the first place), we're getting into the time frame of negative days.

There's a weird tipping point somewhere in there where if a series gets sufficiently hot enough, it actually becomes monetarily worthwhile through ads/clicks/embedded crypto currency miners/whatever other schemes to go towards the darker side of scanlations of acquiring early raws and speed scanlating them.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 19, 2019 10:28 am Reply with quote
Somewhere wrote:
What's our standard for popular here? Because at the absolute top end of popularity (ie the series that drive the bulk of traffic to pirate sites in the first place), we're getting into the time frame of negative days.


I'm not sure it's possible to give a clear answer/standard for what's "popular" and what's not. Of course any legal service could never compete with people leaking raws before the official release data of a manga. That said, I'm not sure I agree that early releases of super popular shows drives the majority of traffic to pirate sites. If anyone has any actual data on that it would be very interesting to see. I can't speak for everyone, of course, but the only times I have ever gone looking online for fan translations would be for titles that simply don't have an official release in my country. The same seems to be true for my friends who are into manga.

Quote:
There's a weird tipping point somewhere in there where if a series gets sufficiently hot enough, it actually becomes monetarily worthwhile through ads/clicks/embedded crypto currency miners/whatever other schemes to go towards the darker side of scanlations of acquiring early raws and speed scanlating them.

I'm sure that is true, though I wonder how significant it is? I'd love to see numbers.
And, of course, that sort of thing is a problem for the manga industry in general, no matter what kind of publishing model they use.
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Somewhere



Joined: 27 Sep 2013
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 19, 2019 12:26 pm Reply with quote
Admittedly, it's been some years since I actually looked at the then major sites (like the panda, the fox, and some others which probably have since been shuttered I think?), but back then, their most popular/hottest series lists were made up of the super popular stuff of the time.
(aside: I believe that was also the time I used Alexa to check out which countries used such sites the most. Go figure; USA was usually the #1 country)

Anecdotally, keep an ear/eye out for social media chatter. What gets the most talk? (One Piece has always been a big one and My Hero Academia is the current big thing as far as I'm seeing) And if possible, keep an eye on where and when.

For the where, I can't speak for other platforms, but if you browse a link aggregator like reddit, then naturally it's easy to observe.

For the when, check when the conversation peaks versus the street date. If people are talking about the latest chapter when the respective paper magazine isn't even out yet, that's a dead giveaway that people are reading a speedscan.
An example would be this morning (in ET/UTC -4), Jaimini's Box released the latest chapters of the Weekly Shounen Jump stuff they work on. The respective physical magazine releases this Saturday in Japan (because of a public holiday next Monday; otherwise WSJ normally releases on Mondays). The Shonenjump.com version releases tomorrow afternoon (in ET, which makes it Saturday morning in Japan). I assume that Shueisha's Mangaplus version also releases at that time. I am absolutely 100% sure that reddit chatter at least will peak today, with relatively barely anybody waiting until the official release to talk about it. As that's how it's been year after year and is still the case in the present time even with Mangaplus's existence.
IIRC, on normal weeks where WSJ publishes on Monday in Japan/Sunday afternoon in the US, speedscanners release on... Friday nowadays? And that's after some tightening up of the supply chain by Shueisha. I think that years ago speedscanners used to get the WSJ stuff out on Wednesday.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what the exact revenue numbers are in the speedscanning business, as nobody's saying those. But that a series getting picked up strictly for the money chasing is something that absolutely happens. The one example I've seen happen (and am 100% sure of) is Mangastream picking up My Hero Academia.
This was a few years back; the manga was roughly around 1.5-2 years old. Probably post-anime announcement but before s1? Or around the time of s1 airing? Anyway, as far as the international fandom was concerned, it was starting to look like the next in line of WSJ hits (it was already a ~300k in 4 weeks seller in Japan at this point). At this point, the one group doing MHA was Fallen Angels. They were there from practically the start (~chapter 3 or so). That would be the group that you can say was translating MHA out of passion for the series. I know that the translator loves the series, as I've seen/talked with him on another forum back then. And he's the guy that came up with the 'quirk' translation for kosei that the international fandom uses. Fun aside: he's also cool with Caleb Cook, the official translator of MHA. I believe that's a (small) one of a couple of reasons why the official translation uses the 'quirk' translation.
Anyway, Mangastream picks up MHA. They allege that they're doing so out of love for the series; that they're fans. People read it. People notice that 'quirk' isn't used for kosei. Instead, it was either 'individuality' or 'personality' that was used. It was a translation straight from the dictionary. It was also a translation for kosei that the international fandom never used. So yea, people knew the deal. Just Mangastream continuing their thing of trying to take/keep control of the hottest series (and/or, series with the potential to get hot). (whether people care about this is a whole other issue)
At some point Fallen Angels drops MHA because of Viz licensing the series and it becoming available in the English version of WSJ. Because at least they have some of that classical fan translation ethos. I can respect that.
I think Mangastream still does MHA in the present day? I'm not too sure; I usually see the Jaimini's Box version get posted on reddit. Mangaupdates says... yes, Mangastream also still works on MHA. So MS and JB are the two speedscanners for this series. In the situation of multiple speed groups working on the same series, it's basically a battle to see who gets it out first, as the winner gets the bulk of the clicks/views.

A second example (but one I'm not as sure of) could be Assassination Classroom. It can be suspicious how Mangastream picked that up late when there already was a small time group dedicated to just that series.

And something I want to mention just cause it's funny; there was that time when Mangastream sniped the last chapter of Nisekoi (ch 229) a few days before Tsurezure Scans got theirs out. It was completely out of the blue, as MS never worked on Nisekoi before. That last chapter was literally the only chapter of that series they did. Whereas Tsurezure Scans.... started with some Tsurezure Children apparently, but mainly existed to finish off Nisekoi from ch 198 on.

Anyway, the most important issue above all is time. The masses are most attracted to whatever comes out first. And unfortunately for the manga industry, time is an issue that cannot be solved as long as physical magazines are still published (which will continue for quite a while; as aside from the money from selling the magazines themselves, they also have ad space for sale like any other mag). The process and logistics alone of printing out the magazines then delivering them across Japan to make sure that every single convenient store/bookstore/whatever else can have them out on the shelves after Sunday midnight (and thus, technically Monday morning!)* offers that window of time for someone to yank a copy somewhere, scan, and sell it to some group to rush it out.

Edit:
*er, for Weekly Shounen Jump it'd be Monday in Japan. For the other magazines, I'd need to look up which days they release on. Why yes, I'm mainly a Jump guy.
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lys



Joined: 24 Jun 2004
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 20, 2019 6:38 pm Reply with quote
Sorry for the belated reply...! I appreciate the acknowledgement that most professionals are doing professional-level work in their fields! :) My personal busy schedule is a result of loving my work too much and accepting more projects than I strictly need (and working for multiple publishers as well), so I sometimes end up with deadlines colliding all at once. My editors are all great folks who do their best to allow sufficient time for the work to be done, although sometimes things happen and we get materials late or hit other snags along the way that do end up making a tight turnaround necessary.

I do know folks (mostly working with publishers that distribute digitally) who are given really crunched timelines to complete their work. And simulpubs are certainly in that situation just as a reality of the work needed--since we're working with the publisher, we do get the art a couple/few days ahead of time, but that has to go through a translator, an editor, a letterer, usually back to the editor and approved by the Japanese side, so it's a real hurry to get it done and often involves working with opposing timezones (Japan, US) or over weekends. If someone is only working on one or two titles, it's one thing to sacrifice a weekend here and there (the folks working on weekly Jump titles have probably given up on ever having a weekend off...), but making this a full time job means having several series going at once with full volumes released every couple/few months (for each series), and throwing simulpubs in on top of that is a serious time commitment.

I'm doubtful that running ad-based or optional-subscription websites would ever make enough money to properly compensate the artists/publishers/people working to translate and localize the titles. Maybe the most popular stuff can make it work (and that's why Jump is on MangaPlus) but there is so much manga out there that will never reach the popularity of those titles--and shouldn't have to in order to be profitable!! The industry can find ways to adapt, sure, but fans also need to recognize that manga is not a free gift to the world and the people who make it available to read, from the artists on down, deserve to be paid fairly for their hard work.
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