If you don’t know what a scanlator is, it’s a portmanteau of scan + translator and is a person or group that scans and translates Manga from Japan.
Online theirs this unspoken rule that scanlators seem to follow of not scanlating if another group is scanlating the Manga.
But the problem is that sometimes you can get stuck with a bad scanlator either from not translating things well or being a horrible human being and inserting that into the translation or just ruining the Manga somehow or some sort of combination of those.
It’s why I’m fine with multiple scanlators especially when theirs a bad scanlator ruining things
How do you know about it if it’s unspoken?
I’m not really familiar with this subculture, but it sounds like it’s on the border of piracy, and if only one person distributes a book it can be more easily seen as archiving and fair use, but if someone else already archived that book what is the point, it’s aready available for the future.
Also these people are volunteers. What stops You to buy the manga and scan it for the community?
It’s not officially written anywhere, but multiple scanlation groups have stated such a rule. It is usually a courtesy thing and looked down upon to scanlate a series someone else is working on since scanlation takes a lot of work, and as you said these people are volunteers so they are unpaid.
What OP is saying is a real problem though. Sometimes there are really poor translations and due to this courtesy other groups will avoid working on the same series.
I agree with the OP here. Courtesy is one thing, but if your scanlations were superior in the first place there wouldn’t need to be competing translators. As with all art, you want to put the best foot forward and do the art piece justice when presenting it. Many of these scanlations are straight up lazy, and others are downright damaging the original work.
no its piracy and content stealing either way , stop making arbitrary rules, scanlators need to stop shoving their opinion,comments, etc. in the work, im trying to read the authors work I do not want the translaters commentary ever, those mfs are not as funny as you think they are
I support piracy because of the inherent inequality and inequity of capitalism
I’m an egalitarian and I beleive everyone deserves to live with equality and equity
I agree, ppl need to get paid, but its also kinda bs that the rich get infinite entertainment while others get their weekly book if they actually have to pay for it
I was reading with the thought id donate for once and commit to a scanlator if they just didnt drop unwanted commentary, never found one
