3 ms·
Not really trying to nitpick here, but I’d say the official translations are usually way better than the pirated translations—but occasionally it’s the other wa
by klodolph 5y ago
Not really trying to nitpick here, but I’d say the official translations are usually way better than the pirated translations—but occasionally it’s the other way around.
There are a ton of really bad pirate translations out there. The vast majority of scanlations you’ll find, if you really dig through them, are barely readable. For every top-notch scanlation group out there, there are probably ten groups out there producing garbage.
I’ve seen groups that put out English translations which are translated from the Spanish version of the manga, because the scanlation group has nobody who can read Japanese (but has someone who understands Spanish).
Some translation groups put out super inconsistent work, such as translating names differently from chapter to chapter. Foreign names, especially, have already been transliterated into Japanese and you have to guess what the original name is before transliterating.
One particular offender was “Xerxes” in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, which was spelled as “Cselkcess” in the official Viz translation and something similar in various scanlations. Maybe in the 1990s this would have given you trouble, but these days you just pop over to ja.wikipedia.org and look for クセルクセス, and find out that this is how “Xerxes” is transliterated into Japanese.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoScanlations of the big Shonen were far superior to the official translations. I read one piece and Naruto scanlated first and then through a subscription to shonen jump. The shonen jump translation were awful. Reading yugioh was so bad I just download the scanlations and found them much better. The best official translations I read were the CLAMP manga xxx Holics, tsubasa chronicles, etc. there was a lot of bad scanlations, but the good scanlation was better than the best official.
- falcolas 5y agoSomething that can cause poor scanlations is, ironically, competition. When there's competition, there's huge incentive to post chapters first. The first releases will get the vast majority of the views (they will often remain listed first, even after other versions come out), and cause other groups to drop the manga - even when their product was superior. And for some groups, they leverage that to get ad impressions on their own sites (or YouTube videos) before releasing them via the more generic methods. The best scanlations will usually be niche titles done by one group.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- astrange 5y agoWeird name choices in official translations are often mandated by the Japanese publishers. They do actually oversee the work that gets put out, but that has good and bad sides, because they don't know what they're doing either. Sometimes it's for other unpleasant legal reasons - if a story is being published in novel and manga form, the translations might intentionally use different names from each other because they don't have the rights to the other translation.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> One particular offender was “Xerxes” in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, which was spelled as “Cselkcess” in the official Viz translation and something similar in various scanlations. Something really weird is that the demon Mara in Ah My Goddess is "Mārā" in the Japanese and "Māra" in the original Sanskrit name of the Buddhist demon, but for some reason the official English version of the name seems to be "Marller". I can't understand where that came from.
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoAs a person who scanslated (and was active in adjacent TL scenes) in another life (and thus has some bias), I disagree. Yes some groups out there are pretty shoddy and they make cute examples. This was more common in the 90s when anime/manga in the West was new and expectations for translations were low. These days Chinese language translations leak before Japanese language raws (due to weak IP laws in China) and in order to be first, most speed-scanslating groups are scanslated from Chinese translations into English. If you wait for a quality scanslation, it'll often be as good or better than the original.