A lot of the comments here on official and fan translation are rather uninformed. As an active scanlator I will try and clear them up. With regards to translat

A lot of the comments here on official and fan translation are rather uninformed. As an active scanlator I will try and clear them up. With regards to translation quality, there is considerable variability with officials almost always coming out on top. A native-speaking friend ranked translation quality as follows—Viz/Kodansha>=very best scanlators>=Yen Press/Seven Seas/others>average scanlation>poor scanlation/MTL. Naturally it depends considerably on the effort the given scanlation team puts in to translation and editing. Some are exceptional, most are not. The average scanlation is worse than a mediocre official. Regarding sound effects, there is no one way to do these. Both officials and scanlations vacillate between panel notes/in-panel subs/redraws. Officials are generally better and more consistent although again YMMV. What any given publisher picks is a product of their house style, what you prefer is a product of your personal taste. Editing-wise, there have certainly been instances of overzealous editing and censorship in the past. But it is far less common and less egregious than it used to be. Seven Seas has their own smut line for publishing particularly daring titles, for instance. And it’s not as though fan translators have never been known to produce intentionally biased translations, insert panel notes of their own views with no relevance to the content, and the like. Fan translators are dedicated, dedication which (even if you dislike fan translation as a practice) should be commended. But that dedication doesn’t always (or even often) translate into a high quality result.