If one wants fast and low quality, they should use Google Lens translation.

How low quality are we talking here? Both options are bad if taken to too far.

Slow is fine if it's consistent. When we go 1 month, 2 months, 6 months, 1 week, 1 month... I'm just going to end up dropping the series.

I've definitely opted to keep reading the high quality version that comes out every couple weeks over a flood of daily LQ releases... but that scenario usually ends with the HQ group dropping the series all together.

There was a time when I would've actually preferred the faster option, but presently I've picked up so many series that I honestly could use a break.

If the "low" quality one is just slightly worse than the "high" quality one then I might settle for it if it's significantly faster (like weeks/months between chapters for the high quality but consistent releases for the low quality), but that's the exception rather than the rule.

Usually the situation is more decent translations vs unedited MTL quality trash, and in that case I will absolutely wait for the decent translation every time, no matter how far ahead the low quality translation is. Most of the time even if there is no good translation and the only "group" translating it is magusmanga, kai scans, harimanga, or teenmanhua/treemanhua/whatever they're going by these days or the like, I would rather put the series on my wishlist and not read it at all as I wait for someone better to come along and pick it up or for it to be licensed.

The really poor quality translations usually make the reading experience less enjoyable for me, so forcing myself to read that garbage would just ruin the story for me anyway (assuming I can even figure out what's going on in the first place), and I dislike that these MTL groups will pick up damn near everything and release a zillion trash quality chapters right away after the manhwa comes out, discouraging proper translators from bothering to pick them up since there's already a "translation" out there.

Really depends on both side mmm...

If it's total garbage unedited MTL, I'll gladly wait for weeks if not months mmm...
But most of the time, I'm fine with low quality release since they're pretty readable, especially since raw quality are pretty good these days, so even without proper cleaning the quality is at least okay mmm...

Voted slow HQ as that's my preference but when I'm impatient and left on a cliffhanger anything goes - I have gone and MTL'd the raws myself to get that fast low quality, lol. I do re-read whenever the slow release comes out though.

I have recently noticed a lot more of these really bad downright unreadable quality translations with horrible typesetting though. I guess cos webtoons make it really easy without putting the effort in to get scans etc?

Eh the real answer is somewhere in the middle.

If you're only putting out a chapter once every 6 months bc you're trying to be absolutely perfect, I'm just gonna end up putting the manga on hold until it's finished. By the time you release the next chapter, I'll forget what happened the entire series and have to reread everything anyway.

I also tolerate "low quality" scans more than the average manga snob it seems, as long as it's readable I could really care less if the font is times new roman or they don't have the photoshop skills to redraw every little detail. Yeah, its frustrating to read manga when the translation is obviously something run through multiple languages worth of google translate, but I'm also not gonna bite the hand that feeds me if it's a series nobody is working on, or the only other person working on it puts out 1 chapter a year.

In a perfect world, it would be great if we didn't have this weird culture where only ONE group can do something ever and its taboo for someone to "snipe" it. Bc then everyone wins. The ones who just want the quick and dirty release get to read, and the ones willing to wait on the perfect got tier quality scan over the course of the next 30 years also gets to read... eventually.


Imo, depending on the series and it's completion status in it's native language, if you can't get at least 1 chapter a month out, you don't have much room to bitch about fast, low quality "sniping". I appreciate those who dedicate their free time to scanslating, I truly truly do, but I also think the community can be a bit snooty sometimes. It doesn't need to be perfect, and if you're so slow it's disrupting the reading experience, and someone else IS willing to put it out faster, I don't get why you wouldn't just let them do their thing and you do yours.

(and for the record, no reader gets to bitch how long its taking if the group in question are the only group willing to work on it lol. Don't like it do it yourself. I just hate when groups try to bully another group who wants to work on it too)

Good quality scanlations or official translations stay forever, bad quality stuff is only really good to binge read and consume a work without appreciating it. They don't realise that having one translation often means that another group will not pick up the work (at least from scratch) and sometimes they even destroy a work's reputation entirely through bad translation.

Plus it's usually only to the benefit of the scanlater trying to garner attention.

It's the same with most of the guys who've been releasing chapters broken into multiple parts, I think.

I'll take high quality scans over low quality ones any day. Like what one person said earlier, low quality translations RUIN the experience for me. If I can't understand the story because the translation is unreadable (bad grammar, unnatural sounding sentences), then what's the point? I actually started scanlating series because the state of BL scans is horrible. Barely anyone here knows how to typeset too. What gives? Have any of you guys even read a proper, professionally published comic before? It's insane to me, honestly.

To add on, I prefer a good translation with minimal typesetting over a bad translation with good typesetting. An example release would be Sensei, Mou Dame desu where the typesetting is bare bones but the translation is one of the best I've seen in BL scans. And at least they knew what leading is unlike many other releases I've seen.

I'm the type who prefers a higher quality scanlation, but I think there can be a good middle-ground between that and speed scans.
Also, for people who don't mind speed scans, I think speedy groups should still be able to work on a series. The only problem is, then there's less incentive for a higher quality group to do the same series, as there's less hype for a re-release than the initial release.

Still, I'm wondering if there might be some way to address this for people who'd prefer to wait for higher quality releases. I know aniDB has a way for users to rate the quality of one group's fansub of a series over another's... perhaps something like that could be applied on this site as well? Perhaps even a way for users to rate individual releases.