If a fan paid for a professional translator for his/her personal use then it's fine. But most of the translators who contributed in scanlations are nonprofessionals. Some cases, they just want to improve their japanese while translating from media (manga) they like. When they are paid, the commisioner would expect good translation quality. Within so few JPTLs in scanlations, how many of them worth to be paid for their work? How many series they can handle? Are scan groups going to ask donation to pay the tls? What I was trying to say with my earlier comment, most people who voted yes, translator should be paid won't spend money to pay the translators. It's okay for scanlation to ask donations, it's okay for translator to be paid, but they couldn't/won't spend any money for those things.

May be in the next poll try to ask, are You willing to pay the translator for theirwork?



Last edited by Akatsubaki at 8:59 am, Sep 25 2017

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No, it isn't scanlation anymore. It is not a part of traditional scanlation culture, to phrase it closer to the original question. Scanlation culture assumes all team members are volunteers. We simply need a different term for this phenomenon.

Also, as a minor quibble, translations are not outsourced to professionals. The vast majority of those who take money for translating manga for scanlation purposes are amateurs just like those who do it for free. Often it's the same person, doing certain projects for free and then getting paid for others.

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While I understand paying a top-notch translator for a project you really wanna do, but are unable to find anybody decent to translate for free, I'm against the idea that all translations should be paid for.

However, I wouldn't mind if a group took on a sponsored project, but all positions should be paid for their work then.

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You can PM me if you need a temporary (freelance) cleaner/redrawer for some project. Especially if it's something with nice art.
Being the lazy person that I am, I'm not likely to accept anything long-term though.

If you receive money for your work - you are a professional and not an amateur, no matter your level.

> Some cases, they just want to improve their japanese while translating from media (manga) they like
Or they are fans that grew desperate enough due to lack of translators to pick up Japanese themselves.

If you get paid a fraction of what actual pros are paid, then you're no pro.

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As someone who's just barely starting to dip their feet into translating from JP->EN, I would not want to be paid for my noob translations lol.

On the other hand, while I wouldn't mind getting paid, but money isn't the reason why I'm learning to translate. I like reading the native language, and like the story/artwork/characters enough to want to spread the love to other people who might not have the resources to learn the language themselves.

Also, I think there is a big difference here if the native work is already available online for free, then TLs of it should not cost any money at all. On the other hand if the native work is only available through purchase, then it's up to the fans if they want to donate to scanlations groups AND BUY THE ORIGINAL WORK TO SUPPORT THE AUTHOR, or support it in some other way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In several of the groups I follow there are members who are actually part of official translating licenses of other manga, so I kind of find it funny lol. many of them have since retired because of the demands of the job, however

I see several people who live abroad in japan commission scanlations to the community and i see nothing wrong. As long as people don't individually charge for scanlations then I don't see how the culture has changed that much. I'd say aggregator sites have made the largest cultural shift out of anything in scanlation

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;D

Your price level has nothing to do with you being a pro - making a living out of it is the only thing that matters.

I'd actually like to know where all these paid translators are... been scanlating 10 years, never came across anyone offering to pay me (or other JPN translators) to translate something. I think this is actually very uncommon, outside of a few fringe groups that actively raise money/charge to pay translators. (If you consider the going rate of $1/page, you're looking at $150-200/volume... generally not feasible for a single fan to sponsor, unless they've got a nice job with plenty of cash to burn.)

Back when I was working at The End, we tested out asking fans to sponsor translations -- the fans could pick any of the ~400 dropped/incomplete projects to sponsor its completion. We had a few translators sign up for a pay of $0.5/page. Then we asked a fan to sponsor half the cost, and if that happened, we'd crowdsource the rest. So figure if the manga had 100 pgs left to translate, it'd cost $50, and the sponsor would need to pony up $25 of that (crowdsource the rest ala kickstarter). Zero takers after a couple months, so I ended the experiment. Most people aren't willing/able to pay translators even a small amount, let alone a reasonable rate for full volumes.

There are plenty of amateur translators out there who'd love paid jobs (even at a low rate, at all skill levels), but there really aren't that many opportunities. Hell, I'd have happily taken a couple jobs to help defray the cost of buying manga to scan =P

Oh, and I see nothing wrong with this, btw. As long as the scanlation is released free to the public, having fans who want to see it done sponsor for any part of it (trans, edits, etc) is fine to me. The exception is threatening to drop a project unless peeps pay for it, thereby forcing readers to sponsor it (not really free at that point).

SinsI:
I've yet to see anyone who makes a living from tling for scanlation. The going rate is peanuts. So, no pros.

Kalendel:
Paid tls aren't common, but they have been more common than you think. It's a matter of hanging out with the right groups to have opportunities come across. I haven't done it myself, but I have hooked up other tlers with those willing to pay them when I was more active in scanlation. And yes, there were some very much not fringe groups that I know used to pay tlers because their whole business model relied on speed. I haven't been keeping up lately, but I suspect that there's even more paid translation going on these days.

In my own experience, I had no problems finding people to sponsor raws, and I have been offered unsolicited "donations" just to scanlate something faster. The thing is, leechers would be wiling to pay for specific projects that they personally care about -- I don't know what exactly you tried, but my guess is that you offered people to sponsor any project from your list without making sure that you're reaching the fans of that particular manga.

Last edited by cmertb at 8:20 am, Sep 26 2017

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Yes, specifically in regards to the prevalence of paid "scanlation" efforts (I'm phrasing it like this, just for this point, because many of the outfits will only do it that way......you wanna pay 'em to translate, you've gotta pay 'em to typeset it too, = more money), cmertb is absolutely right. And yeah, I'd just assume it's the sites you're on, how hard you're looking for it, etc., etc., but I see paid efforts, and their advertising for such, each and every day, and not just from one or two outfits. And yes, have sent many, many people down the road with a list of links in their hand as to who they could approach about taking their money since, well, that's what they wanted and were asking about. Lots of them out there.

Web novel sites like WuxiaWorld demonstrate that there are plenty of people willing to sponsor chapters - as long as you market and price it right.
I.e. instead of "pay me nothing, I release nothing" they go with "pay me nothing, I release 5 chapters a week, and for each extra 40$ I'd release an extra chapter" - and they end up releasing 3 times that due to all the sponsors.
Oh, and web novel chapters take around 6- 8 times longer than the typical 16-20-page manga chapters to translate, so you end up looking at equivalent of 25 cents per manga page for the sponsored extra pages, thus your "$0.5/page" translators are not under - but overpriced, especially if you consider that manga is, usually, much easier to translate.

Hentai scanlators also have no problem finding people willing to commission one-shot releases from them.


Let me guess - most of those incomplete mangas had a few tankoubons missing, right? And they were dropped quite long ago - so most of their fans already forgot about them?
Now, just what could be wrong with that?

Scanlate something high-rated and ongoing, like Kingdom - and you'll have no problem gathering $750 over ~40 chapters (that you can donate to your nearest cancer foundation) without any explicit promises...

Last edited by SinsI at 11:23 pm, Sep 26 2017

If enuff mony get involved then theres going to be enuff mony in it for someone to take legal action for that mony which will potentially be a problem for the whole community. Also asking if translators being paid for their work make it sound like what they are doing is nothing illegal at all. The sentiment seem more like we are already doing something illegal so we might as well make some money of it.

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"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"

Yup, this is really the overall bottom line on the last few polls we've had involving money and scalations, and exactly what goes through my mind every time I see the worst of them (saw one just a few minutes ago)......openly huckstering for pay for chapters. It's like, my God, are you trying to get your door kicked in? D: