This week's poll was suggested by Karonhioktha. Are fan translations more faithful or better in quality? Do you prefer the officially published stuff?

You can submit poll ideas here: https://www.mangaupdates.com/topic/kilkdnn/site-manga-poll-suggestions

Previous Poll Results:

Question: Currently, which official translations do you think are best in general?

Choices:

• Manga - votes: 895 (48.6%)
• Manhua - votes: 70 (3.8%)
• Manhwa - votes: 405 (22%)
• I don't know - votes: 471 (25.6%)

There were 1841 total votes. The poll ended: October 4, 2025

I was going to do a poll about the worst official translations, but according to the comments and the results of this poll, the answer is definitely manhua. Manhua quality across most aspects (like plot) is just not up to par.

A just ruler amongst tyrants

Officials can be as bad as scanlations (Kanna spinoff comes to mind) but at least I can scream at (and be screamed as) the scanlator in a public forum while any mail with a nono word to an official publisher goes straight to spam.

Of course, it's theoretical and I always end up reading officials in the end because who would continue scanlating after you get overtaken by the officials but if I happened upon a series that has both a full official vs a full fan scanlation I would consider both options as equally viable at first.

If money and accessibility aren't factors, I try to make an effort to read/unlock chapters on official platforms because I want to support the authors/artists.

I know the industry can be pretty bad to them, (I've heard in particular some awful things about webtoon and kakao), so it's not like they're gonna get rich off of it, but since the alternative is not supporting them at all, I'll at least do what I can. It's definitely a not making perfect the enemy of good kind of situation.

However, if the fan translation is still ongoing and is much farther ahead, or it's much better quality, I might only "read" as in click on and scroll through the chapters on the official, and choose to stick with the fan translation for my actual reading.

Obviously official translations. I want to support authors and artists.

The reason why I still read pirated releases is mainly because of prices. One volume of tankobon manga in my country is enough to buy me 2 meals a day. If I have to collect all manga series I read, I'll go bankrupt.

The easiest way I can support creators is through official platforms like Webtoons, but of course paid episodes still quite pricey for me (especially English ones).

I prefer official releases, but have found that scanlations have gotten really good in recent years, surpassing official releases at times (e.g., /a/nonymous's releases of The Summer Hikaru Died). If there was greater emphasis on quality control in a way that's binding across the community, I'd honestly prefer scanlations since they're much more accountable to users vs. some people in a corporate building. You see the consequences of the latter in the anime community where fan translations have more or less died out while subbing on streaming services has backslided in the last few years.

It depends. Some official translations are quite crappy (like sevenseas) and low res (like yenpress). Other are good.

Close to half of this, is copy-pasted from a recent post:
I avoid official translations, like the plague!
For both manga and anime. Well, more-so for manga, as anime has the original speech, and I'm getting better at managing without translation. (I also read some manga, raw, but...)

Scanlators are far more likely to try to do a faithful translation, and far less likely to censor and/or change things (which companies love to insist on doing)
...and it's not like official translators are necessarily anywhere close to competent. I've seen a lot of atrociously incompetent official translations.
Official translators also don't necessarily care about it, whereas scanlators do it out of passion. Or at least decent ones do. I've started to see scanlation groups, who ask for money, to be able to read their translations... (unjustifiable and shameless, disgusting, behaviour)

Not that there aren't fan translators who censor/change (or outright seem to be trolling, with their translations), or atrociously incompetent ones (or worse: the increasingly frequent "#%s, who just copy-paste machine translations), but...

As for buying the official release, to support the artist...
If the translation is decent, then sure that is good and proper! (not to mention one official translation I bought, as I not only respect the translation, but also value the many translation notes, added at the end! A rare exception)
...but if you pay for a shit official translation, I don't see that as supporting the artist.
I consider it to be supporting, and encouraging, bad translations. Supporting the defiling of the artists work.
Want to support the artist of a work with a shit official translation? Buy Japanese copies of the work, whilst reading fan translations! (though, granted, that is not as easily done)

You should pay for the stuff you like, to the extent that you are reasonably able to ...but that doesn't justify giving money to support bad translations. To effectively tell publishers, that they can get away with such BS.

Why, but WHY there is NO option "whichever is more accurate eg keeping original names"?!

Official releases are typically better than scanlations, so I can trust them more. So, that's my answer.

Of course, there have been times where the scanlation is superior. This is especially true of older official releases... especially back in the 90s when manga in North America were still being flipped to left-to-right format and just often not being as faithful to the source material. In these cases, the scanlation can be better, assuming some group actually re-did it from the original Japanese version.

Big thanks to TokyoPop for popularizing the right-to-left format in English releases. Without them, I don't think manga would be anywhere near as popular in America as it is today.

Visit my scanning blog: Jammin' Scans

::End of Transmission::

Dumb options again. How hard is it to add "Other" or "Something else" to cover things you didn't think of. I wouldn't read either, I read the originals.

Far-off places with sweet sounding names.

Money not being a problem, I'd go for the official release in order to support the author. With that said, there are definitely scanlators that do an amazing job and, in an ideal world, would be hired for the official translation so they can earn something for their efforts as well. I also like physical books.

Sometimes official means worse, and in that case—assuming money isn't an issue and nothing has been censored in a way that changes the original story—I'd get the official and download the scanlation.

If the official was missing parts or had the original meaning censored, I'd ignore the official.

As an aside: I would, however, be in favor of optional censored versions of stories in regards to nudity, especially the ones that never apply the nudity in an integral way to the story.

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

Given how horrible of a hogwash most official translations are (like almost anything by Slop Press), I'll generally take fan translations over them.

And if I actually want to support the authors (and not by the tiny trickle that makes it back through the chain of grubby hands), I just buy the originals. Definitely would want for my money to go there, and not to the people that insert "Press F" into their "translations".

as things currently stand, never offical

if authors got money off sales and not a flat licensing fee, maybe on the best ones

if authors had 100% creative control over my translation I would consider official over pirate with very few exceptions

but we live in a world where authors get a cut of a licensing fee, don't get per sale bonuses, and have to live with whatever the localizer decides is the correct translation.

I would personally take early ai over official at this point.

Official because even if the money doesn't go straight to the author/artist, it still supports the manga industry as a whole and access to manga outside Japan. Not everybody likes to read digitally, not everybody will go straight to piracy to try out something new, it's safer to direct kids to official releases, etc. You can't support the access of those people to manga just by buying manga in Japanese.

Disappointing translations is an unfortunate thing, but unless they are unreadable or straight up wrong, I think they are still good gateways for new fans. No translation is perfect anyway. I usually buy translated manga because it's more convenient, but if it's a series that I care about the details of the text, I buy in Japanese for when I finally have enough fluency to read it.

But there are some fan translations out there that are really great and improved my understanding of the story. If we can't read in Japanese, then the second best option is to read multiple versions to read the different interpretations. So I don't want fan translations to disappear even if all manga get an official translation.

Quote from vigorousjammer

Official releases are typically better than scanlations, so I can trust them more. /.../ Big thanks to TokyoPop for popularizing the right-to-left format in English releases.

... Anyone who praises Tokyopop, disqualifies themself, from getting to talk about translation quality. (which they were atrocious bad at) ...and not mirror-flipping was already the norm, even for official translations, before them.