Hi,

Im pretty new to the community, so i was just wondering if translators get paid for their work.

Not usually

A just ruler amongst tyrants

As a general thumb rule, the whole scanslation and fansubbing scene is a non-profit affair. Various groups ask donations for help fund their support structure like servers and the like, as well as acquisition of volumes and magazines in order to acquire high quality scans to work with, but not for any real kind of financial gain. From fans, to fans.

Naturally, there are groups and individuals who are making varying amounts of moola out of this, either out of their own releases or worse, scooping up the works of others and using whatever methods they can come up with. There is quite a lot of debate and heated discussion on the issue like ad-covered online reader sites and the like.

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Wow, I'm pretty amazed how all these translations get done without a monetary incentive. I guess it kinda works like the wikipedia model.

Quote from benjaminong

Hi,

Im pretty new to the community, so i was just wondering if translators get paid for their work.

I agree with what "lambchopsil" says they don't usually get paid but this all depends upon the group.
Most translators will usually just translate for fun and because they are fans. Obviously someone has to do it, but not only that by translating for online groups while translating, they can learn even more about the language. So while some do pay you if not a little or if not a lot, mostly I would suggest doing it to learn more about the language and for the fun of it.

If you want to make money translating certain things, then I think you could get a online translation job that will pay you per translation, some people want sentences or paragraphs translated. While others want people for projects for all different kinds of things online. But if you want a legit job in RL then I would try looking at your town to see if they need anyone with multi-language skills, or just in translation in general.

Death beholds you in the Afterlife! <3

Indeed. I agree. I also add:

Scanlation is free, not moneybased. As soon as you start paying someone it becomes a business and there goes the idea with staying in the gray zone when doing scanlation. Paying or getting paid for e.g. translations only justify more the companies claim about illegal work done when making a scanlation. This is also the reason why we hate online manga reader as mangafox, mangahere, etcetc since they earn money on free work.

Scanlations are volunteer work. There are instances where a series, or just the translation, have been commissioned, but they are a bit of a rarity and they usually happen only when someone really wants to see a certain series translated and nobody's willing to do it for free.
If I were to ever consider paying for a translation, the translator wold have to be of a top-notch class, the series would have to be something I absolutely love, and I would have to have enough leftover funds (after raws and server) to cover the price.
Besides, cleaners/redrawers often spend a lot more time working on a chapter. It wouldn't really be fair to pay someone who does less.

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.
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