This week's poll was suggested by lollylopmr. Of manga, manhua, and manhwa, which do you think have the best official releases?

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

Previous Poll Results:

Question: How far back would you travel through time if you could?

Choices:

• I wouldn't at all - votes: 359 (16.8%)
• Back to my golden years - votes: 184 (8.6%)
• Back to my childhood - votes: 1074 (50.2%)
• Back to a historic event in civilization - votes: 346 (16.2%)
• Back to before humanity existed - votes: 179 (8.4%)

There were 2141 total votes. The poll ended: September 27, 2025

We are full of nostalgia for our childhood

A just ruler amongst tyrants

2% for manhua? No surprise xD Plothole masters can't have good translations

note: I'm talking about % state at moment of writing this post

What official translations of Manhua even exist?

Official translations of Manhwa are all over the place. There are some good ones, some bad ones, and some "this would be good if they didn't westernize the names for no reason" ones like HCLW, where they're just like 20 years behind the curve translating it like Detective Conan (yes I'm STILL mad about "Jimmy Kudo") as if the target audience isn't entirely weebs. Like bro, we can handle "Gong Won-Ho", you don't have to make his name "Ethan Gong".

There are definitely mediocre official translations of manga but the average quality has stepped up a LOT in the last twenty years. Largely because the best translators from scanlation groups got, you know... hired. They just have such a good head start compared to Korean translators.

And I have no idea if official Manhua translations are bad because I have never seen one in my life. Unless I have and it's those weird hong kong "companies", in which case WOW those were bad last I saw one.

Quote from Nyxsha

2% for manhua? No surprise xD Plothole masters can't have good translations

note: I'm talking about % state at moment of writing this post

I have certainly noticed that a sizeable percentage of quickly-produced Manhua, even the ones with high quality art, seem to have positively incoherent plots.

I have found two that I liked, but one of them got increasingly incoherent until the web manhua was canceled (afaik the webnovel is ongoing... somehow)

So it's not all of them, the one that hasn't been canceled is still quite enjoyable (though it still has some of the quintessential Chinese quirks), but it does seem to be the case that the Chinese culture leans more towards rambling their thoughts onto a page in exchange for cash than actually making an interesting story from start to finish

Official translation of Manhuas have existed since Manhuas were drawn in horizontal panels targeting desktop users. And they have consistently stayed at the garbage quality that they are.

Official translation of Manhwas range from fucking unreadable garbage (Indonesian, Kakao), to immersion-breaking Christian agenda pushing ("Jesus Christ", Webtoons), to slight mistranslation with often cut-off text that definitely didn't touch any PR or QC (English, Webtoons), to somewhat good quality translation that lost a lot of context due to the lack of TL notes (English, Webtoons), to good quality translation that censors random shit and changes the plot for no reason (English, Kakao).

Official translation of Mangas are usually well made. Any stupid actions by out-of-line translators are immediately called out by the respective fandoms. Post AI though, I've been seeing big publishers (looking at you and your garbage, Square Enix) hide their translators' name and proceed to release mistranslations, switched bubbles, cut-off text, etc. as is FOR MONEY.

I think Korean translatora really picked up lately... so voted Manhwa

I am envoy from nowhere in nowhere. Nobody and nothing have sent me. And though it is impossible I exist. © Trimutius

Between manga and manhwa, I really wouldn't know.

Other people mentioned the general low quality of manhua, and I'm wondering if a lot of them aren't just born from CCP propaganda campaigns (internal and/or external, depending on the type) that are limited in quality by the corner-cutting and censorship?

I'm not saying that's for sure the case, just that it's possible, and similar things do happen both internally and externally.

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

People can argue between manhwa and manga (it depends a LOT on what/where you're reading), but I want to know what jokester voted manhua. If there's one objectively wrong answer on this list, it's manhua.

There are some good official manhua translations out there, and contrary to popular belief there are even good manhuas themselves, but damn is it rare for the two to intersect, it's frustrating to say the least.

The most heinous, offensively bad, literally shouting at my computer "I can't believe they want people to pay real money for this!" official translations I've ever seen were manhua. It made me even angrier because with an "official" technically existing, even if it's unreadable garbage they're trying to scam people into buying, it's very unlikely to ever get picked up by another platform or by fan translators. One that really pissed me off was literally worse than bad unedited MTL, it was completely unintelligible.

The low quality manga official translations I've seen have mostly been on themselves fairly low quality manga, cliché-filled mass-produced isekais and rofans to cash in on the craze, so I suppose the translations also not being high budget productions isn't surprising.

Since most of the better quality official manga translations I'd be interested in seem to come from either subscription platforms, places you have to pay by chapter, or are still print versions, they're simply not as accessible to me as their counterpart Korean versions that often have ways to earn free coins/ink/points or wait until free to read chapters, so I'm definitely biased towards manhwa official translations just because I'm far more likely to encounter them since I'm less limited by budget with them.

I'm also a bit more biased against manga because some of the otherwise good official manga translations I've encountered didn't translate the SFX, which is just unacceptable for me from an official licensed product unless it's a particularly artistic SFX and they put a note somewhere on the side/in the margins to tell you what it says. Random door opening noises, footsteps, sighs, etc. should absolutely be translated in an official product. They're doing this for money, they're not fan scanlators doing this for free as a service to other readers online, so they should be fully translating it, not leaving out bits and pieces because they're more annoying/difficult or less important to the main plot.

Manhwa from platforms like tappytoon, webtoon, and tapas can sometimes vary in quality (most often when they're actually licensing their translations from another company instead of retranslating it themselves with their higher quality TL staff), and I've noticed occasional errors here and there more frequently these days that make me worry they're really not investing properly in QCing anymore, like repeated text in speech bubbles, forgetting to translate SFX, or repeated panels, and basic stuff like that that should have been caught on a quick look through, but generally speaking they produce consistently good to high quality translations, although I do wish they'd make more liberal use of TL notes instead of glossing over jokes and references or choosing to localize them.

Yeah some manhu a has official translationa, most manhua which I saw has translation by webcomicapp or webnovel (yes, it's name of site, not novel type)

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...)
I've barely ever read any manhwa, and never read any manhua, but I see no reason not to treat them the same.

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...

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...

The longest official TL have been existent, the most perfected TL are. At the beginning, TL are usually crappy, overlocalized, erasing east-asian culture components, messing with onomatopoeia as our languages (i speak for Europe) are less likely to have a large range of sound/emotion words, and, in the case of Japanese, juggling with bubble reading order. As time goes -and readers complain - TL gets better.

Nowadays, manga TL are quite good, some have been re-edited to correct past TL mistakes. Manwha is correct but still subpar, and Manhua is .. just not there yet.

You can see the evolution through wether words for "brother" (in East Asian context, therefore not necessarily blood related) get erased or not : Those words should not be translated since they carry untranslatable cultural meaning, and Aniki is usually left untranslated, Hyung/Oppa it depends the publisher, but Gege gets systematically erased.

Been there, read that

Quote from Ruruskadoo

I'm also a bit more biased against manga because some of the otherwise good official manga translations I've encountered didn't translate the SFX, which is just unacceptable for me from an official licensed product unless it's a particularly artistic SFX and they put a note somewhere on the side/in the margins to tell you what it says. Random door opening noises, footsteps, sighs, etc. should absolutely be translated in an official product. They're doing this for money, they're not fan scanlators doing this for free as a service to other readers online, so they should be fully translating it, not leaving out bits and pieces because they're more annoying/difficult or less important to the main plot.

Wow I mean I may be biased in the opposite direction because I can actually read kana and understand elementary Japanese but this strikes me as one of the most absurd nitpicks I've ever seen

The sfx are ALWAYS part of the art. I am fully in favor of putting the sfx translations in the margins of the page or underneath the real sfx, but you make it clear that you're usually NOT okay with that except in extreme scenarios, and want most of the sfx to be replaced within the panel?

I couldn't possibly disagree more. I would actually want to smack you if you bought Viz and started doing this to One Piece. Don't change any of the manga-ka's art you fucking heathen. Add translations where they fit but if you remove even a single katakana of sfx then you have besmirched the page.

Well, I wouldn't be reading a translation in the first place if I could read the original, so fully untranslated pieces of text in an official translation are unacceptable to me, plain and simple.

I already said that artistic SFX can stay as long as a translation is still provided for them, but there's lots of purely functional SFX that a proper official translation team should be able to replace in a way that emulates the original. Not every single door opening sound, cough, or footstep is an irreplaceable masterpiece.

If you really believe that every tiny thing the original mangaka put in there must stay exactly as it is, then you might as well say the text in the speech bubbles shouldn't be changed either and should just be translated in the margins or something. Part of the art of translating any kind of comic is making sure the new text put in still conveys the meaning, feel, and aesthetics intended by the original artist as much as is possible.

Quote from Ruruskadoo

Manhwa from platforms like tappytoon, webtoon, and tapas can sometimes vary in quality (most often when they're actually licensing their translations from another company instead of retranslating it themselves with their higher quality TL staff), and I've noticed occasional errors here and there more frequently these days that make me worry they're really not investing properly in QCing anymore, like repeated text in speech bubbles, forgetting to translate SFX, or repeated panels, and basic stuff like that that should have been caught on a quick look through, but generally speaking they produce consistently good to high quality translations, although I do wish they'd make more liberal use of TL notes instead of glossing over jokes and references or choosing to localize them.

Don't forget the Webtoon censorship. I remembered reading one that was a mix between Tower of God and Solo Leveling, and the two women who pine after the MC actually succeeded in getting the MC to take them to bed. It's a fade to black scene where the girls wake up fully under the covers with the MC. And apparently that was too much, so those panels were removed a day later. Since then I decided the aggregate sites were probably a better place to read if I didn't want to miss anything in a Webtoon comic.

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

I haven't encountered it too much myself, but yeah any kind of removing/changing the actual content of the story is absolutely unacceptable.

I remember this happened with Tapas's official translation of Roxana. There was an entire panel removed and text changed to change it from the FL's father saying it was time for her to start seduction training to I think courtship training? They entirely missed the point of the scene being intentionally horrible and shocking to show what an irredeemable monster he is and drive home how the children of that family are raised in such a fucked up way, so removing that actively changes the tone of the story.

I'm fully in favor of translations including trigger warnings at the start of chapters and the like for people to prepare themselves or skip if need be, but if they've agreed to translate and host the story, they need to do so faithfully, not change it up and remove parts they don't like.