This week's poll was suggested by Afiaki. It's the age of question of speed vs. quality. I believe most of the past times we've done similar polls it was speed that won. You guys just want the content

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: How many chapters are you willing to give a story with a bad start before you drop it?
Choices:
1 - votes: 162 (5.8%)
2 - votes: 193 (6.9%)
3 - votes: 426 (15.2%)
4-5 - votes: 645 (23%)
6-10 - votes: 613 (21.9%)
11-20 - votes: 450 (16.1%)
I'll still finish the series regardless - votes: 312 (11.1%)
There were 2801 total votes.
The poll ended: May 25th, 2024 6:47am PDT

At least you guys give it a chance

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

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.

Was thinking the usual - low res images, bad translations and lousy editing. I'm honestly surprised anyone picked the "fast and bad" option. Can anyone explain why? Is it simple impatience or am i missing something?

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.

Judging by some of the comments I've seen on aggregator sites that's pretty much it, full stop.

Last edited by homogenized at 1:18 pm, May 25 2024

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.

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If I've made a thread in the "I'm Looking For..." forum, I am only interested in Japanese manga. I am not interested in non-Japanese media at this time.

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...

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I will change this world mmm...
So the world can change me 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?

Last edited by Alwerien at 5:55 am, May 26 2024

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Please never die, MangaUpdates.

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)

I chose it bc what a lot of people consider "low quality" is fine to me lol. At least if I'm going off of comments I've seen in the past bashing a translation for being "low quality" and I was just like, eh, its not professional level thats for sure but its perfectly readable... The subjectiveness of what makes something low quality and not makes it hard to answer accurately lol.

My biggest beef with super slow scans is that I basically have to reread the entire series every time a chapter drops bc I've forgotten what the story was even about. So even if it's not the best quality, its easier for me to read something on a weekly or even monthly basis than once every 4-6 months. If its something I'm interested in, but I notice whoever is scanning it is putting out very sporadic updates, I usually just put it on hold until it's completed so I can read it all in one go. (And often times, it takes so long that the group loses interest and it's never finished.... But I'm guilty of that as a scanslator too lol. Srry to all 3 inubaka fans out there T^T) So I guess you could say that's impatience. Idk if its just the ADHD and normal people don't have this problem, but I'm kinda in the opposite boat lol. I don't get how people can read 1 chapter of something every couple months and still remember whats going on, or read it in any enjoyable way, unless they're just starting the series over every update.

Additionally, on popular series I feel like I have to read what gets put out first for spoiler reasons, whether the scan is good or bad. You pretty much have to black out the internet if you're waiting around for a better scan, bc someone's gonna post spoilers. But will say, this isn't as much of a problem anymore bc the popular series now-a-days will either have an official simul-update, or already be in the hands of competent and fast scanslators bc of their notoriety.

Yeah, are we talking about 1kiss/ez/like/teen/magus level unreadable trashlation or are we talking kai/freak level where things are ominously just never quite right?

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.

Usually most "low quality" scanlations are readable. LH gets a ton of flack, but honestly, they're usually decent to me. Even the old Bleach translations were, for the most part, decent enough to convey the story without butchering anything. Usually.

My issue with high quality scanlations are multiple.
1) They do often take too long, cleaning and fixing some things few people care about like sfx and such.
2) They take most of the meat off the bones for the official translations, so they're more likely to get hit with a copyright claim or end up behind a paywall if they become the official translation team. (There used to be no less than 3 translation teams for Bleach, the two best quality ones are no longer available.)
3) Less series can be scanlated overall.
4) I like high quality translations... but I feel like there's a clear moral and ethical issue there.

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