translate this, baby
2 Mar 2008 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouSometimes the world of translations and scanlations really irritates me.
Let’s say I like a particular mangaka. Just like I do with English-language fiction (as do many people), when I find an author whose style and voice I like, I often go in search of other works by that person. It’s no different with standalone comic books (I clarify that as being in contrast to long-running serials like Superman or The Dark Knight, where the publishing house may contract a variety of authors and/or artists over a series’ long life). Over at Baka-Updates Manga, I learn the mangaka has a series with the Japanese title of Mainichi Seiten (picking a title completely off the top of my head). It’s been licensed. Okay, that means I can purchase it at my local comic book store, and I would expect it to be a decent-quality translation. (Not always, but one can hope. I mean, not all publishing houses are Dark Horse, after all.) The link, however, is to Digital Mania Publishing (DMP) who really, really need someone to kick them in the head. I mean really kick them in the head. Several times, at that.
The pages opens, and you see a series of cover-shot images, with the english titles above each image. I only know the Japanese title. I’m supposed to scroll through the images and pick something that looks like it might’ve been drawn by the specific mangaka I like? Where’s the search function? Oh, wait, there isn’t one. Where’s the author’s name listed? Nowhere. The difficulty is that I can’t go to the local comic book store and say, I want to purchase Mainichi Seiten because it’s a fair to better chance they’ll only know the title of the English version. I could give them the mangaka’s name, but I’ve found that’s not always listed in the system because if the distributor doesn’t include it in the information triggered by the ISBN search, then it’s not in the store’s system, and on top of that, most comic book stores list comics by title, not by author. Y’know, like a normal bookstore would.
If I’m really lucky, it might be that I can find the english-publication title listed on Manganews or on Baka-Updates, but not always. Sometimes the info’s not available at time of noting the series has been licensed; the publishing company hasn’t announced that, and so a “licensed manga” just gets set aside and not updated again. This means I’m reduced to clicking on each could-be-that cover image to see what I can find.
Guess what I get: a page with the same image but larger, and the title to the right, followed by the number of volumes and a link for Where to Buy. Under the image are two links: General Information and a link for each Volume. If I click General information, the rest of the page doesn’t change. That’s right. It’s a link that goes back to itself. If I click Volume 1, then I see information like this:
Clear Skies Volume 1
ISBN: 1569705755
ISBN-13: 9781569705759
200 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 8.5
Age 16+
Release Date: August 26, 2008
SRP: $12.95
...and then a short paragraph summarizing the volume’s contents. (I have to add, these are some of the worst teasers I’ve ever read, too. No, honestly. The worst.)
You see anything in there about who the author is? I don’t. That’s right: nowhere on the pages are the authors or artists noted, let alone when it’s a joint work and the author/artist are not the same person. How the hell is this supposed to build any kind of author-loyalty? What about the importance of using existing readership to create a market for the next licensed/translated title? Nada, people.
The entire marketing scheme -- or lack thereof -- on those webpages just sucks.
And while we’re at it, why don’t comic book/manga distributors take a page (so to speak) from novel publishers? Include the first chapter, translated, so potential purchasers can get a sense of the author’s style, the storyline, whatever. If it’s a collection of one-off stories, then maybe the first four pages. It’s not like you’re being asked to give it away, oh ye publishing distribution company, it’s a simple basic element of retail: it’s the loss leader but the reason it’s a leader is because it often leads to sales.
Twits.
So much for the usefulness of the internet in allowing me to review, select, possibly purchase -- or at least plan -- what I want to get/read before I have to get in the car and drive to the comic book store and deal with dweebs and nonexistent stock and traffic and whatnot, all at the comic book store’s convenience and not mine.
This is assuming I even have any interest in reading the mangaka’s work in the first place, if I’ve been able to find the remotest teaser or taste of his/her work to make me curious enough to search it down. Because for the scanlations prior to licensing, sometimes there are just so many goddamn hoops I have to ask: WHO OWNS THIS ANYWAY. From the way scanlators act, you’d bloody well think they didn’t just invent the story, they invented paper itself. And possibly zip-file architecture to boot.
Honestly, people. I get that some scanlation groups are a bit nervous about an American distributor (since Americans are known, sadly, for their suit-happy overboard protection of copyright blah blah blah compared to the rather laid-back non-suing Japanese cultural perspective) coming down hard on them. I imagine it’s a pretty big, and murky, gray area when it comes to “we scanlated it, then removed it from our download files when it was licensed: are we really responsible for the fact that someone out there keeps uploading our files back to the internet to make them available (and thus compete with the official version)?” I’m going to avoid completely the question of what-to-do when the official version is so badly translated, so completely out-of-whack (it happens), not to mentioned sometimes censored or butchered in some way, that any reasonable fan would prefer the unadulterated, more-accurate scanlator’s version.
(In fact, I must admit that for some anime I’ve purchased recently, I find I’d rather have the fansub versions in high quality and get my money back for the official translation -- which was clunky, inaccurate, and sometimes outright wrong along with changing things for no apparent reason. Ergo Proxy’s official release was like that. It sucks.)
However, outside the fear of being sued by an American distributor upon licensing -- and at the same time noting that the vast majority of the titles being scanlated are not likely to be licensed, and may in fact be overlooked permanently by American markets -- the rest of the hoops just make me wonder whether scanlators sometimes forget who really did the work. Yes, I know translation is hard -- it’s beyond hard, in some cases, and I speak as someone who’s studied four languages, and passed as near-natively-fluent in two. I know what it entails. But it still doesn’t justify, in my opinion, doing crap like demanding that people downloading MUST say thank you -- that is, make X number of posts within Y amount of time -- or else they’re banned!!111!!!eleventy-one!!! Oi, I don’t like it when someone holds their chapter hostage if they don’t get Z number of reviews. I don’t like it when someone does it for any reason.
Or the hissy-fit I stumbled over a week or so ago. “Someone’s been posting my scanlations on the intarweebs so I’m deleting all files and distributing them privately from now on, sob, sob, and if you don’t like it, then find that person and stop them, sob, sob!” Oh, well, excuse me, I just wanted to freaking get an idea of whether this is a story I wanted to read. I wasn’t here because I wanted to sign up for drama. The punchline? I did a search on the Japanese title, along with “download” and “scanlation”, and I immediately found three sites where the files had been uploaded and could be downloaded... and I didn’t even have to go through the freaking ridiculous hoops of “you must post X” or “you must tell me Y about yourself” or even the “you can’t cut and paste from someone else’s thank you, and it must be at least fifteen words!”
Say what? Would “Thanks for the hard work! Thanks for the hard work! Thanks for the hard work!” suffice, or is that only five words that happen to be repeated three times? What if I don’t think your scanlation was all that great, or the story itself wasn’t that awesome and it was a waste of my time and yours and thus I don’t think you deserve three thanks, but just one? I don’t like being made to feel like I’m obligated to thank you for translating, because in the majority of cases, I didn’t really care before -- or after -- whether a work got translated, and so I have no real inclination to fall all over myself about it.
(This is with the caveat that when I do find a group translating a quality story with quality effort, I do support them... but again, I’d rather support them by just donating to the cost of purchasing the magazines they scan/translate. I just don’t bloody well like having to make a bazillion posts that are all repeats of the same “thank you for your hard work” over and over. I’m downloading it, and I’m downloading the rest of it -- I’d think seeing the count on Savefile that says “984 people have downloaded this file” says something RIGHT THERE.)
It gets really ridiculous when you see non-translated scans, though. That’s where I just shake my head and wonder at this bizarre confluence of the internet’s strong “information wants to be free!” drive, meeting head-on with the human impulse to ‘own’ your work even when your actual input of ‘work’ is so derivative as to be nonexistent. For example, people who purchase a magazine and scan the cover, or a page, or an entire article, and then post to the net. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen warnings on such postings/distribution that say: “don’t use this for icons or wallpaper without our permission!” or “you’re not allowed to translate unless you get our okay first!”
Let me get this straight. You purchased a magazine -- presumably because you wanted to read it in the first place, in which case I’d expect that you would’ve purchased it regardless. That means, to me, your expenditure was already budgeted and the by-product of distributing it is a null value. That is: if you buy a car because you want that specific car, you would’ve bought that car whether or not I needed a ride to the library -- so I fail to see why you think your car-purchase puts an obligation on me to defray your costs.
Then, you take the magazine home. You peruse it, you enjoy it, and then you -- oh, I guess this is the ‘hard work’ part -- you turn on your computer. You fire up the scanner. You set the magazine on the scanner bed, and you hit “scan”. The image comes through, and maybe you twiddle with it, but more likely (judging from what I see posted), you don’t. The most is probably a high-quality scan version, and a low-quality scan version. Then you post it somewhere and claim that no one can use those images without your consent.
Uhm, which part of “those aren’t your images in the first place” wasn’t getting through to you?
Not to mention, what are you going to do, launch yourself into a frenzy whenever you see an image from that article being used by someone on the web? Do you really think you’re the only person out there who had the amazingly rare and brilliant notion of scanning and distributing an image? Did you just conveniently forget that most magazine distribution runs are in the thousands, if not higher? Are you going to froth at the mouth when I use an image from that article, and refuse to believe that because I have a Japanese-speaker in the house, that we could possibly be getting the original Japanese-language version delivered even though we *gasp* don’t live in Japan? Should I include a note from my doctor excusing me from your rampage if I use an image from an article you posted? Should I buy a vowel? Should I not pass Go?
In the few, very few, cases where someone has scanned an image and put time/effort into cleaning it up... then I can see the justification of asking for credit when the image is used. That, like scanlating (or writing/drawing an original work as well), does entail work, and significant work at that, sometimes. Despite that, it still doesn’t justify holding the work hostage, and there’s still a huge dose of hypocrisy in declaring “no one can use this without letting me know!” when the source material isn’t yours in the first place. It’s beyond laughable to scan a text, not translate it, and then demand that everyone respect your right to grant permission or no to any potential amateur-translators. Oh, yeah, because that was just such hard work going to the newstand, purchasing, reading, scanning, bundling, and then posting.
Dear scanners: somewhere on this planet, in a small dark room, there’s a little boy playing a violin just for you.
I don’t care, though. I just wish DMP and its ilk would identify the authors, create a search function, and post at least the first four or five pages of any work so I can get a sense of the work. Then I could just avoid these self-entitled scanlation hostage-holders altogether.
Let’s say I like a particular mangaka. Just like I do with English-language fiction (as do many people), when I find an author whose style and voice I like, I often go in search of other works by that person. It’s no different with standalone comic books (I clarify that as being in contrast to long-running serials like Superman or The Dark Knight, where the publishing house may contract a variety of authors and/or artists over a series’ long life). Over at Baka-Updates Manga, I learn the mangaka has a series with the Japanese title of Mainichi Seiten (picking a title completely off the top of my head). It’s been licensed. Okay, that means I can purchase it at my local comic book store, and I would expect it to be a decent-quality translation. (Not always, but one can hope. I mean, not all publishing houses are Dark Horse, after all.) The link, however, is to Digital Mania Publishing (DMP) who really, really need someone to kick them in the head. I mean really kick them in the head. Several times, at that.
The pages opens, and you see a series of cover-shot images, with the english titles above each image. I only know the Japanese title. I’m supposed to scroll through the images and pick something that looks like it might’ve been drawn by the specific mangaka I like? Where’s the search function? Oh, wait, there isn’t one. Where’s the author’s name listed? Nowhere. The difficulty is that I can’t go to the local comic book store and say, I want to purchase Mainichi Seiten because it’s a fair to better chance they’ll only know the title of the English version. I could give them the mangaka’s name, but I’ve found that’s not always listed in the system because if the distributor doesn’t include it in the information triggered by the ISBN search, then it’s not in the store’s system, and on top of that, most comic book stores list comics by title, not by author. Y’know, like a normal bookstore would.
If I’m really lucky, it might be that I can find the english-publication title listed on Manganews or on Baka-Updates, but not always. Sometimes the info’s not available at time of noting the series has been licensed; the publishing company hasn’t announced that, and so a “licensed manga” just gets set aside and not updated again. This means I’m reduced to clicking on each could-be-that cover image to see what I can find.
Guess what I get: a page with the same image but larger, and the title to the right, followed by the number of volumes and a link for Where to Buy. Under the image are two links: General Information and a link for each Volume. If I click General information, the rest of the page doesn’t change. That’s right. It’s a link that goes back to itself. If I click Volume 1, then I see information like this:
Clear Skies Volume 1
ISBN: 1569705755
ISBN-13: 9781569705759
200 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 8.5
Age 16+
Release Date: August 26, 2008
SRP: $12.95
...and then a short paragraph summarizing the volume’s contents. (I have to add, these are some of the worst teasers I’ve ever read, too. No, honestly. The worst.)
You see anything in there about who the author is? I don’t. That’s right: nowhere on the pages are the authors or artists noted, let alone when it’s a joint work and the author/artist are not the same person. How the hell is this supposed to build any kind of author-loyalty? What about the importance of using existing readership to create a market for the next licensed/translated title? Nada, people.
The entire marketing scheme -- or lack thereof -- on those webpages just sucks.
And while we’re at it, why don’t comic book/manga distributors take a page (so to speak) from novel publishers? Include the first chapter, translated, so potential purchasers can get a sense of the author’s style, the storyline, whatever. If it’s a collection of one-off stories, then maybe the first four pages. It’s not like you’re being asked to give it away, oh ye publishing distribution company, it’s a simple basic element of retail: it’s the loss leader but the reason it’s a leader is because it often leads to sales.
Twits.
So much for the usefulness of the internet in allowing me to review, select, possibly purchase -- or at least plan -- what I want to get/read before I have to get in the car and drive to the comic book store and deal with dweebs and nonexistent stock and traffic and whatnot, all at the comic book store’s convenience and not mine.
This is assuming I even have any interest in reading the mangaka’s work in the first place, if I’ve been able to find the remotest teaser or taste of his/her work to make me curious enough to search it down. Because for the scanlations prior to licensing, sometimes there are just so many goddamn hoops I have to ask: WHO OWNS THIS ANYWAY. From the way scanlators act, you’d bloody well think they didn’t just invent the story, they invented paper itself. And possibly zip-file architecture to boot.
Honestly, people. I get that some scanlation groups are a bit nervous about an American distributor (since Americans are known, sadly, for their suit-happy overboard protection of copyright blah blah blah compared to the rather laid-back non-suing Japanese cultural perspective) coming down hard on them. I imagine it’s a pretty big, and murky, gray area when it comes to “we scanlated it, then removed it from our download files when it was licensed: are we really responsible for the fact that someone out there keeps uploading our files back to the internet to make them available (and thus compete with the official version)?” I’m going to avoid completely the question of what-to-do when the official version is so badly translated, so completely out-of-whack (it happens), not to mentioned sometimes censored or butchered in some way, that any reasonable fan would prefer the unadulterated, more-accurate scanlator’s version.
(In fact, I must admit that for some anime I’ve purchased recently, I find I’d rather have the fansub versions in high quality and get my money back for the official translation -- which was clunky, inaccurate, and sometimes outright wrong along with changing things for no apparent reason. Ergo Proxy’s official release was like that. It sucks.)
However, outside the fear of being sued by an American distributor upon licensing -- and at the same time noting that the vast majority of the titles being scanlated are not likely to be licensed, and may in fact be overlooked permanently by American markets -- the rest of the hoops just make me wonder whether scanlators sometimes forget who really did the work. Yes, I know translation is hard -- it’s beyond hard, in some cases, and I speak as someone who’s studied four languages, and passed as near-natively-fluent in two. I know what it entails. But it still doesn’t justify, in my opinion, doing crap like demanding that people downloading MUST say thank you -- that is, make X number of posts within Y amount of time -- or else they’re banned!!111!!!eleventy-one!!! Oi, I don’t like it when someone holds their chapter hostage if they don’t get Z number of reviews. I don’t like it when someone does it for any reason.
Or the hissy-fit I stumbled over a week or so ago. “Someone’s been posting my scanlations on the intarweebs so I’m deleting all files and distributing them privately from now on, sob, sob, and if you don’t like it, then find that person and stop them, sob, sob!” Oh, well, excuse me, I just wanted to freaking get an idea of whether this is a story I wanted to read. I wasn’t here because I wanted to sign up for drama. The punchline? I did a search on the Japanese title, along with “download” and “scanlation”, and I immediately found three sites where the files had been uploaded and could be downloaded... and I didn’t even have to go through the freaking ridiculous hoops of “you must post X” or “you must tell me Y about yourself” or even the “you can’t cut and paste from someone else’s thank you, and it must be at least fifteen words!”
Say what? Would “Thanks for the hard work! Thanks for the hard work! Thanks for the hard work!” suffice, or is that only five words that happen to be repeated three times? What if I don’t think your scanlation was all that great, or the story itself wasn’t that awesome and it was a waste of my time and yours and thus I don’t think you deserve three thanks, but just one? I don’t like being made to feel like I’m obligated to thank you for translating, because in the majority of cases, I didn’t really care before -- or after -- whether a work got translated, and so I have no real inclination to fall all over myself about it.
(This is with the caveat that when I do find a group translating a quality story with quality effort, I do support them... but again, I’d rather support them by just donating to the cost of purchasing the magazines they scan/translate. I just don’t bloody well like having to make a bazillion posts that are all repeats of the same “thank you for your hard work” over and over. I’m downloading it, and I’m downloading the rest of it -- I’d think seeing the count on Savefile that says “984 people have downloaded this file” says something RIGHT THERE.)
It gets really ridiculous when you see non-translated scans, though. That’s where I just shake my head and wonder at this bizarre confluence of the internet’s strong “information wants to be free!” drive, meeting head-on with the human impulse to ‘own’ your work even when your actual input of ‘work’ is so derivative as to be nonexistent. For example, people who purchase a magazine and scan the cover, or a page, or an entire article, and then post to the net. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen warnings on such postings/distribution that say: “don’t use this for icons or wallpaper without our permission!” or “you’re not allowed to translate unless you get our okay first!”
Let me get this straight. You purchased a magazine -- presumably because you wanted to read it in the first place, in which case I’d expect that you would’ve purchased it regardless. That means, to me, your expenditure was already budgeted and the by-product of distributing it is a null value. That is: if you buy a car because you want that specific car, you would’ve bought that car whether or not I needed a ride to the library -- so I fail to see why you think your car-purchase puts an obligation on me to defray your costs.
Then, you take the magazine home. You peruse it, you enjoy it, and then you -- oh, I guess this is the ‘hard work’ part -- you turn on your computer. You fire up the scanner. You set the magazine on the scanner bed, and you hit “scan”. The image comes through, and maybe you twiddle with it, but more likely (judging from what I see posted), you don’t. The most is probably a high-quality scan version, and a low-quality scan version. Then you post it somewhere and claim that no one can use those images without your consent.
Uhm, which part of “those aren’t your images in the first place” wasn’t getting through to you?
Not to mention, what are you going to do, launch yourself into a frenzy whenever you see an image from that article being used by someone on the web? Do you really think you’re the only person out there who had the amazingly rare and brilliant notion of scanning and distributing an image? Did you just conveniently forget that most magazine distribution runs are in the thousands, if not higher? Are you going to froth at the mouth when I use an image from that article, and refuse to believe that because I have a Japanese-speaker in the house, that we could possibly be getting the original Japanese-language version delivered even though we *gasp* don’t live in Japan? Should I include a note from my doctor excusing me from your rampage if I use an image from an article you posted? Should I buy a vowel? Should I not pass Go?
In the few, very few, cases where someone has scanned an image and put time/effort into cleaning it up... then I can see the justification of asking for credit when the image is used. That, like scanlating (or writing/drawing an original work as well), does entail work, and significant work at that, sometimes. Despite that, it still doesn’t justify holding the work hostage, and there’s still a huge dose of hypocrisy in declaring “no one can use this without letting me know!” when the source material isn’t yours in the first place. It’s beyond laughable to scan a text, not translate it, and then demand that everyone respect your right to grant permission or no to any potential amateur-translators. Oh, yeah, because that was just such hard work going to the newstand, purchasing, reading, scanning, bundling, and then posting.
Dear scanners: somewhere on this planet, in a small dark room, there’s a little boy playing a violin just for you.
I don’t care, though. I just wish DMP and its ilk would identify the authors, create a search function, and post at least the first four or five pages of any work so I can get a sense of the work. Then I could just avoid these self-entitled scanlation hostage-holders altogether.