Theme by nostrich.
Text
So it should be said that I read a lot of japanese/korean/whatever comics or manga as they are more commonly known as. This was a relatively easy thing to do because most manga are not translated and released in English in a timely manner or at all. So more often than not, the fan translations are out within a few days of the original release and they are of astonishingly good quality for work done by people for free.
But this changed about a month ago when all the publishers suddenly realized that “Hey, we can make more money if we shut the sites hosting all these fan translations down!” Just a few hours ago, my favorite host, Manga Toshokan, had to remove every single series licensed by an American publisher. Normally, I would be ok with this, the publisher owns the exclusive rights to translate and release that work. But the issue is that the publishers DO NOT DO THIS. Shit got removed merely because a publisher owns the rights to it but I can guarantee that you will NEVER see 90% of the shit “licensed” available in English by that publisher. Hell, there’s been a few releases where the publisher gave up on translation and just left the series halfway done. Shadow Star/Narutaru in particular stands out. Try finding anything past volume 7 of that in English. Also, too bad that it doesn’t actually end until volume 12. But still sites were forced to take it down.
I sound like a whiny fan boy at this point but the problem is that it hurts both parties. The readers aren’t going to spend any money for slow, incomplete translations from the publisher but if they can’t find a way around it, they might stop reading altogether. This means that the publisher is not only going to lose money in sales of translated manga but also any supporting merchandise sales are going to plummet. I could go about “big business” hurting the “true fans” but looking at this objectively, the publishers are going to lose a lot of readers and the readers are going to stop reading.
So what can you do? Nothing really. This whole issue is a huge legal gray zone to me. If there’s an original foreign book out there and a English publisher picks up translation, is a totally separate translator at fault for doing their own work and release if they do it for free? If someone wants to explain this to me, please feel free. But in the mean time, I think I’m going to look for a new hobby.
