4 replies to this topic

[Horseshoe Crab]

The Invisible Labor Economy Behind Pirated Japanese Comics

I found this to be a very interesting article discussing some of the relationship between scanlators and publishers, with some history of the practice. The focus is on Japanese manga, but some of the discussion applies to Korean webtoons as well. I know many of us can relate to the problem of the "official" translations not being on par with the scanlator versions.

I suppose Webtoon's fan translations are sort of moving toward crowdsourcing, but it's not quite there as far as the English translations go.

The article doesn't really distinguish between scanlators and aggregators, but there is some good discussion on that topic in the comments section.

Edited by Horseshoe Crab, 12 April 2015 - 01:53 AM.

[rojo]

You should probably link to the article so other people can read it

 

I don't think it quite applies the same way to webtoons, since they're online. The issue with scanlating manga is that people have to pay for the chapters (via monthly magazines or volumes), and scanlators are putting them online for everyone to read without paying. Webtoons, on the other hand, are already freely available online*. Of course, you could argue that by translating and reposting the webtoons elsewhere Naver loses ad revenue, but they don't seem to care about foreign ad views since neither the website nor the app for the official translations actually have ads.

 

*I believe some webtoon hosts have options where you can pay to see the latest chapters before they're publicly released, but that seems to be the small minority.

Edited by rojo, 11 April 2015 - 11:29 PM.

[Horseshoe Crab]

That would certainly help, wouldn't it?

[gus]

The Invisible Labor Economy Behind Pirated Japanese Comics

I found this to be a very interesting article discussing some of the relationship between scanlators and publishers, with some history of the practice. The focus is on Japanese manga, but some of the discussion applies to Korean webtoons as well. I know many of us can relate to the problem of the "official" translations not being on par with the scanlator versions.

I suppose Webtoon's fan translations are sort of moving toward crowdsourcing, but it's not quite there as far as the English translations go.

The article doesn't really distinguish between scanlators and aggregators, but there is some good discussion on that topic in the comments section.

 

IMO i think their target audience

is their country ether Japan /Korea or China

 

we  the foreign audience get shit

 

anyway i don't really like the article it always make it sound like a White knight wrote it or try to be neutral but still chooses a side

Edited by gus, 02 May 2015 - 07:28 AM.

[Ivy]

IMO i think their target audience

is their country ether Japan /Korea or China

 

we  the foreign audience get shit

 

anyway i don't really like the article it always make it sound like a White knight wrote it or try to be neutral but still chooses a side

 

Foreign audience is scattered across the world in relatively small groups of people who speak different languages and whose countries have different copyright laws. No wonder they don't care about catering to us. 

 

About the article, I think it says nothing new. It mentions that manga sales declined drastically in the late 2000s, when a lot of new aggregator sites appeared, but it could have also been due to the global economic crisis and a change in publishing methods (there are a lot of comic artists that self-publish on the internet now, not only scanlated manga). 

 

That said, I do think that most people that read manga online don't buy the volumes afterwards. There might be a lot of reasons for this, from lack of avaliability or high postal fees to simply not feeling like paying for something that could be found for free. At least that's my case, I read a lot of mangas online -mostly webtoons, but still- but I only have physical copies of one.