How much do you think fan translations hurt the industry
-
@Jon-Mitchell
I'm sorry if my post sounded a bit aggressive. Other than the specific remarks about the publication of Re:Zero, it wasn't aimed at you. I was looking more at some of the earlier posts, especially the one from @setite-0, and responding to that. I do appreciate your kind words and your support of this site and the industry. Hope you'll keep enjoying (and legitimately obtaining! XD) the work we do here. -
@Jon-Mitchell Also, the fall of Kissanime made me miss a lot of stuff, as I don't like the way my other Provider (AnimeFLV with subs in Spanish) handles its video, especially on the smart TV
-
As far as me goes, I don't really think it hurts the industry, for the most part. I'll separate in two points
- I think they help the industry, and also, normally, when a Light Novel gets licenced, fan translators usually step down, from my point of view, they start translating because they like a certain LN, WN, VN etc. and they want more people to learn about the series, while at the same time, they practice to improve themselves (like the fan translator for DxD), I don't think that's a bad thing, if they are honest when they do it. So in that aspect I think they help the industry, and I have to say, some fan translation groups have a great level (which makes the people get interested in the series) , while at the same time they don't really ask for donations to continue translating.
- The ones who trully ruin the industry are two kind of people: The ones who MTL, and the ones who put 0 effort in the translation, and are just in to see if they can get any money. First of all, they don't even know japanese, and use google, or any other program to translate, secondly, they ask for money, lastly, they make people lose interest in what may be a great series if translated correctly, to mention some.
Even if I read the fan translations, like You-jitsu for example, I do buy the official translation.
Okay, so I apologize for how badly writen it is, I wrote this kinda in a hurry, I can explain more if someone asks.
-
I think I'll be beating a dead horse with this but I'll toss my thoughts in the ring.
Interest in currently airing series was, as far as I can recall, built up by fan translators. Once it was known a market existed, we saw the birth of Crunchyroll. Even before that, there was a level of fan translators bringing light to a series that either was in the works to be localized or potentially drew enough attention to be localized. (No known evidence of the latter, as far as I'm aware.)
However, now that we have a service like Crunchyroll, there are still your average pirates that will use their subtitles in a similar fashion to the "fansub" community. This used to be looked down upon and then became the norm.
That said, pirates are going to pirate. That's actually how I found JNC and when I looked at it, I ultimately went "that's actually really cool, I'm going to support this".
So you have a double edged sword.And that's just anime, because if you start thinking about manga and LNs, they end up being two different beasts. Manga is arguably more niche than anime and LNs are really still gaining traction here in the west. Fan translations will bring these series to people's attention. Most of the time when an officially licensed translation is announced, fan translators back off. In this case, I'd say it is more beneficial than not, as the attention was grown for free for something that otherwise would've been less likely to grab them.
I would go so far as to argue piracy is closer to neutral than detrimental, being that anyone who enjoys something that they wouldn't have paid for still may pay for it but anyone who doesn't still won't... But at the same time it's a lot more nuanced than that and I'm not about to break my brain on it.
-
@Kiritsuna said in How much do you think fan translations hurt the industry:
Even if I read the fan translations, like You-jitsu for example, I do buy the official translation.
A lot of people are not like you. There are people on Twitter trolling VIZ's new volume tweets and telling people to just go read it for free on aggregator sites instead of buying it. There are people who say because they don't have enough money, that means they should be allowed to just go pirate stuff for free.
Anime and manga aside, English LNs are not profitable enough to just shrug when a huge number of readers don't buy the books. It's really easy to lump anime, manga, and LNs into the same bucket since they're in the same "otakusphere," but Western anime and manga sales are much higher than LN sales, so if the same number of people who pirate manga and anime are also pirating LNs, that's a huge blow to profitability. People like to complain about how some series are so far behind, or don't get licensed for years, or the translation/editing is bad, but if there isn't enough money flowing into the industry, then it's hard to pay for all the work that needs to be done to get something translated and published professionally.
Whoever said nothing's impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
-
There's also an increasing trend of starting a fan TL after something is officially licensed. For example a recent case is I'll Never Set Foot in That House Again! which JNC recently licensed. After it was announced a fan TL of the WN started soon after (and they're already way behind JNC's translated content anyway).
I've already stated my opinion on this kind of behavior though, so I won't mention again how stupid it is.
-
@myskaros Well, yeah, I understand that, since most are students they can't afford to buy many translated LN's since (understandably) they are not as cheap as buying them raw. And while I don't agree with people who do pirate all their LN's, I don't necessarily mind if they pirate it at first, and when they get the money, they buy it.
Yeah, manga and anime are differnt, that's why I mostly talked about LN's and VN's. With VN's in particular I get mad (not that I don't with LN's), translating them and making everything work isn't easy, and after all the effort publishers go to release the game, they just pirate it, and then complain of why they didn't translate the sequel.
I mentioned in my previous comment WN's, but when it comes to the ones without either a LN, nor manga. Do the fan translators ruin it? I mean, it's not like they already got officially published
-
@Kiritsuna said in How much do you think fan translations hurt the industry:
I mentioned in my previous comment WN's, but when it comes to the ones without either a LN, nor manga. Do the fan translators ruin it? I mean, it's not like they already got officially published
No, translating unpublished WNs won't affect the localization industry much because a commercial version doesn't exist anyway. It's still pretty scummy to take money for translating it, since it's copyrighted, but it isn't really a detriment to the localization industry.
The problem is related to what Terabyte said: people tend to translate WNs of popular works that do have official LNs, or manga, or anime, because, unfortunately, a huge batch of fan translators out there feel that they deserve to be paid for their unauthorized translations, and it's easy to gain visibility when people are familiar with a title or work from another medium.
-
to summarize:
YEARS AGO some (most?) fan translations were done by selfless enthusiasts, to evangelize okatu culture and content- their goal? help make LN/Anime/Manga more popular more mainstream and therefore more available to the general public
(I'd argue that they have succeeded, legitimate markets in multiple languages are now viable. Anime is simulcast in many large markets (sub and/or dub) Manga are often released at the same pace in English and Japanese, LNs are still a developing market, and JNC is a leader in this sphere)NOW: the signal of the selfless enthusiasts is washed out by the noise of leeches and crooks, whose activities are driven by greed or profit.
Where are the selfless enthusiasts now? They are still out there. There are a few 'responsible' fan translation sites, still translators that restrict their efforts to works in the public domain, or in creative commons (like fan fiction), or get permission from the author to translate their WN, or cease/delete when asked by copyright holder---these folks are few and far between.
How is a consumer to know? They are likely the actions of pirates/parasites/crooks if:
- translation of something popular in another form (i.e. WN of a popular Anime)
- they want payment for works they have not licensed (Patreon or otherwise)
- site has a bunch of banner ads and/or malware
don't support pirates
-
@Terabyte If the fan translators just start fan translating AFTER we start releasing something, 9 times out of 10 they will just give up because they won't be able to beat us in speed and/or quality. If profit is their motive, it's frankly, easier to just rip our official translation off our site and repost it. But if their motive is to do a "better job" they'll quickly realize they can't, or that to do so will require such a large time commitment that it's not worth it to them.
So I'm not particular concerned about this as a new "trend".
-
Me, i got into all of this through fan translation. But i'm rather nitpicky on quality. So i still prefer official release. But also, it is fact that fan translation is often good quality and way, waaaaaaaay ahead of the official ones. Take Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei as an example. My favorite light novel by far. You have a pretty decent English fan translation up to volume 19. Close to what? 30 volumes out in Japan so far? The Yen press release of the translation? Maybe, MAYBE 2 volumes a year. 3 if you are extremely lucky. Volume 16 out next year. So they won't catch up to said fan translation in maybe another 2 years. And the first volume was released like 4 years ago. So it will have taken them 6 years, 6 YEARS to catch up to the fan translation. And that is after the fan translation pretty much stopped completely. Take the chinese webnovels. Wuxia and Xianxia that i am a fan of. They translate thousands of words in a day. 1,2 sometimes 3 chapters a day. Every day. Wuxiaworld.com ftw! Now i don't know anything about the difficuly of translating Japanese and Chinese, but i don't quite understand why it often takes Japanse LNs 1-2 years to release more then 3 or 4 translated volumes. Even if there are like 20+ volumes released in Japan. Maybe licensing issues? Though this site are pretty good on the speed part, wich i like. Quality and speed.
-
@Jon-Mitchell exactly, I started reading bookworm as a fan translation because I loved the anime so much, that In turn made me buy every single book out at this moment and already converted 2 friends into reading the series. And now I’m a member of J-Novel, none of which would’ve happened if I hadn’t tried the fan sub.
