

The Invisible Labor Economy Behind Pirated Japanese Comics - rockdiesel
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/meet-the-scanlators

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Torgo
Something that seems to have been overlooked in the article is that in
response to ubiquitous piracy and scanlations, Inuysha was released almost
simultaneously in English and Japanese. The scanlators decided, the
translation wasn't good enough so they released their own anyway. I get it,
but the moral argument changed from "I can't buy this in English if I wanted
to" to "your product was inferior" which in my opinion is far less defensible.

It also doesn't mention the translations that are done completely crowdsourced
on 4chan (usually of pornography.) Someone in Japan will post raw scans of
comics they got at Comiket; another anonymous person will offer translations
in-thread; another anonymous person will clean up the scans and do the
lettering with the new translation and post the updated pages. These
translations will often go through multiple iterations of people with varying
levels of proficiency in Japanese discussing and correcting the translations,
and then finally the finished translated and cleaned up pages will be uploaded
to a site somewhere ready for consumption. This is often done completely with
no one knowing the identity of anyone else in-thread.

It is an amazing example of the potential of ubiquitous Internet and low-
barrier web technology facilitating sharing culture resulting in a final
product that would be superior to any commercial offering, if such a product
was even offered for sale which it often is not. Even if from a legal (and
arguably moral) standpoint it's pretty indefensible it is an amazing thing to
watch.

