I believe that one of the reasons why manga became so popular in the U.S. is due to the widespread availability of free translated scanlations on the web. AnimeBlog has a post about how digital versions of comics are becoming a huge part of the industry, and publishers, such as Viz, are beginning to make digital versions of their comics available for formats like the iPad.
The reason for conversion to digital formats is because the drop of manga sales according to this article written in October 7, 2010,
where manga sales “declined 9% in the first half of 2010, with an estimated 20% overall drop in 2010, making it likely that this will be the third bad year for manga sales in a row. If current trends continue, manga will drop 50% over three years.” However, digital comics are expanding “from a $500,000 market in 2009 to an estimated $6 to 8 million dollars in 2010, a more than ten-fold increase.”
However, in conversions to digital formats, the manga industry will be competing against online manga scanlating groups. These groups are organized with translators, typesetters, and cleaners, all with the purpose of speeding up the process of releasing manga.
When manga was first published by American companies, the releases were painfully slow, where popular manga books were released one volume every month. However, these manga titles already had over 100 chapters released in Japan, with 1 new chapter released every week. One manga volume contained about 6 chapters. The American translations of manga were far behind the releases in Japan. For manga fans, waiting for the American release of manga was a terrible ordeal, as manga storylines were continuous, and every chapter usually left the reader at a cliffhanger.
To solve this problem, scanlating groups began to form, where people who were fluent in Japanese (or Chinese or Korean and whatever language the manga was already released in) began to translate the manga, scan the manga into a digital format, type the translations in the speech bubbles, and post the manga online.
Programs were also created in order to read the picture files efficiently, since the pages had to be read in sequential order. One popular program was CDisplay.
The scanlating groups did a good job of putting out manga. As more and more groups formed, the releases became faster and in better quality.
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| Pretty clear, but could be cleaned better. |
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| To really clean and clear. |
Popular manga (usually from Shonen Jump), would be put out every week after the chapter was released in Japan (because Shonen Jump comes out once a week in Japan, and there is one chapter from each manga in one issue of Shonen Jump).
Some publishers have noticed the talent in the scanlating groups. Digital Manga Guild is a group of publishers that is willing to pay online translators, typesetters, and editors for their work in producing manga. This work is also legal, as publishers agree to allow their manga be translated in this format. However, most of the manga in this guild are not mainstream. This may become an issue, as scanlating groups desire to translate manga they want to read and share. That is the reason for their existence in the first place.
If publishers release digital formats of manga, will the fans buy it? Personally, as an avid fan of One Piece, I love buying One Piece merchandise, and I wouldn’t mind buying the chapters as they come out in order to support the mangaka. However, I still enjoy the massive amounts of manga available to me for free. I can pick any manga up and try it, and if I don’t like it, I can just move on to another manga.
While I dont necessarily know if all scanlations are of the upmost quality, having the major titles from WSJ or Sunday come out in HQ and regular intervals would be a great thing for everyone.
ReplyDeleteThe only problem is that the published versions of the mangas by Vis or what ever often have terrible translations, and some of them even mess with the pages, reading left-right instead of right-left. These things really mess with the overall message of mangas and if publishers are gonna do that crap, I'd rather go through scanlators.
Scanlators have their own problems because some of them are terrible at cleaning, post them at very irregular intervals, terrible at translating, and sometimes just doesnt seem to want to work on scanlating some mangas. While some sites like MangaStream/Binktopia have quality scanlations that our published quite regularly, they only do so many mangas... And some mangas are only scanlated by one group, and if that particular group didnt do a good job, we're stuck with it.
While online manga will spread manga better to everyone around the world, I dont necessarily agree with having to pay for it. If I could buy all the volumes, I really would, but that would mean I order them from Japan (too expensive) or I wait for sometimes-mediocre english versions for $5+ a volume. WSJ is like 500yen w/ 20 ish titles. If they were to sell manga by the title, aka CH600 of One Piece, each one better be like a quarter or something... If it was something like that, I wouldnt mind paying and reading, but it would have to be of good quality.
Scanlations are very nice since groups that decide to translate them are very avid about that manga. They spend the time to translate the phrases into styles that fit that series and that character. They put effort into doing this because they like that series, and want others to enjoy it the same way they do. If these people are asked to translate that series, that would be great! The problem though, is if they have to translate something they don't like, which will diminish that quality that they are capable of doing. Large corporations have their own style of translating, but if they allow the group to have that freedom, then it may work out. If the company can hire those who enjoy translating that series, or would enjoy doing so, then we can expect the quality we want for that series. If only one group is translating everything, it might just turn into a very "americanized" way of the translation process.
ReplyDeleteI would look around at different translating groups and see how they translate the content. If one sounds more better, I would follow that group, even if it isn't as popular as the others. With many different groups out there, they have different ways of translating the same series. Hopefully if these hired groups are translating a series they aren't too compelled on translating, the quality will still be good.
I am certain that if this goes through, the organization will allow free downloads of the first few chapters of each series, to allow readers to get a feel of it and purchase the rest of the chapters if they enjoyed it. If I find that the way they translate it is nice and I like the series, I wouldn't mind paying something for it. They might have to alter how much older series would cost compared to the ones that are recent, like how many chapters are already out for One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, etc, if they charged the same amount per chapter as for the newer ones, no one will go back to buy all of the chapters, or even read all of it if they desire to read all of it.
@Yoda: Yoda, I can see where you're coming from when talking about the mass number of chapters that manga like One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach have. Buying the entire series would be very pricey, and the fact that American published manga is more expensive than Japanese published manga is also deterring. However, I know an avid fan of One Piece (Chris K.) who wants to one day buy the entire series, except he wants the Taiwanese translation. For me, I would also like to buy the entire series because I like to reread the series, and holding onto a book is a bit of a different experience than reading on the computer. I guess this is where Viz and Tokyopop get their customers from. But the only purchases I would make would be One Piece.
ReplyDelete@Abarai: I really like your idea of a company allowing free downloads of the first few chapters of a series. This would really help a customer decide if they want to invest in buying the manga. However, yeah, I don't know how companies hiring scanlating groups will work out. I didn't add this to my post, but the Digital Manga Guild is made up of mostly publishers for Boy's Love genre manga. This is far from the main audience of manga (which is the Shounen Jump group). However, the Guild does hope that in the future, they can release mainstream manga, as well. I agree that having so many scanlating groups is nice for the reader, the reader can choose to read the releases he/she thinks is best. For publishers to have the hope of regaining back the readers, they would just have to provide the best quality digital versions. They should aim for this, since they are competing against non-paid scanlating groups.