Fan translators asking for payment for latest chapters for comics, webtoons, manhwa, manga...

There is a trend currently were fan translaters are paywalling the latest chapters, with poor translations. What are your thoughts on this? I don't mind asking for donations, but asking for money with mediocre translation is scammy.

Examples: https://asuracomic.net/ https://madarascans.com/ https://nightsup.net/ https://casacomic.com/

36 comments

That stops being a fan translation at that point. (It also opens the translator up to much bigger legal problems)
- Exactly, this opens up legal problems. This is the exact reason that Nintendo was able to go after Yuzu, because they started taking money from people. Donations are fine, but when you are profiting this opens up legal troubles. What's funny is that these fan translater have a DCMA reporting email like they are not profiting from copyrightable content.

I hate it..hate it..really hate it
Most of them are just machine translated work with little editorial. The only good thing about them is they came out faster than the official translation (which usually will be free anyway).
This is not a fan translation anymore, just plain opportunistic business venture.
- Sadly, this can be said about actual streaming services as well. There's some episodes on Crunchyroll on even big name titles like One Piece is very clear that they took the episode and threw it through some sort of subtitle auto generator because it won't line up with what they're saying. And I don't mean like they don't align or they're out of sync. That does happen as well. What I mean is like it will say Fred on the show, but it will say the word bread on the screen.
  I don't get it, because a service that is licensing the shows shouldn't need to use a service like that, because shouldn't the original source have that information? It makes me wonder if those big streaming services are still pirating the smaller things, like subtitles.
  
  I've talked to a few translators who work on official subs and my understanding is that for simulcast subs like One Piece, they end up having to ship subpar translations with no editing because the deadlines are so ridiculous. So if they mishear a word or make a typo, they usually don't have time to fix it.

I get wanting to charge, because it's a lot of work (I've done cleaning, redrawing, and typesetting for a scanlation group) but that's not how it works and is scummy. Also a legal liability.

I think charging money for pirated content is crossing the line. Once you do it for profit, you put a target on your back for the work's author to aim for.
- It's only crossing the line because they expect me to pay for it.
  I don't give 2 shits about what the 'owners' have to 'aim for.'

Not really a fan translation service if they're requiring payment.
- Nothing in any of those three words precludes payment (it's work after all) but it's still notoriously scummy. A donation jar would make far more sense.
  
  "Fan"
  That's the part that precludes payment. Fan works legally have to be free, that's what makes it not copyright infringement.
  
  I should clarify it depends on your definition of fan. When you're making a derivative work, there's two versions. There's fan which is The person is enthusiastic about the content and then there is the intellectual property variation of it, which is someone who is doing it for non-commercial reasons under fair use(or said countries equivalent). However, once you start requiring money for said process, it removes the protections the creator has shielding it and generally changes the definition to that version.
  Additionally, I agree a donation jar would be much better, but even then it's been shown that that doesn't resolve all liability because fan projects have been taken down for having a donation button even though the project itself is free, heck projects have been taken down for having advertisements on the projects website despite having nothing to do with said project

I donate but I will not subscribe

Rightsholders have to compete with pirates, but the inverse is true too.
Pirates typically win on price, but if they deliver a sub-par product, or make it more inconvenient to access, then it makes sense to go through official channels instead.
- Yeah, history has repeatedly proven that piracy is largely a convenience/cost calculation. Each individual person will have a different way that they measure convenience or cost, but that’s ultimately what it boils down to. And piracy’s biggest benefit is that the financial side of the “cost” equation is low.
  Maybe the cost has other factors that people consider, like time spent searching for decent sources, malware risk, potential legal issues, moral objections, etc… All of that gets lumped into the cost side of the equation, and weighted based on the individual’s unique situation. For someone like a 12 year old kid with no financial freedom, the “price” side of the cost calculation will be weighted very heavily.
  Meanwhile, the convenience has its own factors too. Download speed, ease of access, quality of the media being consumed, etc… All of these factors get weighted and lumped into the “convenience” side of the equation.
  It ultimately just boils down to “does the convenience outweigh the cost?” And if piracy becomes less convenient/more costly, (or legit sources become more convenient/less costly) then people will reconsider their decision.

If I wanted to get into the point system nonsense I would've wasted my money on official source.

I pirate because I'm broke, so, not gonna happen... 😄

To me it seems fine, especially if there's still a free version that's basically the same or it gets released after a delay. I don't think I'd pay for something like this myself, and maybe they're taking some legal risk, but if the money lets them spend time making media accessible, how is there a problem that outweighs the good?

Are they paying the original creators?

Not to defend scummy Business practices but as an avid reader of asura scans i gotta give them Credit for free to read and actually good translations (i haven’t bought a subscription). My experience was good and in my eyes while there is hiccups here and there they tend to put in the effort.
- They are not that bad compared to the others I listed, but there translation has been getting worse these days. Also they drop stuff on a whim.

Yeah pretty awful. If this stuff was around when I started reading manga in the mid 2000s who knows how many series I might've skipped out on. Even though most of these are just early access, I feel like it totally goes against one of the main purposes of fan translations, accessibility. My favorite part of translating manga is knowing I'm providing otherwise unknown series to others and helping people discover something new. Not everyone can just pick up Japanese (日本語上手！！) so helping people access their hobbies is really fulfilling and gating that behind a patron is shitty. I know the pain of being a poor kid whose parents wouldn't support their interests.

The majority of the proceeds better go to the original author of the chapter
- Doubt it, only a small part will go the originl author which is the price required to purchase the chapter which is a few coins on Naver equivalent to $0.10, while manga is equivalent to $1 or $2. Some will go to the translator, but judging by the horrible quality of the translation probably not much and the editers, and the rest will go the owners of the site.
- You got a source on that? Because somehow I doubt it.
  
  You probably missed the word "better" in there.