Lost in Scanlation

You will never make an automated process that is half as good at analyzing the artifacts of human nature as actual human beings are.

The big auto-translators like Babel Fish seemed to hold such promise at first, and it's certainly true that having them is better than not having anything. But they're just not very good--I remember years ago I tried to translate a paragraph into Spanish and Babel Fish took the word "ruler" as in "one who rules", and translated it into "regla", which means "ruler" as in "the thing you measure with." A person who speaks both languages can understand from the context which "ruler" I was talking about. An automated process cannot.

Fortunately you don't have to rely on Babel Fish or even on paid professionals if you want to consume art and culture from nations whose languages you do not speak. For maybe two years now I have been reading Japanese comics (manga) for free in online fan websites.

It is called Scanlation; where fans scan, translate, and post comics online so that fans who aren't as versatile in the language can enjoy them. In the area of manga it was often defended as being justified for those comics that weren't licensed in the United States; after all, it wasn't as though they were competing with paid products at that point. But it has moved well beyond that; comics that are licensed in America have, if anything, even more devoted scanlation communities precisely because they are more likely to get attention.

The lag between when a manga is first published in Japan and when the professionals translate it and republish it for an American release is simply too long for diehard fans to wait. When a very popular manga comes out in Japan, you will often see an English translation of it up on websites like Bleach Exile or One Manga the very next day.

Are there quality issues? Of course there are. These are amateur translators, doing it for the attention and for the fun of it. But it's good enough, and it's in a whole other league from anything like Babel Fish could get you.

Debates about filesharing and the music industry are talking about something different from what's going on here. If these fans were simply taking the professional translations, scanning them, and sharing them, then it would be the same. But they are actually taking content from another language and editing it to be more suitable for the purpose of sharing. From the perspective of the American reader who doesn't understand a word of Japanese, they are adding value to the product.

The speed at which these mangas get translated and appear online is really quite amazing.