Scanlation (also scanslation) is the fan-made scanning, translation, and editing of comics from one language into another. Scanlation is done as an amateur work performed by groups and is nearly always done without express permission from the copyright holder. The word "scanlation" is a portmanteau of the words scan and translation. The term is mainly used for Japanese manga, although it also exists for other languages, such as Korean manhwa and Chinese manhua. Scanlations may be viewed at websites or as sets of image files downloaded via the Internet.
History
Frederik Schodt describes having "dreamed of [manga translation] as far back as 1970 or 1971". Subsequently, Schodt, Jared Cook, Shinji Sakamoto, and Midori Ueda formed a group named Dadakai. Schodt referred to Dadakai as "really the beginning of manga translation", however described these efforts as "way too early" because they could not get anything published. One of the manga Dadakai licensed was Osamu Tezuka's manga titled Phoenix, and the translation was later published by Viz Media from 2002 to 2008. The Amateur Press Association (APA) was the first formally organized form of manga scanlation. Their major period of activity occurred during the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Scanlation groups began forming in Europe before the United States, translating into their respective languages, the largest of which was the French.
Parallel to the increasing growth of the Internet in the late 1990s, people increasingly began to translate manga scripts, soon after which groups began editing those translated scripts onto manga scans. Initially scanlations were distributed using mail, CDs, and emails within anime clubs. By 1998, many free hosting services such as GeoCities and Angelfire hosted scanlations, and eventually scanlators congregated to form an IRC channel named #mangascans. In 2000, organized scanlation groups began to emerge. The majority of scanlation groups seemed to uphold an unspoken agreement between them and manga publishers; that when a series is officially licensed, scanlators are expected to police themselves. For instance, when Viz licensed three of the most popular series that Toriyama's World was scanlating, the website took their scanlations offline.
Process
Scanlation is usually done by a group of fans who collaborate through the internet. Many scanlators actively communicate with each other, even with those of other groups, some even belonging to several groups at once; others choose to avoid communication completely. One former scanlator, by the pseudonym Stephen, noted that scanlators often fall into three types of cliques: those who belong to prestigious 'old guard' groups that have been active for several years, to newer groups that established themselves through hard work, or to fringe groups that attempt to undercut other groups attempting to best them via larger download count. Much stigma exists between the old and new. Stephen stated that Old Guard consider newer groups as "trend- or fame-whores" and thus choose to work on series that have more cultural or artistic significance whereas newer groups consider the Old Guard bitter losers who are no longer popular and tend to work on the more popular titles. Many groups have their own webpage as well as an IRC channel or a Discord server. These platforms are an important part of the community aspect, as they allow for real-time interaction between the group staff and the target audience as well as allowing the groups to recruit new staff.
thumb|Part of scanlation involves cleaning, including the removal of text, among other processing.
Much like their earlier predecessors, the anime fansub community, scanlators tend to organize into groups and divide the labor amongst themselves. The first step in scanlation is to obtain the "raws" or the original content in print form, then to scan and send the images to the translator and the cleaner. The translator reads original text from the raws and translates into the desired language of release, then sends the translated text to a proof-reader to check for accuracy. The cleaner removes the original text, corrects blemishes that arose from scanning, adjusts brightness and contrast levels so that the finished product looks like officially published volumes, etc. Finally the translated, typeset manga is sent to the scanlation group's quality controller who copyedits the final product before releasing it to the websites that it will be viewed or downloaded from.
Motivations and ethics
While early official translations of manga focused on localizing the manga to an Anglophone culture, scanlations retained the cultural differences, for example, leaving in forms of address, romanizing sound effects and onomatopoeia instead of translating them, and providing the manga unflipped. This minimalist approach to translation has been referred to as "enculturation". Sound effects can also be left untranslated in scanlations, creating an evocative Japanese atmosphere. The reader can often infer the meaning of the sound effects from the context or lettering choices.
Fans are often quite unhappy with the translation industry for various reasons. Patrick Macias, a columnist for The Japan Times Weekly described fans "addicted to page-turning narratives" as impatient with the "agonizingly" slow pace at which official translations are released. Douglass, Huber and Manovich say that enthusiasm by fans about a particular series, coupled with delays in official translations led to the formation of scanlation groups. Scanlators say that they scanlate to promote the series or the author in their own language, but Hope Donovan suggests that the scanlator's goal is more along the lines of "self-promotion", and argues that it is prestigious for a scanlator to have many fans.
As many titles do not get licensed in most countries, or licensed in any foreign country, scanlation groups allow a much wider audience access to the content. The owner of the now defunct manga-hosting site Ignition-One, Johnathan, stated that "The entire reason I joined the scanlations community is to promote manga that I was interested in and, coincidentally, that no one else would translate." Andrea Wood has suggested that teenage yaoi fans seek out more explicit titles using scanlations.
The quality of commercial offerings is a common complaint.
According to a 2009 study conducted by Lee Hye-Kyung of the University of London with Japanese manga publishers, those publishers generally stated that they considered scanlation "an overseas phenomenon", and no "coordinated action" had taken place against scanlation. Lee stated that a possible explanation for some of the lack of legal action is that scanlation groups always make sure to buy an original copy of the work and generally stop scanlating should the work become licensed.
Historically, copyright holders have not requested scanlators to stop distribution before a work is licensed in the translated language. Thus, scanlators usually feel it is relatively 'safe' to scanlate series which have not been commercially released in their country. Steve Kleckner, a former VP of sales for Tokyopop, stated that "Frankly, I find it kind of flattering, not threatening... To be honest, I believe that if the music industry had used downloading and file sharing properly, it would have increased their business, not eaten into it."
Due to manga's popularity steadily increasing in the overseas market, copyright holders felt that scanlators were intruding on their sales and in 2010, a group of 36 Japanese publishers and a number of US publishers banded together to form the Manga Multi-national Anti-Piracy Coalition to "combat" illegal scanlations, especially mentioning scanlation aggregator websites. They have threatened to take legal action against at least thirty, unnamed websites. The coalition has achieved some degree of success. The scanlation aggregator site OneManga, ranked 935 in the entire internet in May 2010 according to a Google listing and top 300 in the United States, announced its closure in July 2010 due to their respect towards the displeasure expressed by the publishers, while OneManga officially shut down its online reader in August 2010.
Some scanlations leak before the manga is even published in the Japanese weekly magazines. As of April 2014, the Japanese government was looking into amending copyright law to more effectively target translated scans. A 2014 estimate was that lost revenue from scanlations amounted to "560 billion yen per year in only four major cities in China".
In 2020, a Haesin Young, a manhwa artist, threatened legal action against a piracy website asking users to stop illegally uploading the manhwa. In 2021, Lezhin said that they are working with law firms to bring legal charges against manga piracy sites, after accusations from several manhwa authors, including manhwa artist YD, that scanlation causes authors to lose money and motivation. Moreover, the Korean government and Interpol initiated a three-year-long cooperative investigation in April, aiming to arrest individuals engaging in illegal distribution of pirated and illegally translated comics, cartoons and novels.
Reception
Patrick Macias wrote for The Japan Times that there seems to be an unspoken agreement between scanlators and publishers; once a series obtains an English-language license, English-language scanlators are expected to police themselves.
Jason Thompson, a freelance editor with deep involvement in the manga industry, stated that although manga companies never mention them, they have placed paying increasing amounts of attention towards scanlations as a means of gauging a title's popularity and the presence of a fanbase. Steve Kleckner, former VP of sales for Tokyopop, stated that "hey, if you get 2,000 fans saying they want a book you've never heard of, well, you gotta go out and get it."
Johanna Draper Carlson says that some readers of scanlations do not wish to spend money, or that they have limited mobility or funds, or that they are choosy about which series they wish to follow. Carlson feels that the readers of scanlations "do not care" that scanlations are illegal. Forbes describes the cost of keeping up with new manga as "astronomical", stating that "fans expecting to read any manga they want for free isn't reasonable, but neither is it reasonable to expect your audience to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to stay up to date with content that their Japanese kindred spirits can get for a quarter the cost."