I’m coming to this post several years too late and took a while to form coherent opinions I was willing to post, but as someone who’s been on both sides of the debate before, I’m kinda conflicted…

Rise’s scenario reminds me of a scenario I had, where I was asked to have my fanfic translated into Vietnamese years ago. Now, I don’t know Vietnamese, despite having some potential use for that language (I have extended family in Vietnam), so I let the translator translate it because I was happy to have more people read what I produced. However, is that stuff really mine in the first place, considering the best practice I could do as a fanfic writer (and indeed, something I started doing once I started imitating creators whose works I liked) was go “these characters are not mine”? There’s no solid answer to this, for sure.

This leads me to a fork in my opinions:

On the one hand, I’ve consumed more than my fair share of manga with “support the original creator!” tacked on to it. Having been in this position myself and now doing the Sisyphean task of trying to go pro (but sabotaging myself with impostor syndrome), I get it’s good practice. Not asking for rights is like flying into a rage – people usually don’t think about the repercussions of their actions when they’re in the throes of passion and by the time they want to patch things up, it’s probably too late.

Sidebar: Translators sometimes specialise in certain topics (such as medical translations) and translating fan works can mean upskilling outside one’s specialisation or otherwise working outside one’s comfort zone in a way that’s enjoyable and low-risk (in terms of not having money on the line).

During my time as a fan translator (or at least, what I remember of it), I tried my best on the credits page to mention where you could read the original and mentioned my work was not perfect and ever-evolving. This is more than what most people do, so Rise would probably be happy with past me, but if you give people a translation, they’re not likely to understand the original in the first place and so never will go check it out. It’s a weird paradox which nonetheless boosts the popularity of the original work.

Besides, in personal experience, “giving credit to original creators” as a practice is only a very recent development. I know I only started crediting things after a fan artist asked me not to use their art without permission and this was at most, about a decade ago – who knows what happens in other spheres for this same kind of deal?

Also, the whole “not everything is for you” argument is a double-edged sword – it protects rights holders, sure, but as long as there is freedom of information, people will want to know things, especially if there’s reverse psychology at play (“I can’t have it in its original form, so I’ll find a way to learn about it anyway”). It’s only human nature. (Furthermore, the “translate every English fic that ever existed into Japanese” argument is flawed in that translators are taught to translate from their B language into their A language – or the one they’re less fluent in to the one they’re more fluent in – to ensure greater fluency and idiomacy (i.e. making sure expressions sound natural and correct to a native speaker). Since English is such a ubiquitous language due to the history of colonialism at large, people who have Japanese as their A language will be outnumbered by people who have it as their B language.)

On the other hand, as someone who wants to go pro, amateurs (and/or sometimes machines) who produce low-quality or outright laughable/unintelligible translations wear away at the integrity of the translation profession. This is why there are translation ethics, plus so many hoops to jump through to go pro in the first place and there’s criteria to maintain said certification once acquired…at least in my neck of the woods. (I can’t speak for other regions.)

On the other, other hand (third hand…?), English audiences for fan works are a ravenous lot which like to have quality translations done as quickly as possible. Not only does this put pressure on translators (who, like doujin creators, have other jobs and sometimes multiple translation projects at once), pressure to produce the best possible translation can degrade it through perfectionism and/or overthinking, plus possibly tight deadlines. From a translator’s perspective, the fans are nice if they’ll be as patient as it takes to produce a quality work (including proofreading!) and it can be a little irritating when someone else defers to a machine before they consult you – that’s why wanting to please is the best and the worst feeling at the same time.

There is always the counterargument that if you like something, you should learn how to translate it yourself, but people tend to not have the right circumstances that allow themselves to “fall into the cockpit” of translation (to use a mecha term) – financial circumstances, wanting to pursue other (more lucrative!) career paths and so on can deter them from taking it seriously. Language learning and/or maintenance is often (but not always!) most of the battle and some people only get to an intermediate stage at best before they even get off the bandwagon. (Believe me on that – I almost did it myself…)

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I’ve only started dealing with doujinshi in particular since the beginning of this year (2023), so I can’t speak about them at length, but with my experience with other types of fan work and piracy surely fills in the gaps. Getting the email of the rights holder and receiving a “no” is one thing, but as this post shows, the issue is a lot more complicated than that. (I didn’t even go into the bit about paying for doujinshi, which isn’t totally the same as exclaiming “paying for fan translations is unethical!” and probably a post in itself.)