While lettering often goes unnoticed by the general manga-reading audience, translations for series—especially popular shonen manga—are heavily scrutinized. And with good reason: how else will one know a spiky-haired protagonist’s convictions, a joke’s punchline, or the mechanics of a complex power system if the words are as opaque as apple cider?
In step with io9’s previous feature speaking to manga letterers about the ins and outs of the profession, we spoke with professional translators Stephen Paul (One Piece, Akane-banashi, Vinland Saga), David Evelyn (Undead Unluck, Gokurakugai, City Hunter), and Casey Loe (Spy x Family, Kill Blue, Shiba Inu Rooms) about localizing some of manga’s best series as well as how they combat discourse over their translations.
Manga translators are freelancers, too
As the name denotes, a manga translator is in charge of localizing the language of a manga from its native tongue into a different one. In this case, translators change the Japanese text of weekly and monthly published manga series into English. By and large, manga translators work on the same schedule as letterers about a month in advance. While rates depend on the publisher, weekly series typically pay $100-$250 per chapter, while monthly series can range from $1,000-$1,700 as either a flat sum or a total for a by-the-page rate. Translators are also contract workers, meaning they are freelancers and must take on multiple projects at once to make ends meet if they venture to make it a full-time job or balance it with a secondary income.
“I’m full-time, but it’s not going to be that way for someone who’s only been doing it for two years,” Paul said. “You don’t get health benefits from these companies. It can work out, but it all depends on how much work you’re able to get.”
It takes a village to translate a manga
The job also comes with a breadth of fallacies about what their roles entail from readers, chief among them being that they are the sole person in charge of localizing a manga series.
“Most people don’t even know that there’s a translation team working on something—and that’s not even just for manga per se. Anything translated from Japanese to English and brought over—video games [and] anime—[fans] think it’s just like one shadowy person pulling the strings and making sure they don’t have a good time,” Evelyn said. “That’s one of the biggest misconceptions.”
While manga publishers like Viz Media make it a point to credit single translators and letterers in the margins of their panels—typically a couple of pages after crediting the manga author and illustrator—translators work similarly to journalists in that they have an editor, copy desk, and a glossary style guide for colloquialisms, dialects, whether or not someone has a verbal tic, and honorifics that they commit to memory or create in Word or Excel documents to maintain consistency in a given series.
“I also keep track of translations for sound effects across all my titles. Figuring what each sound effect represents in FX-heavy series and how I can possibly express that in English is far and away my the most annoying part of the job,” Loe said, adding that the nuances of character voice mostly live in his head.
While most translators are given just shy of a week to translate chapters, Loe, Paul, and Evelyn make it a point to finish their work within the day they receive it to make room for the long-term volume translations they’re working on in the interim.
“The Japanese manga sometimes comes in as little as a week before it goes live online, and in that time, it needs to be translated, edited, lettered, reviewed by multiple people, and who knows what else,” Loe said.
When a translators quit/need a vacation
In some instances, as with the Shonen Jump mystery series Cipher Academy, 20-year veteran translator Kumar Sivasubramanian had to drop the series at its 13th chapter because its many niche terminologies and complex puzzles proved impossible to translate into English.
In an interview with Kotaku in 2023, Sivasubramanian disclosed that he proposed two conditions to Viz Media for continuing as the series’ English translator: a “much higher” page rate and a “book” schedule—translating one volume/8-10 chapters/160-200 pages—every three to six months instead of a weekly schedule. However, Viz Media’s executives declined the offer and assigned the series to a new translator, Dan Luffey, who continued until its 58th chapter. This chapter would be the last, as the series was canceled on February 4, 2024.
“In Cipher Academy‘s case, that was a bum deal all around,” Evelyn said. “That is not a series meant for weekly translation.”
Cipher Academy is so infused with japanese wordplays that it simply broke the official translation, I’m in awe pic.twitter.com/qAo9ZHGPp9
— Rukasu (@RukasuMHA) February 12, 2023
When a translator drops a series, is sick, or goes on vacation, another translator fills in for their series (plural). To avoid working in the dark, editors will send translators the previous chapter to familiarize themselves with the series and have their translations match its tone. Given the rate at which manga are canceled as frequently as they’re announced, Evelyn completed the MMA-centric martial arts series Martial Master Asumi in tandem with filling in for translator Nova Skipper’s work on Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead while she was out. Funnily enough, Evelyn wound up finishing the series after it was concluded with its 32nd chapter.
The challenges of translating One Piece
As of the time of writing, One Piece, one of the most popular ongoing shonen manga, is sitting at a staggering 1,137 chapters. While many a fan will attest to the series being worth the time sink it would take to catch up for its attention to detail, calling back to breadcrumbs of information about characters and plot points hundreds of chapters before they become relevant, Paul admits it’s the hardest series he’s worked on. Not because of it being impossible to translate, but because of the “baggage that comes with it.”
“There’s so much context and difficulty of recognizing foreshadowing and trying to balance things and knowing the weight of the expectations that every chapter is going to be under,” Paul said. “There are so many people who are going to read it. There are so many people who are going to pick it apart and compare every single line to a scanlation or something like that.”
He continued: “There’s gonna be a ton of people who are really critical of it. I still have to feel out the pulse of what people are feeling about it. It can be a lot to balance.”
Paul refers to One Piece‘s style guide as a “Frankenstein document” due to how many people have touched the series over the years to keep track of proper names, techniques, character-specific laughs, and islands. This style guide is often shared to help develop other media, like One Piece‘s trading card game. Though even there, fans have noticed discrepancies with translations, most famously Yamato’s pronouns. In the manga, Yamato refers to himself as Kaido’s son and uses he/him pronouns, whereas in merchandising, Yamato uses she/her pronouns. This, in turn, causes a stir in the One Piece community whenever anyone voices their opinion on the matter on either side of the fence over Yamato being trans.
“It’s a really tricky situation for Yamato in particular because there’s a natural tension there where, within the story, Yamato is clearly like, ‘Hey, yeah, I’m a man,’ and you see Yamato in the bath with the guys and stuff like that,” Paul said.
While the dialogue within One Piece‘s story, which already includes queer characters, makes Yamato’s gender seem like a straightforward matter, the series at large has been inconsistent with the language surrounding it. For example, One Piece‘s aforementioned card game will refer to Yamato with she/her pronouns.
“There’s mixed messages, and it’s one of those things where, I think, within the story, it’s pretty clear, but as a translator, you never know for sure how things might change in the future or how they might shake out,” Paul said. “I have to be really careful about the language that I use.”
Paul notes that one of the challenges in translating Yamato’s gender into English is that Japanese allows for writing without gendering characters.
“Their version of he and she, which is explicitly gendering a person in the third person—they don’t have to use that in order to have a natural conversation,” Paul said. “It’s very easy for authors to write about characters who either have ambiguous genders or are hiding a surprise reveal or something like that without drawing attention to it. That’s definitely one of the ever-present difficulties in working on translating, especially for a serialized story where the whole thing isn’t written yet [and] there’s still stuff you might not know yet.”
Scanlations vs. official release discourse
While a majority of the series the trio of translators work on receive the official release of their chapters every week (typically on Sundays with the release of Weekly Shonen Jump), vast swaths of the manga readership have likely already read the chapters days in advance from fan scanlations. Scanlations are scans of original Japanese manga made online, translated by fans, and uploaded to online forum websites.
Manga scanlations exist in a morally grey area, similar to the ongoing discourse over video game emulation as a means of preservation vs. stealing. For obvious reasons, manga publishers have diligently shut down individuals distributing manga leaks through scanlation websites. These leaks are obtained by stealing manga magazines and illegally disseminating them on the internet, disrupting the manga industry’s ecosystem. While there’s room for argument that scanlations encourage series whose rights owners haven’t yet localized them—due to a lack of popularity or business incentive—to do so, scanlations are often used as a rallying point for manga readers to engage in online discourse over the official and scanlation version of a popular series.
“Especially when it comes to Shonen Jump stuff, one misconception I see a lot is when [readers] see the scanlation first, they think if there’s something different that it was something we saw it and we changed when that’s not the case,” Paul said. “We work before anyone sees the material. There no prior conception of the material before we get our hands on it.”
Not all feedback that finds its way online is world-ending, and translators like Loe, Evelyn, and Paul will often note good faith criticism as ways they could’ve approached translating aspects of a chapter for future reference.
“Spy x Family has a huge readership, so when I make an error, or something doesn’t land right, I always hear about it on Reddit. That’s never fun, but it’s important to learn from the mistake and, if it’s serious enough, to ask the publisher to get it fixed in future releases,” Loe said. “I do get a lot of positive feedback as well, especially when it comes to localizations of puns and such. And of course, it’s an amazing feeling when I come up with the perfect translation for a key piece of dialogue and see people repeating it like a catchphrase or making memes out of it.”
I know this was months ago, but the translation from Casey Loe in chapter 26 of Spy x Family still stays within my mind as one of the most unique translation moments I’ve seen, and I keep coming back to it because of how much I love it. https://t.co/aG6S6recu6 pic.twitter.com/P8OZaUYw1M
— Fletch (@HeroFletch) November 28, 2020
Online harassment is not atypical for translators
The rise of harassment explicitly directed at Shonen Jump simulpub (an ongoing manga series translated into English at the same time as its Japanese release) translators is a recent development. While most of the negative feedback translators receive stems from insinuating a character is not as strong as another—a hot-button topic in both the anime and manga community—some readers step over the line of criticism and message translators directly to air out their grievances on their social media. If not for power scaling purposes, Paul says the reason behind the discourse usually stems from a topic that can be considered political in translation that “set some group of folks off.”
“It definitely happens more with combat and big [shonen] series,” Paul said. “I work on Akane-banashi, which is rakugo, so it’s about the arts. It’s a fairly successful series. People who are into it really love it, but the week-to-week experience could not be more different from One Piece because there are no leaks for Akane. There are no scanlations. It just comes out on Sunday when all the other chapters do, and that’s the version everybody reads. There’s no arguing over stuff.”
He continued: “It’s a different type of series, so it doesn’t necessarily engender that kind of argument. I would say passion, but passion can cross the line. [Argument] is definitely more prevalent for big battle series, for sure.”
With publishers now crediting translators and letterers, there is a heightened sense of awareness from readers to identify them as the sole entity responsible for aspects of localization that audiences may fancy or detest.
“It’s very unfair. Some translators want to interact with the community and show trivia and language choices and it will immediately get shit on by the majority of people just because they think it’s a dishonest ploy by the translator,” Evelyn said.
In the past, translators like Jujutsu Kaisen‘s John Werry and My Hero Academia‘s Caleb Cook were routinely harassed online by fans, leading them to shut down their social media accounts.
“[Cook] used to talk about all of his choices on Twitter for every chapter, and then people had disagreements about stuff, and they would bother him. Eventually, he just got sick of it, locked his account, and moved on,” Paul said.
Until Jujutsu Kaisen‘s manga concluded in 2024, it became common for manga readers to dogpile on Werry for translation choices that deviated from scanlations. When Yuji Itadori’s official English voice actor, Adam McArthur, posted a tweet seemingly joining in on the ongoing criticism toward the series finale, most fans felt emboldened in their ongoing harassment of Werry. Others, on the other hand, felt his tweet was blatantly unprofessional, especially given the ongoing issues that English dub actors face whenever discourse over their line delivery versus the Japanese dub comes into question.
“It broke my heart because [McArthur] didn’t have to do that,” Evelyn said. “What are you gonna gain from that aside from a few thousand likes on Elon Musk’s masturbation platform? I don’t understand dogpiling on someone to make yourself look better for decisions [Werry] might not have been responsible for. We’re only a single person. We can only do so much.”
Whenever a translator faces online harassment, publishers rarely take a stance against it because there are no protocols other than recommending translators lay low online, not rock the boat, and safeguard their social media.
“With my publisher, specifically Viz Media, they don’t give you much in the way of direction. Just run your social media account how you want, but don’t do anything that defames or draws bad press,” Evelyn said. “Don’t be a dumbass essentially is the rule of thumb.”
We are making an official statement in regards to recent reports of harassment and bullying toward Seven Seas employees and contractors. We do not condone nor will we tolerate this behavior. If you have comments or concerns, please contact us at [email protected] pic.twitter.com/x5tvb6OjQW
— Seven Seas Entertainment (@gomanga) October 24, 2024
According to Evelyn, other publishers, such as Seven Seas, have incorporated into their rules and style guide for translators not to interact with manga artists or fans online due to harassment campaigns that employees have experienced in the past.
Manga translators and letterers have the same problems
When I spoke with manga letterers, they noted that the manga industry faces many challenges, making pursuing a full-time job out of the career path untenable. Key among them are untimely invoice payments, a lack of open calls for new workers, scarcity of open lines of communication with contractors, and negotiating wages to match living costs.
“Making a living working strictly in manga is a challenge that’s only getting harder. Even if you’re satisfied with your pay rate multiplied by the number of chapters you can realistically translate in a week, scheduling challenges pose a huge obstacle. First off, you can’t just sign up for all the manga you want—it takes years of developing relationships with multiple editors and publishers to get on their lists to be offered new projects,” Loe said. “And since most new projects are simulpubs, you can’t just sign up for 10 of those because they might all come in at the same time (typically 4:59 pm on a Friday), leaving you with 48 hours to do a week’s worth of work.”
He continued: “With flexible-deadline manga projects growing more rare, it may be necessary to branch out into fields like light novel, game, or literary translation to fill your workday. Manga makes for a fun side gig, though!”
According to Evelyn, most freelancers who attempt to make a full-time job out of translating take on up to five series at a time to accrue enough income to make ends meet, because only working on two series would not be feasible. Despite being perceived as a fun job on the surface, Evelyn cautioned manga readers to refrain from shaming translators for raising wage issues.
“Even if [translators] are passionate about what they’re working on, they can’t do it for free,” Evelyn said. “We gotta eat. There’s no ifs, and, or buts about that.”
AI is not a solution
Similarly to the letterers we spoke to, Paul, Evelyn, and Loe do not believe that publishers or the newly released AI-generated manga reading app Novelous are sustainable solutions for accelerating a series’ release. They think this practice produces subpar output that readers notice and abhor, but it also results in the same amount of work for translators while they are paid less to copy-edit.
“Translation is way more complicated than ‘source language A into target language B.’ I don’t feel like AI is threatening anyone’s jobs right now because it’s so useless at what it’s doing,” Evelyn said. “I’m not of the mind where AI can totally replace a translator because whatever suit on top said, ‘Hey, I can make a lot of money. I make 5,000 volumes of manga a year, and I don’t pay anybody for it.’”
“Even once AI gets consistently good at mechanical translation, it won’t be able to create unique and consistent voices for each character, come up with equally entertaining versions of puns and references, smooth over uniquely Japanese concepts that would be confusing to international audiences, etc. etc.,” he said. “The AI companies say they’ll use human editors to review and fix those issues, but doing so requires someone who can understand all the nuances of each line in the original Japanese and rewrite them appropriately in English—which is what translators already do. Except now they’re calling that job ‘reviewing AI output,’ and they expect us to do it for pennies on the dollar.”
He continued. “Also, these AI initiatives are not about lost gems in IP libraries that desperately deserve an English release. There is a ton of localized content out there. If the big localization houses miss some gem, fan translation communities will pick it up. It’s not even in the publishers’ own interests to drown out their current slate of series with crappy localizations of D-tier manga published decades ago. This is about developing technology that will allow them to save money on future translation by cutting out human employees.”
While many of the solutions translators suggested echo Paul, Loe, and Evelyn’s sentiments, Loe went a step further to suggest a way that Japanese publishers can make the job easier for everyone.
“One simple change the Japanese side of the manga industry could implement that would make everyone’s life easier is to simply roll back the schedule so manga creators are submitting their work two or three weeks before it gets published,” Loe said. “That would allow everyone on the localization line to schedule their work efficiently and do a better job with it.”
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