Jan Mitsuko Cash

Screenshot of the VIZ manga app. At the top is artwork of a young woman and man standing in front of a Japanese-style house. Beneath the artwork is the text: “HIRAYASUMI Story and Art by Keith Shinzo Sometimes slowing down is the best way to move forward” Beneath that are a list of chapters starting from chapter 1

Vols 1-5 of Hirayasumi by Keigo Shinzo are available now in the VIZ app! It’s such a lovely story, and I wound up reading all 44 chapters in one sitting.

Translation by @jmitsu.bsky.social
Lettering by Elena Diaz

I'm not sure how things work in Japan--and even my US knowledge is very limited--but teaching might work differently
We're also still allowed to form organizations, but we just don't have protections like full-time employees, so there are some things we can't do

Dear manga publishers, we don’t want your AI translations VIZ Media quietly added an AI-translated manga to their app and hoped no one would notice. We did and want none of it.

VIZ Media quietly added an AI-translated manga to their app and hoped no one would notice. We did.

Manga deserves better than cheap, soulless automation. This is a betrayal of translators, fans, and the art form.

We don't want your AI translations!

We're freelancers. Legally, we cannot unionize

"Under U.S. antitrust laws, freelancers organizing to negotiate higher pay could be viewed as engaging in “price-fixing” since they’re considered individual businesses rather than employees of a single organization."
www.themuse.com/advice/can-f...

Large language models are incapable of having respect for an artist. And the people choosing to use them for the localization of art hold an active disdain for that art and the people they supposedly want to appreciate that art.

Lettering pays poorly. I work a full-time office job to support my passion of lettering manga. I don't dislike AI localization because I see it as a threat to my livelihood, I dislike it because it is profane. An essential aspect of the job is respecting the work of the artist and writer.

y'know, I've been a die-hard supporter of the Shonen Jump app, and lately the Viz app

but this is literally Step One to publishers strongarming licensors to save a couple bucks on translators and letterers

contact Viz... let 'em know

I actually care about the quality of the products I pay for

anyone who has a viz sub they pay for, I totally suggest leaving a comment about this www.viz.com/company-cont...

NFTs (Neat Font Tricks)...AI (Adobe Illustrator, obviously)...VC (voice chat, where we cry together)

I'm going to start a lettering consultancy agency and all it will say is "don't use comic sans, anime ace, serif fonts, or system fonts"

"also don't left justify text"

I'll personally donate $40 so you can buy a great Blambot font if you don't want to spend $130 on Wild Words!

Yup! They're one of the only ones. JNC also does raises based on amount of work translated for them. Other publishers seem to only do rate adjustments across the board for inflation, if they adjust them at all

Yen has been giving me yearly raises, pretty much, so good on them, but yeah, the dollar doesn't stretch as far, so it's really stagnant.

and don't get me started on how many thousands of dollars I've lost over the years because of the yen-dollar exchange rate... 😃

Anecdotally, letterers are usually paid close to translator rates for styles that require less retouch, then rates should go up from there based on the amount of work asked for
But it'd be better to ask professional letterers like @sara.pizza , since I don't work as a letterer

Yup. I've gotten a rate increase here and there but it's nowhere close to cover cost of living increases. So by stagnation, it really just means you're making less money. The $800 I was making on books in 2017 wouldn't go nearly as far today, and I live in relatively cheap North Carolina.

Yeah, I almost always ask first now before I'll do a test. I've still tested with places paying below market but usually they're new publishers just starting out, and sometimes they reconsider their rates with enough feedback from freelancers

Oof! I hope you can!! I think all the major print publishers pay $5 or above now, and a handful of places also raised rates to $6 a few years ago when we had that big inflation spike
There are a few places that pay sub-$1000/vol. but that's usually because they're calculating from a page rate

Also, consider what you'll do long term. It's hard to save up as a freelance translator unless you're very fortunate and lucky, but if factors outside anyone's control eliminate our jobs, we need to make sure there's cushion
Save a rainy day fund or open up a SEP IRA/solo 401k for retirement

To summarize:
-Don't take work below $5/page (manga) or $10/page (light novels) unless there's really good reason to
-Before seriously thinking about going full time freelance, make sure you can realistically translate one volume of manga (or about 200 pages) in a week

This is also why a lot of people who have tried full-time freelance will recommend keeping a part-time job or a day job at the start. If you have insurance covered and a base income, you have the flexibility to weather freelance famines and to see if you're able to make it a sustainable career

$1000/vol. of one manga per week is $52,000~/year before tax (and if you're in the US, without insurance)
Finding enough work to have one volume per week is an entirely different issue, but if you struggle to finish 200 pages per week, this is going to be a difficult career in the long term

Taking on more work also isn't something everyone can do, since that requires translating faster at larger volumes. At a certain point, speed becomes a factor that makes full-time freelance impossible for some people, so keep the math in mind:

It's also difficult to know what a company pays, and often the application process itself requires an unpaid test before rates are discussed, so applying to new companies could be disadvantageous in some cases

Focusing on higher-paying clients can also lead to problems. They're less likely to have continuous work, meaning you make more on an annual basis on $5/page manga with a client who books monthly than a $8/page client booking annually

What this means practically is that the only sure way to make more money with more experience is to either find clients that pay higher from the start or to take on more work with time
The higher-paying clients are finite, so work with them is limited and can't sustain everyone

This is fine for new translators but also means more experience doesn't always mean more pay
Experienced translators may even make less money over time for the same amount of work because of inflation

Notice that I call these retention raises. These are given as a translator works longer with a company, meaning experienced translators may be offered the same starting rate as brand-new translators and would need to work their way up to higher rates with time

Raises with experience are also rare. I know of two companies that give retention raises for translators who continue to work with them. Some publishers have given inflation raises, but these are also rare and are not annual, so freelancer pay has been mostly stagnant overall

Simulpubs (simultaneous publications) usually (and should be) paid at a higher rate because they often involve fast turnarounds or weekend work. They're in the $7-$9/page end for manga
Some translators have also managed to negotiate non-simulpub for rates above $10/page, but this is rare

For manga and light novels, rates are generally determined by the publishers, so negotiation is difficult
For translators, $5/page for manga and $10/page for light novels are the lower end of market rate, but rates vary from $1-$9/page or $1000-$1500/vol (manga) and $6-$15/page (LNs)

Been thinking about that too... I've been compiling a sfx database, but it's on my website, which will probably disappear whenever I retire/die/forget to renew hosting
I've got stuff up on a Notion page, but they're into AI now 🙃