I am not a manga artist. I am not a translator. I am not a lawyer. Heck, I don't even read all that much manga. But I have several friends that do, friends that have done translations for the benefit of fan communities, donating hours of their own time. These friends have posted their own opinions in blog entries, LiveJournals, and message boards, but I have never seen an actual, searchable webpage devoted to arguments against scanslations. As of the time of this writing, Googling for "scanslations" pulls up dozens of resources on how to obtain them, but no arguments against them. This is why I have created this web page.
"Scanslations", "scanlations", or "scan-trans" is the process of taking a Japanese manga, scanning it onto a PC, using Photoshop or another program to replace the Japanese text with English text, and distributing the resulting files over the Internet. It is the print equivalent of the "digisub", in that it is converting the original media to digital format, and adding a translation directly to the media.
It should be noted that almost all of the arguments below also apply to ROM translations -- although the time and effort that go into translating games is often far more, considering the sheer amount of text involved.
The primary argument against scanslations is that it promotes piracy of copyrighted material. Now, let's be honest here: there will always be people that will find ways to get things free by whatever means possible. For every hundred people that go to the theater to watch Matrix: Reloaded, there's a person that grabs a pirated DiVX of the file to watch at home. But scanslations actively encourage obtaining copies of artists' and writers' work on the Web at no cost. Those people that espouse being huge fans of the material are unwilling to pay fair dues to the folks that spent time creating it for them. There are no doubt a few who actually do go out and buy the manga to support the authors, while reading the scanslations, but without statistical data there's no way to determine exactly what percentage of scanslation readers this is.
In addition, scanslations may be less accurate due to speech bubble sizes. A stand-alone translation has whatever space is necessary to provide an accurate translation of a line; however, line sizes between Japanese and English can differ considerably. Just as lines often must be altered in order to dub an anime, lines may have to be shortened (or sometimes lengthened) to fit into spots in scan-trans where the original text was. To some readers, this doesn't matter, but others may prefer to read text that more closely matches the intention of the original material.
Another (albeit less quoted) argument is that stand-alone translations encourage readers to learn Japanese. Just as watching a subtitled anime you will start to pick up on common phrases, reading a manga along with a stand-alone translation will help you start to recognize common words. You may not know how to pronounce them right away, but that sort of visual recognition can help immensely if you choose to take a class in Japanese.
For the sake of playing devils' advocate, here are some common arguments for scanslations and rebuttals to each of them:
Perhaps you would like to read a particular manga, but can't find stand-alone translations for it? Below I've tried to put together a list of some sites that carry translations for you to use. Note that the majority of these sites prohibit using their translations for scanslation/scan-trans purposes. This list is accurate and deadlink-free as of the time of this writing. I take no responsibility for the accuracy, availability, or completeness of the following translations.
P.S. This is by no means intended to be a complete list! There are undoubtedly many, many translations that are not present here. However, this should give you a good starting point.
This simple page will not convince hardcore scanslation fans to change their ways. I wrote it to help persuade those who are "on the fence": those who are new to reading translations, or just curious about the subject. In my own opinion, scanslations are a middle finger, rather than a tip of the hat, to the people that work so hard to provide the material you love. Before you plunge in and start grabbing whatever free junk you can find, please consider this.
I don't want my address to be clogged with spam and flames just yet, thank you very much. Once I set up a dedicated mailbox, I'll post it here.
Disclaimer: These opinions are my own, and nobody else's. As noted above, I am not a manga artist, writer, or translator, nor am I a lawyer, copyright or otherwise. Although material has been researched thoroughly, factual errors may still exist. This essay carries no guarantees of any sort, implied or otherwise.