I've never bought the manga but it sounds really bad.

Good on ya for following it up! maybe now they'll improve the quality. ^_^

  

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Interesting.  

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I never <i>buy</i> my manga, but for my birthday my aunt heard I'm a manga freak and bought me some volumes of InuYasha. I was overjoyed, being able to have some off-the-pc Takahashi love, but I was holding it and I flipped it over to where the back was SUPPOSED to be and realized it was in NOVEL FORMAT!! *dies* And to do that, they flipped everything. With tears in my eyes, I literally sat on my bathroom counter, holding it up to the mirror to see how the panels were SUPPOSED to be expressed. I mean, do we really need to order raws off EBay? And english dub companies wonder why kids everywhere go for scanlations. Cause lots of dubbers do stupid stuff like that! Not to mention they translate almost EVERYTHING! I mean, have you never heard of a side-note explaining what it is so you can leave the Japanese word for it? And the way they put so much screentones! Takahashi almost never uses screentones, but the dubbers do stupid things like that… Gehh *dies again*

  

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Definately want to see Inuyasha in the correct format. It annoys me to see Sesshomaru's crescent backwards also part of the fun of reading manga is reading it backwards.  The mistakes in the profile were horrendous!  I've chalked many but not all to the book being outdated but now I'm not so sure.  

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In my country we don't have flipped manga and they have side notes too, but i agree that Viz should do a little better work. I HOPE they improve the quality.  

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It would be great if Viz improved it…though I already have 21 of their InuYasha volumes (and how I regret it!)  

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I collect the InuYasha manga, even though I find Viz to make a lot of careless mistakes. But the thing that always bothered me is the SLOOOOOW pace at which they release the books.

I own several other Viz series, Claymore, Bleach, and Fullmetal Alchemist to name a few. All of those manga books are produced just about bimonthly, to the point where we're getting really close to the Japanese releases and have to slow down.

But why not the same treatment with InuYasha? It's not a dead series and there still are eager fans willing to get Viz's product. *sigh*

  

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Yeah, there's definitely a problem with the release rate of the books, which is another reason people are ditching them for scanlations.  At their current release rate, it will take them five and a half years to catch up to where the manga is now.  True, they release the books at the same rate as the Japanese release, but the Japanese release has the excuse that they don't even have all the material ready until a month before publication, since the chapters are still being released and cover art and whatnot still needs to be done.

But, I mean, come on.  It takes me, what, 45 minutes to script out a chapter?  And then the scanlators can edit that text into the bubbles in about an hour.  So even with the most liberal schedule, even people who do stuff like this in their spare time could have a whole 10-chapter volume ready to print in less than a week.  What gives?

  

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I never picked up a Inuyasha Manga… mainly do to the fact that I know it's old… If only Viz had their releases like a week or two behind japan's and fixed their formatting they'd be awsome.  

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I have a problem accepting the accuracy of Viz's translations.  I turn to reading scanlations because the translators typically do their best to be as accurate as possible.  And when it’s not possible to be completely in keeping with what the original Japanese says, they explain why rather than fudge it into something English.

I have personally learned a number of tid bits about Japanese culture through reading scanlations.  The translator will tell us “This is a slang term derived from…,” rather than change it around to an American slang even when there is no equivalent.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d rather read a few translation notes than have the context of a scene changed.

If I have to look something up to see if it’s canon or what exactly happened in chapter ___, I *always* turn to a scanlation, even if I own the Viz text.  Although the chances of that are slim because I must admit that I don’t own many.  If they were translated more accurately, and if they weren’t riddled with errors, I might see them as a more sound investment.

But that might just be my preference.  Maybe the public at large doesn’t care about accuracy.  But I certainly appreciate the translators that take the time to be as consistent as possible.

  

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It'd also be good if they got some halfway decent people to translate the manga. I mean, there are several spots where characters are speaking out of place, words being put into speech bubbles that don't belong to them, and careless typos. One of my favorites was Naraku saying "And that's why I sent Kagome to kill Kagome." What the heck?

I very much agree with what Cyperian said, which is why my favorite manga production company is Del Rey. Not only do they leave the background sounds in tact, they also translate wonderfully and give excellent information at the end of each book, explaining what's what and the Japanese jokes/culture.

  

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On a similar topic, does anyone know of an Inuyasha Manga Profiles scanlation?  I looked through the thread here that deals with the book, and while people are disgusted by the number of errors in the Viz version (my favorite comment: do you think the people at Viz have actually read/seen IY?) there doesn't seem to be any links to an alternative.  Does Freelance Manga plan to do one?

  

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Personally, I'm by no means a puritan when it comes to my manga and anime. I really do enjoy the original Japanese productions and scanlations are about as good as I can get, living in a backwater Australian city. But I'm not about to write off the English versions either. From the point of Viz, I understand their choices in flipping the pictures (I don't agree with it though). As for the translations, well, Japanese translates into English pretty poorly, no matter how literal or liberal the translator. Alot of the context can be lost in a literal translation. Although I don't think Viz does a great job in translating the manga for those of us who actively seek out the scanlations. For those who enjoy the 'Americanised' version of InuYasha, I think they have done what they consider to be the best they can in adapting the cultural significance of the storyline for those who don't have a general knowledge of Japanese culture.

I think Viz has done so poorly on InuYasha because it's not just another one of those series whose storyline takes a back seat to the action. I don't know, I'm a bit torn to be honest. To make a profit Viz can't solely cater to the puritans. My friends and I love InuYasha, but I'm probably the only one who would notice that Sesshomaru's crescent is backwards. Yet, I also have almost the entire anime series on DVD and enjoy watching both the English and Japanese versions. It seems to me that everyone is too quick to write-off the English version. It seems kind of weeaboo to me. lol.

That's definitely not to say, though, that Viz needs a hefty kick where the sun doesn't shine. InuYasha has been going for years and they're so slow.

  

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