TATM #3: Proofreading Is Not “Quality Control”: How Manga Language Professionals Became Exploited Data Workers, by Thalia Sutton
This article is by Thalia Sutton, a freelance editor and proofreader of manga, light novels, and webcomics. She is an invisible disability rights advocate, industry visionary, social critic, and studies the economics of women and queer people in the anime and manga sphere.
This article is the third in our ongoing Translators Against the Machine open call, where we call on fellow translators and other language professionals to tell us about their working lives. Our aim is to gather experiences and stories to paint a multifaceted, three-dimensional picture of what it’s really like to work in the language industry. If you’re interested in submitting, you can read more about the open call here.
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Last year, I started freelancing for a leading company that publishes Asian webcomics and web novels translated into English. I dearly love the team and the stories I work on, but I found the fact that the company referred to their editors and proofreaders as “quality control” (QC) deeply disturbing. My esteemed title of editor had been taken from me and replaced with one that was not only incorrect, but derogatory.
This sentiment was shared by nearly the entire editorial department, and turned out to be portentous when the company, just a few months into its web novel push, decided, with no advance warning, to remove proofreaders from half of its titles to save money before launch.
Proofing duties for these selected series were moved onto the editors’ plates. Ostensibly, it was because the editors on those series proved to be capable of proofing also. However, as a reward for my dual skill, I was then required to do a second pass on a title with no extra time under already tight weekly deadlines, and to cover formatting duties for online readability as well. I suddenly found myself doing the work of three people, and all for only a 25% pay bump.
This move indicates that a publisher is willing to sacrifice quality to make money, and sees money as the end goal, rather than creating good books. It is a sign that a company has been taken over by business school economics, and puts profit over people and over art.
It is especially confusing, however, in light of the fact that the manga market is making more money than it ever has in the United States. Throughout my decade-long career in the U.S. manga industry, I have seen per-book and per-page wages decrease by 75%, to the point where it is genuinely impossible to do this full-time as a freelancer. It is either physically impossible to do the amount of pages needed in a month to survive, or they must be done so fast that it is impossible to do a good job.
The rebranding of editorial staff in particular is not confined to my section of publishing alone; I recently saw the same “QC” term used to describe a managing editorial position in a job posting at Netflix. In my experience, the issue always begins when literature moves online and publishing companies begin to behave more like tech companies.
Art becomes content
This points to a wider issue of seeing art as a product. Books have existed in an uneasy truce with their fate as a saleable product for hundreds of years, but the relationship made sense – to continue publishing books, publishers needed to make money. However, as art of all kinds moves online, it is becoming either “digital media” or “creative content”, and content is made to be consumed. It is transactional, disposable and fleeting. This is reflected in how business schools and their MBA graduates, who the shareholders install in publishing companies as their CEOs, see their role – to create products, not art.
Creative industries typically resist “making products” by their very nature, because they are engaged in a spiritual endeavor first and a commercial endeavor second. Their goal is to challenge, illuminate, educate, and entertain their audience through exploration of the human condition and the status quo, two things which are often at odds with each other.
Once moved online, however, these saleable artworks and their industries move from operating in creative industries to tech. Unfortunately, the tech industry’s primary motive is profit (and the power and ego that comes with it), with little interest in the spiritual life of humans or the betterment of society as a whole. So, once tech rules begin to apply to creative industries, commercialization becomes their products’ only purpose. The financial bottom line becomes god and king – to the detriment of all involved, including the work itself.
Tech work deserves a tech salary
Since language workers increasingly find ourselves in the tech world, there needs to be a discussion about what our place in it should be. “Quality Control” by definition assumes there is a product with a standard design, and that each part has a standard it must adhere to. However – and here is the critical part – it also assumes the checker has no ownership over fixing the defects.
Nevertheless, language workers such as editors, proofreaders, and translators do make the fix themselves. They know the product quality standards inside and out and make the corrections to bring the product up to standard on their own, using their own expertise. Not only do they write the ticket, but they are the software engineer to whom the work ticket goes. And they should be paid appropriately for that.
Editors, likewise, code the finished product line by line, in the form of physically editing how each sentence is written, whether in translation or the original language. They consider not only how each word of the language flows to make people feel, comprehend, and see things in their mind, but how effectively and sensitively the many elements of the story come across. While coding essentially amounts to, “write words, make the computer do a thing”, editing amounts to “write words, make the audience feel a thing.”
To do so, one must engineer reality onto the page. A writer and their editor must, to the best of their ability, recall everything they’ve ever experienced or read related to the topic; understand the dynamics and motivations behind the topic both contemporarily and historically; and then distill it into something logical, comprehensible, ethical, and veracious that flows well. In other words, they need to understand the front end and the back end – as well as the history and morality behind every choice they are making. That is, in many ways, a much more complicated task than coding.
Furthermore, editors – like coders – are often proficient in several languages. While a software engineer’s languages are SQL, Python, Java, or HTML, an editor’s languages are Horror, Romance, Fantasy, Poetry, and so on.
Not everyone is versed in every language; you have to be trained in these languages through thousands of hours of exposure to writing, reading, deconstructing, editing, critiquing, and studying the reception and historical impact of books written in that language. Each editor, translator or proofreader is a specialist in a certain “genre language”, and must be respected, valued, and paid appropriately for their expertise. You cannot simply AI your way out of that.
Corporations benefit from this redefinition of proofreading and editing because it reclassifies a skilled worker as an unskilled one, but in the long term, it leads only to deteriorating standards and a lower-quality final product. Instead, writers, editors, proofreaders, and translators should be held equal and paid similarly to software engineers and coders. They are just as necessary to the final product and are equally skilled, if not more so.
A “pink collar” industry
Gender and disability also play a key role here. While tech is notoriously male-driven, language workers are mostly female, with workers of all genders experiencing above-average proportions of disability, commonly including conditions such as anxiety, depression, CPTSD, OCD, and autism. These demographics reveal a lot about the forces that sit behind the devaluation of language services.
Since I started in the manga industry in 2010, I have witnessed how a 75% reduction in wages correlated to a steady shift from a male to female workforce, and a similar shift of majority male consumers to majority female consumers of manga. My own industry, like many others, has become a pink collar profession, where women do most of the work and fill most of the jobs, but all (or most) of the highest-level positions are filled by men. And, as has been documented with other pink-collar professions, once women are a majority of the rank-and-file workforce, the profession becomes devalued by society and wages drop – even if the product or service becomes no less necessary or utilized.
Since the majority of producers and consumers of manga in the west are now female, disabled, or both, the fact that professional wages have steadily fallen over the last ten years for language professionals while profits have soared in the same companies makes one wonder if this is not just another case of capitalism exploiting vulnerable populations and driving their contributions to invisibility. If that is in fact the case, it is a great shame on the industry and must be rectified as soon as possible.
Art is the adult, tech is the child
Book and comic publishing has existed in the West for over 400 years, and their production is a well-oiled machine. As an industry, publishing has already matured; it does not need to be “disrupted”. To claim it does reveals a lack of knowledge of and respect for the industry, and we must carefully inspect the motives of those wishing to do so.
Art, created with our own hands since the cave paintings 50,000 years ago, is the adult; technology is the child. It seems to me that we are being pushed around by our children at this moment, and need to take back control. After all, it is the writer – and editor – who best understands why they are creating art, for whom they are creating it, and how much they should be compensated for their service toward pushing humanity forward as a whole.
Whether you identify as one of the groups mentioned in this article or not, I hope you will join with me in continuing to push back against the commodification and devaluation of language workers across the world. We are vital to a well-functioning society, our work is a sacred pursuit of artistic expression, and our expertise is real and should be compensated appropriately. Getting those in power to understand this is an achievable goal; we just have to find the right allies and arm ourselves with the right words.
Produced under a Peer Production License
– Written by Thalia Sutton
– Edited by Guerrilla Media Collective
– Lead image from Public Domain Review