Going Global

Chapter 1 said official English translations of webtoons began in July 2014. This chapter follows what happened next: the launches in other countries, the different ways platforms handle translation, the services that closed or merged, and the argument about unofficial translation. The sources report both expansion and retreat, and the chapter keeps both in view.

The Platforms Abroad

Advances and Retreats

The same articles that record expansion also record withdrawal:

• Naver closed XOY in Japan in December 2018, two years after launch.
• Kakao's Piccoma launched a French service on 17 March 2021, and announced on 27 May 2024 that it would "cease all its operations" in Europe, with the service ending on 30 September 2024. The Piccoma article's stated reason is "a desire to downsize or shut down unprofitable overseas units".
• Kross Komics closed in 2023.
• The Kakao Webtoon article, as Chapter 3 noted, says that since October 2024 Kakao began shutting down webtoon services globally, and that on 22 September 2026 it announced it would shut down Tapas and merge Kakao Webtoon into KakaoPage.

Taken together, the articles show that "going global" was not a steady rise. Some services were closed within a few years, and an article's reason for a closure ("unprofitable") is the article's wording, with no company statement quoted.

Translation: Three Models

1. Translate in-house. "Lezhin Comics, Toomics, Manta, and WEBTOON translate their own titles rather than licensing them out."
2. License translated works. "Spottoon and Tappytoon offer translated licensed works from various publishers"; Delitoon "provides French translations of licensed works, mostly Korean titles".
3. Fan translation inside the platform. "WEBTOON offers the ability for fan translations to be offered in different languages." This is the only mention in the articles I read of fan translation as something a platform itself provides.

The Webtoon article also notes a fourth practice: reworking for print. Where it describes "printoonized comics (a portmanteau of 'print' and 'webtoon')", it says they are "completely restructured to achieve dynamic storytelling akin to the best action manga, moving away from the native vertical scrolling narration". It adds that, "thanks to printoonization, the comic Solo Leveling has sold over 900,000 copies of its first six volumes in France". That is a sales claim with no source, period or publisher named, and the causal "thanks to" is the article's.

The platform services also grew new ones. TopToon's TopToonPlus launched in July 2021 and "gained over 200,000 subscribers" in its first month; it was rebranded DayComics in 2023. In 2022, Kakao Entertainment "merged with Radish Media and the aforementioned Tapas to form a single entity", to serve "the US market". There has also been "a rise in the creation of original non-Asian webtoons", through sites that let anyone submit their own work. So webtoons are no longer only Korean works translated: the format has its own foreign-language creators.

Piracy and Unofficial Translation

Chapter 1 recorded that "prior to 2014, most webtoons were only available in English through unofficial fan translations", and Chapter 3 that the platform article says Naver did not join a 2012 crackdown on illegal sites that had copied its content for eight years. The Scanlation article defines scanlation as "the fan-made scanning, translation, and editing of comics from one language into another", done "as an amateur work performed by groups and... nearly always done without express permission from the copyright holder". It says the term "is mainly used for Japanese manga, although it also exists for other languages, such as Korean manhwa". On the Korean side it reports:

• In 2020, the artist Haesin Young "threatened legal action against a piracy website".
• In 2021, Lezhin "said that they are working with law firms to bring legal charges against manga piracy sites, after accusations from several manhwa authors, including manhwa artist YD, that scanlation causes authors to lose money and motivation".
• "The Korean government and Interpol initiated a three-year-long cooperative investigation in April" (the passage I read gives no year) aimed at people distributing pirated or illegally translated comics, cartoons and novels.

Reading a Claim About Going Global

1. Launch or still running? Check whether a service named in an article has since closed or merged.
2. Whose reason? "Unprofitable" and "popular" are the article's words.
3. Which country and which measure? Downloads, monthly users, subscribers and transaction volumes are different things.
4. Official or unofficial? A translation's status changes what a claim about readers means.
5. What is the other side? A one-sided account of a dispute is a gap.

Exercises

Next chapter: Creators and the Industry, which covers who makes webtoons, what the sources say about pay, contracts and working conditions, and how to read claims about "overnight success".