The Brief Life as a Scanlation Translator

January of 2014 I picked up a current copy of the manga magazine Young Ace.  I needed a visual aid in explaining to people how manga is distributed in Japan, as I was having that conversation a lot at that point and time.  If you are unaware, manga is distributed differently than comics are in America.  When a series is licensed by a publishing company it is added to one of that companies magazines which come out at regular intervals.  Many are on a weekly or monthly release schedule.  The magazines, for lack of a better name, are large bound publications that feature many different manga titles.  They sell for a few hundred yen, have lower quality paper and are generally viewed as semi-disposable by the general populace.  Manga titles that show signs of popularity and length receive a reprint in higher quality paper featuring a handful of chapters together; the tankoubon that everyone outside of Japan is familiar with, for collecting.

 

 (Young Ace magazine Issue 3, 2014.  Published by Kadokawa Shoten)

    In that issue there was a brand new manga titled Inugami-san to Sarutobi-kun wa Naka ga Warui or Inugami and Sarutobi are on Bad Terms (or 'have a Bad Relationship') I figured, cool, I got lucky and am able to get into a series on the ground floor.  So I did a rough mental translation of the first issue.  Then searched out a scanlation of it to see how my translation fared with what other, hopefully more experienced people, came up with.  To my surprise I wasn't too far off.  I noticed a little note from the group looking for translators.  I figured, what the hell, and emailed them saying I was interested.  I thought this would be a great way to force myself to study Japanese and get better at kanji.  Some time passed and maybe 2 months later someone got back to me.  I told them my intentions to use this as a way to drill the language more and to continue reading the manga.  I was given a sample manga to translate as an interview and a test of my abilities.  I worked on it, relying somewhat on my various dictionaries and with some help from a translation program to clear up sentence structure issues.  I apparently did well enough and was offered a pick of a title on their list, as Inu-Saru-Warui was already being worked on.

    I went through the series' to see what would interest me then picked one out of that list that had furigana (hiragana characters used to help adolescents read unfamiliar kanji).  I settled in on a shonen romance titled 50 Ways to Kiss Her.  A few days later I received an email with a zip file of the issues scanned pages.  Scanlation at its basic; each page cut out of the magazine and scanned.  I went straight to work with my tablet and books handy.  The issue was rather straightforward and easy to work through.  It was long though, over 40 pages, so it took me a few days to finish. 

    The first part was to establish a simple and easy to follow method to explain what was being translated on each page.  So with the help of a sample text file given to me I began to establish my codex.

(Translation text for 50 Ways to Kiss Her, Issue 6, 'Theory 6 Animal Planet')

    Right away I realized how difficult and troubling translating all of the onomatopoeia would be.  I searched the internet and found a great resource to help me translate the myriad sound effects I was coming across.  A book I own, claiming to be an onomatopoeia dictionary, was anything but helpful.

    Once I had a rough translation down I went through, edited any spelling errors and re-worded it to flow more naturally.  When I was satisfied with the translation I sent it off, my job done.  Not too long after wrapping up the issue of 50 Ways to Kiss Her I was assigned to Inu-Saru-Warui.  This series proved to be a bit more difficult than 50 Ways was for me to translate.  To help me out I read the back issues to make sure I was up to date with the story as I was starting with issue 4. 

    Inu-Saru-Warui is a shonen romance that deals with the main protagonist, Inugami Tsubaki and the challenge she faces in retaining her future control of the family empire.  The Inugami family is a long running and powerful conglomerate that has its fingers and influence in almost every aspect of Japan.  Her father had inherited control of the conglomerate from her grandfather but had died prematurely.  Due to Tsubaki's youth and inexperience, her grandfather came out of retirement to run things until she was deemed capable enough.  Her capability comes into question on her entrance to high school when a transfer student, Sarutobi Sanosuke, beats her as the top student in their grade. To make matters worse she discovers he is moving in to her house and is being made the heir apparent.  Sanosuke strikes a deal with her though.  If she can beat him at something he will return the conglomerate back to her.  Unfortunately Tsubaki naively underestimates his ability to be deceitful.  Each time she loses a challenge she is put through an embarrassing situation as her punishment.

    I found myself a little out of elements having to deal with complex kanji for business conglomerates and other related elements.  I'm OK at general conversation but when it starts getting technical I'm a fish out of water.  I had to look up a ton of kanji that leaked from my brain the minute I looked away from the page.  But generally the translation process went as smooth as I could expect.  It just took time, more time than anticipated.  Since my Japanese is mediocre I could only move through the issues slowly.  It was a monthly publication so the issues were 30+ pages worth of dialogue.  Thankfully it was nothing as dense as Bakuman, but it had more dialogue than something like Kimi no Iru Machi.  Each translation probably took me about 8 hours in total from start to finish.  Half of that going through and re-wording things, being picky about the way the dialog flowed as well as deciding how to translate the onomatopoeia.  I took it upon myself to do that as poorly translated anything is a major annoyance to me.  Then I would relax for a few weeks and await the next issue.

(Inugami-san to Sarutobi-kun wa Naka ga Warui, Issue 4, 'Tsubaki-sama is Amazing After All!')

    After 4 issues we parted ways wordlessly, the group and I.  I think I was taking too long and the translation work was probably shoddy at best!  Near the end I was asked to help pick up the slack for a sister group that was doing Isuca.  They were anticipating a surge in popularity following that titles anime announcement and wanted to make up for lost time.  I did one issue, rather horribly, being way out of my element having to deal with odd supernatural references and other things I was totally not used to.  They didn't ask me to translate more than that one issue!  So I think that poor showing and how long it took me to translate the last issue of Inu-Saru-Warui put an end to my participation.  Which was fine with me.  I was out of my element and it had ended up being more stressful than anticipated.   The issues would usually come to me at times where life was most hectic and it was hard to keep making the same, legitimate, excuses of life getting in the way.  With all of my personal responsibilities it wasn't a realistic thing for me to commit to.  If my Japanese was better than it is, it would probably have been less of an issue.  If I could have breezed through them instead of slowly mouthing everything out like the learning disabled 7 year old I am, it wouldn't have been much of an issue.  But I am content in the understanding that my Japanese abilities are special needs child at this point, with perhaps a stronger kanji repertoire but lacking in other areas.

     Regardless, it was an exexcellent learning experience and I did increase my kanji understanding.  It made me a master of navigating my tome like kanji dictionary.  Radicals, its the only way!  My skill at dialogue and prefixes/suffixes is still shitty.  I have a lot more understanding and respect for oddities in translation.  Instead of instantly jumping on the way something is translated versus how I would do it, I consider the flow and context involved.  Japanese is respectably different than English and can be tricky to directly translate.  I view the rampant use of sound effects with an entirely other level of respect with in the Japanese language and need to seriously understand the crazy system they use for them.  I don't see myself getting into scanlation translation any time.  Instead, seeing the benefit of the action, I am slowly working through 34-sei Mushoku-san for private use and understanding only.  Even though it lacks furigana...forcing me to reference the tome more often, its worth the effort.  With furigana I was able to read it out and pick up on what the kanji was through familiarity with the words, as it is intended to do.  But this series is intended for a mature and literate audience...not some snot nosed boy.

 (Inugami-san to Sarutobi-kun wa Naka ga Warui, Issue 5, 'The Princess x Punishment Game')

UPDATE: After this post was initially released to the general public I had some conversations with people about it and realized I left some key factors out.

     One thing that came up that I didn't think about discussing, believing it was general knowledge, was the idea of financial compensation for scanlation work.  In no way shape or form did I receive any financial compensation for the brief scanlation work I did.  It is generally assumed that scanlation and fansub groups adopt a policy of honorable thievery and do not seek financial gains for illegally translating and releasing the works they do.  Back in the early days of VHS fansub groups you would typically pay a fee to cover postage and material costs.  But with the advent of electronic transmission I am unaware of anyone who charges anything for their translation efforts.  Some groups who maintain websites do have varying degrees of advertising space on their sites.  Given the niche market reach I doubt that would account for anything beyond covering website hosting costs if even that.  Generally people do this for the passion, bragging rights and experience.  Scanlations and fansub’s are undeniably illegal.   They exist and operate in a legal gray area and it is best not to push the owners of the licenses any further by trying to turn a profit from illegally distributing licensed material, especially across international borders.

    The other thing that came up was the amount of effort put into scanlating manga.   There are a few steps involved in doing a scanlation.  The most important is acquiring the source material.  This can also be the hardest if you are attempting to release it as it comes out in Japan.  This requires you either being in Japan or having a reliable contact that is.  This means someone is buying the magazines as they come out, cutting the pages out and scanning them.  Some groups, amazingly, are able to get their hands on the actual files the publisher uses.  The quality between the raw files and the scanned printed pages are significantly noticeable.  Lately also, many publishers are releasing the manga online as well, so if you are able to access that release you can easily get clean copies of the files around publication time.  I know that some groups can get some pages directly given the availability of the translated manga even before the magazine hits the streets in Japan.  Kimi no Iru Machi, near the end of its run, was sometimes available 2 days prior to the magazines release...that is insane!  The only other option is to wait for the tankoubon to come out and then cut the pages out and scan them.  Going the tankoubon route does not allow a group to release the manga simultaneously with its magazine release in Japan.

    Once the scans are acquired they are sent to the people who will be translating it.  The translation is done and then it’s time to do some serious editing.  This part, I feel, is the most time consuming and pain staking and I don't have any experience in it.  The easiest part is erasing all of the text in the word bubbles.  Then you have to typeset all of the translated text to fit in them.  That alone can be a pretty daunting feat.  Usually there is more text than can be held in the speech bubbles.  Many times panels will have text and sound effects mixed in with the artwork of the panel its self.  This significantly increases the difficulty in doing a complete translation.  Many scanlation groups will elect to leave any background text alone and place the translations underneath the panels or on the bottom of the page.  Those that are really dedicated to their efforts will delicately (or not) edit out the original text and typeset the translations in its place.  Many times the space will be left white when the original text is over artwork.  In rare cases a group will redo the erased line working to the best of their ability to make it look like nothing changed.  That is some serious dedication to your work.

    Having never attempted that portion of the scanlation process I can only imagine what you have to go through in the initial process.  Until you do it a number of times you are playing around with formats that work.  At times the amount of space in a speech bubble may not be enough to fit the proper translation so you either have to parse the translation down or alter the text in other ways to make it fit, cramming it all in.  If you are one to partake in reading scanlations take these things into consideration when your favorite weekly manga is a day or two late before you start complaining.

  

(Nightmare scanlation scenario - '34-sei Mushoku-san' vol. 2, Ikeda Takashi)