7 ms·

A bit disappointed that this didn't cover the scan(s?)lation community that was the lifeline for anime and manga in the early 2000's before the categories becam

A bit disappointed that this didn't cover the scan(s?)lation community that was the lifeline for anime and manga in the early 2000's before the categories became mainstream. How manga was translated was by rabid enthusiasts who would learn Japanese and scan and translate manga for little to no compensation, or even at cost to themselves. In that sense, it felt similar to the warez scene of the same era. Since then, anime has gone from a weird niche genre to cosplay supplies being sold in Joann Fabrics. I am still not used to how mainstream it is, but as someone who benefited from their work, I would love to hear more about those early scanslators.

pohuing 3y ago
The scene is still pretty alive and I cry for every manga that gets an official English release. Because at least the digital offerings often look visually worse than the fan scanlations. But they're the rights holders, so there's no competition to avoid insane compression artifacts or stupid localisation errors.
- arijun 3y ago
  What does look visually worse mean? My (very limited) experience is the opposite: the quality of the translations and redraws were much higher in the official versions. And there’s way less “all according to keikaku”-type translations.
  - pohuing 3y ago
    I've found baked in aliasing artifacts of tiny dots to be a common issue. A good scan would give you a high enough resolution that would allow you to zoom in far enough that it disappears. Of course this is a bit of a double standard by me, there's a lot of lower quality fan scanlations, but I don't expect the same quality from a free fan service as from a commercial official one. E: Just one example: try reading the most recent Chainsawman chapter on the official app by Shueisha. There's very visible jpg compression artifacts around text and all straight lines have very visible blurring issues if you look at a panel in detail. I remember the fan scanlations by, for example Jamimi's Box to be significantly higher quality than that.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      Getting a higher quality from scans is not unexpected either, because it’s a fan service. So for HQ teams there’s often a love of the work involved, and more importantly there are no ROI calculations. If the redrawer wants to spend hours on SFX (then rightfully moan about it in the credits) they usually can.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        I was a translator for an anime fansubbing group, so I have (good!) stories to tell about the fansubbing and scanlation community. That's for another time though. For now, I'll just cut to the chase and copypasta something I wrote a couple years ago regarding translation quality between professional and amateur work:[1] Japanese has a very rich history and is also significantly more expressive than English is, so academic teaching of the language can only do so much. You really need to immerse yourself in Japanese literature/media and partake in just ordinary day-to-day conversations to simply begin to understand the depth of it all. Translation is also hardly an appealing job unless you find love in the art of translating itself, speaking as someone who has done translating as a hobby (both FGO and otherwise). Almost nobody knows or cares about the effort that goes into translations, most readers only care if it "sounds right" in English. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people who read the bad translation pointed out in the OP won't realize it's bad. It's very hard to keep yourself motivated when your readers don't and can't give a crap about your work. So combine a language that is very different from English with people who probably aren't all that motivated anyway, and most professional translations end up being shit. The work is thankless and giving more than the absolute minimum quite sincerely doesn't pay off because the readers don't know and can't care. Good translations require passion from the translators and the editors, passion that simply just isn't there outside of the hobbyists and enthusiasts who enjoy the art of translating rather than doing it for their paychecks. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone_flipping_out_over_osakabehimes/f5f895x/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...
        hparadiz 3y ago
        I grew up watching fansubs and reading scanlations. I still prefer them. As one simple example the word "nakama" is almost impossible to translate properly into English. It's like a combined "comrade, crew, squad, friend, family" type of concept that has no English equivalent. Scanlations will typically have explanations for certain things on the side which adds a lot of depth to many stories.
  - moonchild 3y ago
    Officially licensed translations generally promise some degree of consistency, but are often (though not always) mediocre. Scanlations are more variable (of late, one not infrequently sees machine translations...), but peak higher.
  - djtango 3y ago
    While I get why the exaggerated "all according to keikaku" is poor translation, I've always been a fan of things like translators notes and not trying to translate things like jutsu and rasengan (anyone remember spiral blast????) Maybe commercially it sells better to localise, but when you're consuming foreign media you're also sub/consciously discovering their culture. So having little notes about the little sneezing trope brings the world a bit closer one step at a time...
    - alexvoda 3y ago
      Toally agree. I vastly prefer to be imersed in the cultural context when enjoying a media artifact rather than have it adapted. Explain the joke first and next time I'll get simmilar jokes. Don't replace the joke with one you think I already know.
    - ecshafer 3y ago
      There's some anime and manga that you can't localize, you can just explain. Monogatari has so many cultural references and language jokes that its impossible to localize without losing everything that makes it what it is. Or something like Azumangha Daioh which has a character with many jokes built around their accent, you can't localize that.
      - gwern 3y ago
        As I recall, they localized Osaka with a Texas accent, which worked perfectly - the same drawling and also associated stereotypes about businessmen/greed/money/nouveau-riche/big-things.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      "Localization sells better" is downstream of having a properly translated work. Deliberately not translating "jutsu" or "rasengan" only works because Naruto is a show about ninjas... debatably. If we translated everything in Naruto then everyone would realize that it's actually a show about ramen.
      - 3y ago
  - rendaw 3y ago
    In Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou the images are dark to the point of making it hard to see things, in both the physical and digital editions. This isn't the case for the Japanese versions (including the new digital edition) or the fan versions.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    I disagree. Official translations are quite often worse. They try to localize far too much. The cultural peculiarities (non-western) are the kinds of things why many people prefer manga/anime over more western media. Removing them is silly and probably the reason the fan translation scene is and was popular. While an official translations usually means that you have no fan translation alternative for the work, but you can just go watch/read something else instead.
- Frotag 3y ago
  I suspect that even if an official release is available (with free samples) potential buyers tend to check out the scanlation first. Mostly since checking for updates on websites that aggregate fan scans are more convenient than checking 3ish publisher sites. But anyways, I'm playing devil's advocate but I'd imagine a sloppy scanlation of chapter 1 has very real consequences on interest in the later / better official release. By sloppy I mean distracting grammar mistakes, poor image quality, etc. I know I personally wouldn't give the official a chance if I mistakenly thought the plot / art was meh from the scanlation. And that's bad because it doesn't support the authors, who tend be super overworked.
xoa 3y ago
Agreed, as someone who did some scanlation back in the 00s and still follows the scene (which remains quite vibrant) that was a real disappointment. Fan scans lead the way on all the things they're discussing, with a lot of debates around various translation choices and work put into sound effects and redraws despite having no access to originals. I think it lead the way for commercial translators and showed there was a market and demand for getting close to the originals, and sense then has also been a source of effective market research in terms of what is popular. There are a number of wonderful series also only available to non-Japanese readers via fan scanlations. No sort of coverage of that was a surprise.
zdw 3y ago
Even older than that, even in the 90's there was a large community of folks who had an Amiga and genlock and would translate and distribute subtitled VHS tapes of somewhat esoteric shows like Marmalade Boy and Kodomo no Omocha that did not fit into the genres that were getting commercial releases at that time. Also, didn't mention the entire run of Mangajin[1], which was quite the resource for folks learning Japanese back in those days. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin)
- brazzy 3y ago
  Ahhh yes, the original fansubs. The good ones came with liner notes, explaining linguistinc and cultural nuances. And there was substantial debate in the fandom concerning the ethics. How much margin over the price of a blank tape was acceptable before it became a for-profit piracy operation? Should fansubs cease distribution when a show got an official release? Even if that release was dub-only or had a worse translation?
charlieyu1 3y ago
Not only scanlations are unpaid, they are often met with copyright lawsuits.
chickenimprint 3y ago
Sadly, the big french scantrad groups have shut down in recent years
sn9 3y ago
I still prefer scans when I can find them. Official translations often (1) censor a ton in both the text and the art to satisfy Western Puritanical sensibilities and (2) have drastically less cultural context than scans do --- scans often will have notes about references to myths/stories that manga are referencing or influenced by like creation myths or relevant stories/concepts from Buddhism or random bits of cultural stuff like why a character might sneeze randomly after being talked about. I've yet to read an official translation that's as good as scanlations, and the notes are often more creatively integrated into the scans in a way that are useful when encountered whenever possible. I still subscribe to the official translations out of some sense of moral obligation to send some money back to the creators, but scans are faster and higher quality often enough.
- NoRelToEmber 3y ago
  That's because official translations follow the rule of “Readers in English should be able to enjoy the story without thinking about it being a translation,” - an impossible standard. Think about what it requires - to cut out or replace any signs of the culture it came from, that would cause any friction with the target culture. To trick the reader into thinking the world is one big homogeneous mush, where works coming from the other side of the globe don't contain anything that would so much as confuse them. Nothing that would require a translator's note or explanation. It's not translation, it's butchery. It's making a sausage come out on one end, no matter what parts come in at the other.
  - sn9 3y ago
    Yeah I understand the constraints. I just wish there was an official version that was targeted for people like me instead of scanlators getting lawyered into submission and we end up with less.

pohuing 3y ago

The scene is still pretty alive and I cry for every manga that gets an official English release. Because at least the digital offerings often look visually worse than the fan scanlations. But they're the rights holders, so there's no competition to avoid insane compression artifacts or stupid localisation errors.

arijun 3y ago
What does look visually worse mean? My (very limited) experience is the opposite: the quality of the translations and redraws were much higher in the official versions. And there’s way less “all according to keikaku”-type translations.
- pohuing 3y ago
  I've found baked in aliasing artifacts of tiny dots to be a common issue. A good scan would give you a high enough resolution that would allow you to zoom in far enough that it disappears. Of course this is a bit of a double standard by me, there's a lot of lower quality fan scanlations, but I don't expect the same quality from a free fan service as from a commercial official one. E: Just one example: try reading the most recent Chainsawman chapter on the official app by Shueisha. There's very visible jpg compression artifacts around text and all straight lines have very visible blurring issues if you look at a panel in detail. I remember the fan scanlations by, for example Jamimi's Box to be significantly higher quality than that.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Getting a higher quality from scans is not unexpected either, because it’s a fan service. So for HQ teams there’s often a love of the work involved, and more importantly there are no ROI calculations. If the redrawer wants to spend hours on SFX (then rightfully moan about it in the credits) they usually can.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      I was a translator for an anime fansubbing group, so I have (good!) stories to tell about the fansubbing and scanlation community. That's for another time though. For now, I'll just cut to the chase and copypasta something I wrote a couple years ago regarding translation quality between professional and amateur work:[1] Japanese has a very rich history and is also significantly more expressive than English is, so academic teaching of the language can only do so much. You really need to immerse yourself in Japanese literature/media and partake in just ordinary day-to-day conversations to simply begin to understand the depth of it all. Translation is also hardly an appealing job unless you find love in the art of translating itself, speaking as someone who has done translating as a hobby (both FGO and otherwise). Almost nobody knows or cares about the effort that goes into translations, most readers only care if it "sounds right" in English. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people who read the bad translation pointed out in the OP won't realize it's bad. It's very hard to keep yourself motivated when your readers don't and can't give a crap about your work. So combine a language that is very different from English with people who probably aren't all that motivated anyway, and most professional translations end up being shit. The work is thankless and giving more than the absolute minimum quite sincerely doesn't pay off because the readers don't know and can't care. Good translations require passion from the translators and the editors, passion that simply just isn't there outside of the hobbyists and enthusiasts who enjoy the art of translating rather than doing it for their paychecks. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone_flipping_out_over_osakabehimes/f5f895x/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...
      - hparadiz 3y ago
        I grew up watching fansubs and reading scanlations. I still prefer them. As one simple example the word "nakama" is almost impossible to translate properly into English. It's like a combined "comrade, crew, squad, friend, family" type of concept that has no English equivalent. Scanlations will typically have explanations for certain things on the side which adds a lot of depth to many stories.
- moonchild 3y ago
  Officially licensed translations generally promise some degree of consistency, but are often (though not always) mediocre. Scanlations are more variable (of late, one not infrequently sees machine translations...), but peak higher.
- djtango 3y ago
  While I get why the exaggerated "all according to keikaku" is poor translation, I've always been a fan of things like translators notes and not trying to translate things like jutsu and rasengan (anyone remember spiral blast????) Maybe commercially it sells better to localise, but when you're consuming foreign media you're also sub/consciously discovering their culture. So having little notes about the little sneezing trope brings the world a bit closer one step at a time...
  - alexvoda 3y ago
    Toally agree. I vastly prefer to be imersed in the cultural context when enjoying a media artifact rather than have it adapted. Explain the joke first and next time I'll get simmilar jokes. Don't replace the joke with one you think I already know.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    There's some anime and manga that you can't localize, you can just explain. Monogatari has so many cultural references and language jokes that its impossible to localize without losing everything that makes it what it is. Or something like Azumangha Daioh which has a character with many jokes built around their accent, you can't localize that.
    - gwern 3y ago
      As I recall, they localized Osaka with a Texas accent, which worked perfectly - the same drawling and also associated stereotypes about businessmen/greed/money/nouveau-riche/big-things.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    "Localization sells better" is downstream of having a properly translated work. Deliberately not translating "jutsu" or "rasengan" only works because Naruto is a show about ninjas... debatably. If we translated everything in Naruto then everyone would realize that it's actually a show about ramen.
    - 3y ago
- rendaw 3y ago
  In Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou the images are dark to the point of making it hard to see things, in both the physical and digital editions. This isn't the case for the Japanese versions (including the new digital edition) or the fan versions.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  I disagree. Official translations are quite often worse. They try to localize far too much. The cultural peculiarities (non-western) are the kinds of things why many people prefer manga/anime over more western media. Removing them is silly and probably the reason the fan translation scene is and was popular. While an official translations usually means that you have no fan translation alternative for the work, but you can just go watch/read something else instead.
Frotag 3y ago
I suspect that even if an official release is available (with free samples) potential buyers tend to check out the scanlation first. Mostly since checking for updates on websites that aggregate fan scans are more convenient than checking 3ish publisher sites. But anyways, I'm playing devil's advocate but I'd imagine a sloppy scanlation of chapter 1 has very real consequences on interest in the later / better official release. By sloppy I mean distracting grammar mistakes, poor image quality, etc. I know I personally wouldn't give the official a chance if I mistakenly thought the plot / art was meh from the scanlation. And that's bad because it doesn't support the authors, who tend be super overworked.

xoa 3y ago

Agreed, as someone who did some scanlation back in the 00s and still follows the scene (which remains quite vibrant) that was a real disappointment. Fan scans lead the way on all the things they're discussing, with a lot of debates around various translation choices and work put into sound effects and redraws despite having no access to originals. I think it lead the way for commercial translators and showed there was a market and demand for getting close to the originals, and sense then has also been a source of effective market research in terms of what is popular. There are a number of wonderful series also only available to non-Japanese readers via fan scanlations. No sort of coverage of that was a surprise.

zdw 3y ago

Even older than that, even in the 90's there was a large community of folks who had an Amiga and genlock and would translate and distribute subtitled VHS tapes of somewhat esoteric shows like Marmalade Boy and Kodomo no Omocha that did not fit into the genres that were getting commercial releases at that time. Also, didn't mention the entire run of Mangajin[1], which was quite the resource for folks learning Japanese back in those days. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin)

brazzy 3y ago
Ahhh yes, the original fansubs. The good ones came with liner notes, explaining linguistinc and cultural nuances. And there was substantial debate in the fandom concerning the ethics. How much margin over the price of a blank tape was acceptable before it became a for-profit piracy operation? Should fansubs cease distribution when a show got an official release? Even if that release was dub-only or had a worse translation?

charlieyu1 3y ago

Not only scanlations are unpaid, they are often met with copyright lawsuits.

chickenimprint 3y ago

Sadly, the big french scantrad groups have shut down in recent years

sn9 3y ago

I still prefer scans when I can find them. Official translations often (1) censor a ton in both the text and the art to satisfy Western Puritanical sensibilities and (2) have drastically less cultural context than scans do --- scans often will have notes about references to myths/stories that manga are referencing or influenced by like creation myths or relevant stories/concepts from Buddhism or random bits of cultural stuff like why a character might sneeze randomly after being talked about. I've yet to read an official translation that's as good as scanlations, and the notes are often more creatively integrated into the scans in a way that are useful when encountered whenever possible. I still subscribe to the official translations out of some sense of moral obligation to send some money back to the creators, but scans are faster and higher quality often enough.

NoRelToEmber 3y ago
That's because official translations follow the rule of “Readers in English should be able to enjoy the story without thinking about it being a translation,” - an impossible standard. Think about what it requires - to cut out or replace any signs of the culture it came from, that would cause any friction with the target culture. To trick the reader into thinking the world is one big homogeneous mush, where works coming from the other side of the globe don't contain anything that would so much as confuse them. Nothing that would require a translator's note or explanation. It's not translation, it's butchery. It's making a sausage come out on one end, no matter what parts come in at the other.
- sn9 3y ago
  Yeah I understand the constraints. I just wish there was an official version that was targeted for people like me instead of scanlators getting lawyered into submission and we end up with less.