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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 wors

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.
        Aerroon 3y ago
  - jwells89 3y ago
    There's a lot of parallels with quality issues in official anime streaming. It's not unusual for those involved in the fansub scene to be obsessed with figuring out how to encode shows to look their best with a given codec, with settings often being dialed in per-episode, while services like Crunchyroll and Netflix seem to have one-size-fits-all settings that have issues that are readily visible even on cheap commodity screens. Most notoriously, they're bit-starved with dulled colors, smudged motion, and extremely bad banding in dark scenes.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Netflix has extremely elaborate compression setups to eke out every last bit, so if it looks bad on a reasonable connection then they're effectively doing that on purpose by being too aggressive. I would not call it lack of effort. Crunchyroll seems to happily throw 6-8MBps at things, is that not enough with h.264?
      - jwells89 3y ago
        I've been on gigabit fiber for years so I doubt connection speed is an issue. Between the two Netflix is usually worse with dark scenes in anime. If I had to guess their settings are better optimized for live action shows/movies, which to my eye generally fare better with their encoding than anime does. Crunchyroll is generally ok-ish but even at 6-8mbps it still sometimes struggles with high detail (grain for example) and motion, and as I mentioned earlier sometimes colors can be a bit washed out. Banding is also sometimes a problem but not to the extent that it is with Netflix.
- 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.

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.
      - Aerroon 3y ago
- jwells89 3y ago
  There's a lot of parallels with quality issues in official anime streaming. It's not unusual for those involved in the fansub scene to be obsessed with figuring out how to encode shows to look their best with a given codec, with settings often being dialed in per-episode, while services like Crunchyroll and Netflix seem to have one-size-fits-all settings that have issues that are readily visible even on cheap commodity screens. Most notoriously, they're bit-starved with dulled colors, smudged motion, and extremely bad banding in dark scenes.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Netflix has extremely elaborate compression setups to eke out every last bit, so if it looks bad on a reasonable connection then they're effectively doing that on purpose by being too aggressive. I would not call it lack of effort. Crunchyroll seems to happily throw 6-8MBps at things, is that not enough with h.264?
    - jwells89 3y ago
      I've been on gigabit fiber for years so I doubt connection speed is an issue. Between the two Netflix is usually worse with dark scenes in anime. If I had to guess their settings are better optimized for live action shows/movies, which to my eye generally fare better with their encoding than anime does. Crunchyroll is generally ok-ish but even at 6-8mbps it still sometimes struggles with high detail (grain for example) and motion, and as I mentioned earlier sometimes colors can be a bit washed out. Banding is also sometimes a problem but not to the extent that it is with Netflix.
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.