Scanlation Groups

Mayuka said:
Okay, coming from someone who can take on all three jobs at once:

Translating - Firstly, you have to be very fluent in both Japanese (or whatever language the scans are in) and English. You can't just be okay at English. You need to be good enough to take the original language and make it into a nice sounding English phrase. Most Japanese will sound awkward if you directly translate it. You will not understand what I mean unless you speak an Asian language like Korean/Jap/Chinese.

At first, translating seems fun but then it starts to get tedious when half of the dialogue is stuff like "Oh, how was your day?" "It was okay, thanks." You feel like you want to give up because it won't be relevant to the main plot.

Coming from a non-Jap translator, the hardest thing is translating things that don't make sense or names. Because I have to write out the original Japanese sentence with the name and then translate the name from Japanese.


Cleaning - It's the easiest job obviously, but not so easy when the scan quality is poor or has a lot of dust specks on it. Also, if you want to be a GOOD cleaner, you need to be able to redraw.

For example, this is something that requires some serious skill to clean: (Spica)

Firstly you need to be able to redraw the bookshelves in the last panel. Because English text is not vertical like Japanese, you can't just cover it up that easily. Then the panel on the right with the teddy bear is pretty much impossible to redraw.

Another example of a hard to clean page: (Nagi no Asukara)

I only gave cleaning jobs for Nagiasu to the best cleaners in my group.


Typesetting - It's honestly not that bad except you NEED an eye for art. You need creativity. To be able to pick fonts, align text, and such, you need the ability of typography which not everyone has. If you mess up typesetting, readers will notice most of the time because it's even more noticeable than a spelling mistake or grammar mistake, at least for me.

The worse part about typesetting is how much time it takes. It took me around 10 hours to finish a chapter of Shitsuren Chocolatier which is around ~60 pages long per chapter. It has a lot of dialogue. For Gomen ne Idol-kun, it was around ~40 pages and took 4 hours since there was normal dialogue. Although, I had to do quality checking for Idol-kun because the translator for Chocolatier had perfect English already.

As a typesetter, you'll start to feel tired after a while. Which is why I typically typeset only 10 pages at a time now so I don't burn out.

One more thing, as a typesetter, you need to be able to cover up things that the cleaner cannot redraw/clean. Like in the above example I posted (the manga cap), the typesetter is responsible for putting English text (horizontal dialogue) above Japanese text (vertical dialogue) and making it work out.

I also think the typesetter should know English so they can make sentences shorter to fit bubbles, but that's just how my group does it.

Also, an example of a dialogue-heavy page (Shitsuren Chocolatier):



In General - It's hard to find dedicated translators who will do a chapter per week. I thought I was a dedicated translator until I started hating the job. When people don't read your releases, you stop having motivation to make more work. Which is why I love getting fanmail when I scanlate something. It makes me happy knowing people are reading my stuff.

We are doing it for free, out of our free time, for people to read. Do not expect it to be a timely release or something. I mean, props to groups that can release things quickly but most can't.

Because editing a comic book is different from this. Cleaning actually takes around a 1 minute per page without redrawing. I timed myself and the best I can do is 30 seconds per page (with a lot of dialogue).
No, they need to be able to make it into English and not awkward.
The hardest job because of how much dialogue a page has. I hate typesetting. I love it but I also hate it.

Mkim said:
^I quoted this cause Mayuka is the only person I'm aware of that works with scanlations here on MAL

Danthefanotaku said:
Awesome, thank you for all of this info Mkim!!!!!

Mkim said:
Thank Mayuka maine

justotakuthings2 said:
One more question I heard in official companies which release stuff here like viz they have a person who basically turns the wall of text of broken english into fluent English ?

justotakuthings2 said:
One more question I heard in official companies which release stuff here like viz they have a person who basically turns the wall of text of broken english into fluent English ?