I've been extremely curious about you for a while, as you scanlated so many things practically on your own.
Are you fluent in Japanese? Where are you from? What made you start doing this? You mentioned that you were curious about this present series but not enough to take the effort to read it in Japanese, so does reading Japanese take a lot of effort for you? Does it take you a lot of time to scanlate?
Answering in order, I am not fluent in Japanese, I did study Japanese in college for a few years, but my actual reading vocabulary is on the small side, but that's what online dictionaries are for. Plus I've purchased close to a dozen dictionaries and language references over the years. I am from Kansas in the USA.
I started doing this simply because I had purchased "Her World" in Japanese and I wanted to be able to read it in English. (It was even harder for me to read Japanese at that time.) I translated about the first half and kept playing with the idea of producing a scanlation. Then I had the chance to get a copy of some old software that could handle the editing, and started experimenting with a different chapter and eventually released it through Dynasty. Some here will remember that fiasco. WeatheredPeach gave me a lot of help on improving my editing, and over time I like to believe I've improved my translations.
Yes it is difficult for me to sit down and read Japanese. In addition to having a relatively small reading vocabulary, it takes more attention and focus to read much of what I do have than with English.With most manga if I give it that focus, I'll get a pretty fair idea of most of what's going on, but unless I take the time to look things up I'll miss a lot. The most effective way for me to read Japanese thoroughly is to transcribe what I don't immediately understand into the computer and then use computer resources. I have a program call rikaikun that will give me definitions of Japanese words just by doing a mouse over, so the only time I spend much time with a word is if rikaikun doesn't know it or if it's definition is suspect. And my reading vocabulary is slowly growing.
Yes it takes time to scanlate. I consider it my hobby. It takes a lot of time for most people to scanlate. I don't know how I compare to others, but I know I take less than half the time I used to, and that's still improving. And of course it depends heavily on the material I'm doing. Some pages it can take a long time just to do the editing, say there's a complex redraw I can't get out of, or there is a large quantity of highly varied lettering, or the page was damaged for some reason and has to be repaired. Other times it may take some time to figure out complex sentences. My usual method is to take each page and do any redraws needed, clean it, translate it and letter it in that order, then go on to the next page. Sometimes translating it really is as simple as just looking at it and reading it. Once I've done the whole chapter, I go back over the translation in detail to work out any problems, find any errors and polish the translation. Then I usually get help to QC it. The fastest I've ever done a page is 8 minutes. the slowest, even after throwing out when I was first starting... Well there was a reason for the four month gap in releases when I was working on chapter two of Secret of the Princess. A few pages had taken me over 3 hours each, and I got discouraged and stopped working on it for quite a while. That was because of redraws, a lot of text, and I didn't have either rikaikun or an OCR program then; it takes time to look up Kanji in a physical dictionary, especially when you haven't yet learned how most of the radicals are used. When I finally got back to it, most pages went quite a bit faster, so it wasn't as bad as I thought. And as I said, I think I'm at least twice as fast now as I was then, in part because of making better use of computer resources.
Ah! A wall of text; sorry to talk your ear off.
Edit: And off topic besides. Sorry Nezchan.
last edited at Aug 16, 2015 2:11PM
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