-Do the scanlators work from the actual printed books when they come out? Or do they work from a digital copy? Or do they use some other source? I imagine it varies, but I see the term "raws" all over. Where do the raws come from?
Digital copies are way easier to work with. Scanned pages require 1. Rotating the image. 2. Cropping. 3. Adjusting levels to remove paper grain and make the image look as close to the original page as possible. 4. Additional removal of paper grain (manual cleanup process with the PS dodge tool).
However, you can scan pages at as high of a resolution as you want, so paper copies typically warrant higher res scans, but are at risk of not looking as nice as digital copies.
-How long does it take to scanlate a comic? Obviously the page count has something to do with it, and I imagine that some scanlator teams are faster than others. But as a pages translated per day, sort of thing, what is "normal"? If the scanlators begin work on a new project, are we looking at a couple of days before it's ready? Couple of weeks? Couple of months?
I don't do translations, but our translator seems to sit down and translate an entire chapter (20-30 pages) in 4-6 hours. Feel free to correct me there, Roppon :) As I understand it, the hardest part is trying to fit Japanese phrasing into English. Apparently some phrases just don't translate well at all, and requires quite a bit of thought to make the text "make sense".
The longest part of scanlating is probably either cleaning/redrawing or typesetting, if you try to pick matching fonts and do decent redraws. We do our work in phases, where we clean and redraw, then translate, then typeset, and then QC. We don't go page by page either, we clean everything, then translate everything, etc...
I'd say a chapter for us takes about a month if we're not rushing... though, that assumes that we have multiple chapters we're working on, so we're not just working on one thing.
I agree with Faust, you should try it for yourself and see what the process is like! I think it's pretty fun...
-How much of a pain in the ass is it to translate the SFX and onomatopoeia? Seems like the speech bubbles would be reasonably straightforward, if a little constrained on space. But I imagine you'd need full-blown artist skills to erase the Japanese SFX and replace them with English SFX. Every time I see a manga with English SFX, I'm always impressed.
Apparently it's pretty damn hard, though it seems like the translator can usually give you an idea of what sound is trying to be conveyed without actually giving you an onomatopoeia (ex: tears, standing up, turning around). Yeah, finding space for speech bubbles can be tricky, especially when the Japanese text is much shorter than the English text. You have to be careful too to not use really small fonts :P
I don't have shit for drawing skills, but I think I do alright on redraws by using the tools PS has. Here's a video I recorded of me cleaning/redrawing Futakaku Kankei, where you can see how I do some redraws:
https://youtu.be/Yrn0Qndtqmc
Here's one I did on typesetting too:
https://youtu.be/AyWMyG1FHYw
It'd be cool if other scanlating groups could comment here about how they do their work, as I'm quite curious as well.
