I’d like to write something about the process of scanlating manga. Firstly, it’s a lot harder than I expected. Let me take things step by step.
Firstly, starting a scanlation group. This one was easy, but only because me and sirjoey know each other personally. I can imagine how hard it is finding suitable people on the internet.
Scanning manga was one of the easy things. Since it was sirjoeys manga, I didn’t want to debind it (I don’t think I could’ve rebounded it properly). Thus, I had to put pressure on the scanner. If you read the chapters (nothing has been released at the time of writing), you will see that around the edges, the image is a bit blurry. In the later chapters, I think I improved my technique a bit. The secret: Apply more pressure.
Cleaning. I love cleaning. Opening up photoshop, levelling, deleting, redrawing. It’s cool. I got a lot of help from null’s wikilation articles. If you are starting a scanlation group, their articles are a great help.
Waiting for translations. Maybe sirjoey will make a post about translating. The hardest part about translating so far has been the kanji settei. And you might notice we haven’t translated the onomatopoeias, frankly because we don’t know what they mean. Use your imagination.
Typesetting. Hard and time consuming. In the beginning I hated it. I wanted to use times new roman size 12 on everything. It would’ve been easier. Here are the hardest things:
- Finding correct fonts
- Keeping text inside bubbles (Especially thin, long bubbles)
- Using a constant text size
Quality checking is the last step, and also the step that is never done. At the time of writing, we have quality checked for about two weeks. Hopefully, we will get faster.
Another thing that took some time was the name. “Eventyr scanlations” was actually chosen on the 17. of May, Norway’s independence day.
So, as you can see, there is a lot more work involved than you might think. Still, we would love comments on our work. And is someone knows about an IRC channel where we can ask questions about scanlating, please let us know.
EDIT: We’ll release as soon as the files have uploaded.
EDIT2: OK, one last QC
