January 2024: Scanlation
I'm really just guessing that this won't take up too much time. I read my fair bit of manga, when I don't feel like thinking too much, or if I need to feel that's not just nondescript "excitement". Do that often enough, and - I'm assuming some interest in underground titles - you'll stumble across some translations that are just kinda bad to the point that it impedes the reading experience. I'm relatively tolerant about typos, but once the grammar gets too rough, half of the medium is basically missing. If I read stuff like that, it's hard not to think about polishing it up yourself, I find, but I understand the difficult legal implications of unofficial translation projects. As such, I'll just grab a chapter off somewhere and try my hand at the whole process, since it's pretty involved. I don't honestly have much of an expectation, so we'll check how many pages I'll manage to get done. If I end up scanlating a whole chapter, something has gone wrong, and I'll likely regret it next month.
Clearly this isn't the way to go about testing my language skills, but when have I ever tried taking the regular approach to anything. In a more streamlined approach, I probably should have started with easier texts, but I chose something I hadn't seen before and looked chill to translate. I occasionally read the easy to process slice-of-life stuff, and I like to have some surreal elements in there to keep things interesting. I landed on "Kujima Utaeba ie Hororo", because there's a thing stuck under a vending machine on the first page.
The first thing is always cleaning up. In most cases, the places where text is placed are mono-colour, which allows us to use stuff like smart-patching tools to draw over the characters that need to be replaced. It does most of the stuff for me here. I use Segoe Script for the dialogue and thought bubbles, because it kinda looks like what I'm used to seeing, even in comics.
I'm doing this in Krita again, just because it's the image editing software I'm most familiar with. A lot of people use some Adobe licensed software, but I'm not enough of a chump to pay for software that draws on pictures. Perhaps its smart-patching is better, I don't know. Where it gets difficult, is the sound-effects, which are usually just scrawled on the background. I can always check what the smart patching tool does and correct the rest by hand.
To be perfectly fair though, it's not always easy to figure out what the sound effects are meant to be. Best I can find quickly are tables, but I don't often find them helpful. Similar things apply to cases where I have to think about Katakana. Not existing in an environment where Katakana is used much doesn't help building intuition, and since I never quite know whether I'm looking at a colloquial expression, or a loanword, I have to google around quite a lot, and occasionally just kind of infer the meaning. I was a few pages into the translation when I noticed that the creature spoke in Katakana a lot, and it was probably just used to symbolize a foreign accent, or unfamiliarity with the language. It irritated me, since I had never seen things that would have otherwise been written using Hiragana expressed in Katakana, the writing system I have technically the least familiarity with of the three that are relevant for me here. It hit me when the creature went "ワタシクジマ". The Manga had "Kujima" in the title, which I assumed was its name, and having 私 spelled out in katakana made some alarm bells ring in the back of my mind.
In several cases I just wasn't sure what the speech bubble meant in context, so I skipped around to the easy to translate parts. Not to toot my own horn, but the actual translation of the words was probably the least difficult thing to figure out. A lot of the vocabulary for daily conversation, unsurprisingly, finds its way in the slice of life genre. It's still a different experience to read them in a context that is not as dry as the usual news articles I have tried my hand at on occasion. In truth though, I feel that a good translation should feel natural first, and contain all the correct words second. After all, all translations should aim to convey the nuance in the original speaker's contributions. Of course some forms of nuance are lost in translation. The idea of using Katakana for a foreign voice (turns out the creature hails from Russia) can't readily be recreated in the English language. I could go for a different font, but I don't think it'd hit the same way, because the chapter has only the protagonist and the creature conversing for a long while, and different fonts are usually used to imply a distinct voice, more than a style of speech or pronunciation. I'm not going to stoop to the 1970s comics level and phonetically write out pronunciation either, so I'm kinda accepting the loss at this point, and hoping that it won't become important later.
I did about five pages in an hour, which included fidgeting with tools and struggling with the Katakana issue, so I'm assuming that this is just a comfortable manga to translate. Like I said, I don't really feel like uploading somebody else's work, just because I can, so I'll just post a few pages and you'll have to trust me that I did more than those. I might continue reading this, and maybe even doing the scanlation, if nobody else picks it up. It might help me finally learn Katakana in a way that won't evaporate once I haven't looked at it in a week or so.
