I have to say I'm a quality person all the way! I hate piss poor edits as to me it just feels like defacing and nothing else. Manga is a visual media the artist have honed their skills and I'm sure often take pride in the art they produce and that is part of the joy of manga. I dont see how you can act as though you love manga if that isnt even a concern to you...

Another thing I hate about Speed groups is the fact that they are flighty! I have yet to see a speed over quality series pick up something and stick with it or complete it, the only exception to this would probably be Kenichi. Speed groups pick up a project that's being worked on by a quality group and once they have muscled the other group out they then wind up dropping the series or losing steam. I can reel of a whole host of speed groups who have never seen something through to the end and are all now relesing at a much slower pace then they once did, have dropped multiple projects or have died out.

Slow and Steady wins the race every time! Series were fully scanlated before speed groups they were finished and done in good quality to boot.

1) Speed vs Speed
If there is a reliable speed group that I know is decent then I'll stick with them. But, usually I read whatever is there and I only read speedscans of the WSJ crap that I read out of habit and not in anyway out of enjoyment (not you HxH...).

2) Quality vs Speed
Quality! I can't say this enough a well edited scan with a good translation is a pleasure to read. As scanlators we say we do this because of love for the manga so the quality should matter. I hate reading a manga and it feeling like a chore due to poor edits killing the art or awful English.

3) Quality vs Quality
If one group started a long time before the other group then I'll just stick with the first. Usually, however I see which group has the highest quality scans. Many groups do good with the edits and then kill me with the typesetting so that's usually the final deciding factor when I'm choosing between 2 quality groups.

The point people seem to miss is that there are soooo many good undiscovered series out there and even though you may not get instant gratification from working on an something somebody else made popular. It's so much more rewarding to take on a dead project or a new project and make it into something good. We should be trying to bring to light as much good manga as possible not sinking endless amount of man hours into doing something already done.

Also, most of these quality groups who people call slow are hiring and I don't get why instead of starting a new group they dont try and apply to help the current group or if they are already in a group then open up dialogue and try to get a joint sorted. What we do as scanlators is hard and only other scanlators can truly appreciate that we need to try and create a better community than the one we have now.

As for SnoopyCools point about the translations, for most people they don't have the luxury of understanding Japanese. So as long as the translation is grammatically sound and not nonsense there is no way for them to tell if it is good or not. You basically put all your faith into the translator and hope that they know what they're doing, I know from experience that this can go either very wrong or can work out to be fine.

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Deadbeat-Scans are hiring!

I won't disagree that my posts were rantish, but I really do care about speed releases (whether I read them or not).
I said I don't care about speed vs. speed specifically, not calling quality into play.

But in scanlation as a whole, I just hate what speed groups tend to cut off. People read these and proclaim that it's their favorite series and that they don't miss a thing, but in actuallity I find that they're missing a lot and it's a shame.

One thing speed groups always leave out are the SFX. It's one of the things I find vital for allowing you to connect with the manga and allow you to get a closer understanding to what's happening and the mood. Leaving it out makes the manga feel empty and hard to create the mood when I'm simply reading what the people are saying. Sure, I can look at the SFX and guess what's happening and what the mood is, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

Like any other scanlation member, I spend my free time (and sometimes not my free time) to get things going. Just because it's free time doesn't mean I should waste my time. I still haven't gotten an excellent grasp on Photoshop usage (in my opinion), but I'm way better off than I was 6 months ago (what's cloning?). Yet there are still people who show no improvement because it's speed scans. No one's a machine, so why should the scans feel so cheaply done?

I'm sorry to those who I may have offended with my previous cursing, but hopefully you can get a glimpse of how much I think the "fans" are losing from speed scans. No one's perfect, but that's not a good excuse to skimp out on so many things.

EDIT: Not that some "normal" or "quality" groups don't have such problems. But I find it occurs a lot more in the speed department.

Last edited by MrEngenious at 1:25 pm, Jan 12 2009

This is both true and not true. You have to realize that we all do this for two reasons: first of all, we like the manga and want to let other people see it, and second, we feel that we can do something nice for people with our skills, and advance the state of the manga community as a whole (all of the 'for the fans' groups are the same as everyone else, btw, there aren't that many reasons to spend unpaid time doing this... no one here is selfish). If the people don't really care, then we lose one (if not both) of those reasons. There are lots of ways to quantify how much someone appreciates the work that you do, from download numbers, to thank you messages, to people in your IRC channel, and everyone has their own definition of 'enough to make it worthwhile'. Personally, I like to think that I've kind of grown out of the whole 'no one downloads my stuff, boohoo' thought process when the numbers don't reach what I'd like, but it does still kind of feel like no one cares sometimes (and I have pet projects that I love and no one else likes... even my staff frowns on some of my stuff). I'm blessed with popularity and something of a fan following, which is great for me, but there are lots of smaller and newer groups that constantly wrestle with whether or not people appreciate the work they do, and they're the ones that really need the thank you's and download numbers.

As for how to tell if a translation is bad, it's actually remarkably easy. Ignore the grammar, which is hard for lots of people, and look at the meaning of the bubbles and how they work together. If you see a bubble that doesn't fit in with the other bubbles, then that bubble is wrong. There are no manga where someone goes off in left field and BS's something. Reasons are detailed and, while sometimes nonsensical in real life, fit in with the rest of the world the manga is set in. If you ever find yourself saying 'Wait... what...?' and reread stuff trying to figure out what's going on, then it's a bad translation at fault, not a bad manga, especially if you're reading something that's fairly long (bad manga tend to end prematurely, cutting the chances of that option even further). There are lots of other types of mistakes that you can't see unless you look at the original, like who people are talking to or what have you, but when you see a string of bubbles that are obviously intended to go together but don't, then you KNOW that you've got a bad translator on your hands, even without any Japanese knowledge at all.

Another rule of thumb, when the translator leaves in Japanese words for no reason at all, you can go ahead and call shenanigans on him. I'm not sure what the hell One Piece people are thinking with all there 'nakama' this and 'nakama' that. I know it means 'comrade/friend' in the dictionary, and since he's saying crew, it's SO difficult to translate (sarcasm), but use crew for Christs sake. It's crew! CREW! One Piece actually usually has good translations... although somewhere someone took the trans that Stephen did back in the day (Stephen is the translator that everyone should aspire to, btw) and decided that it wasn't good enough, so he untranslated some of it and everyone else liked it (probably because it added one more Japanese word to their vocabulary along with kawaii and nani, and people love pretending they know Japanese). There is rarely, rarely, rarely a reason to keep words in Japanese other than the kun, chan, sensei stuff (and sensei can easily be translated to doctor or sir or mr whatever), and if someone says "Japanese word=English Word" (example: "I'm going to take a drive in my kuruma. *Kuruma=Car" ), I just want to strangle them.

I agree with almost everything Snoopy Cool said.

Annoying as it is, there are some groups that take popular series that quality scanlations groups were already doing and butchering it all in the name of "speed" (and their "donation drive". Everyone should know the obvious example. I just erks me the wrong way when I see ANY scanlation group EXPLICITLY asking for donations in their release pages, and what's more is people actually do DONATE! ZOMG...~! If you have money to spare these days, please just support the artist by buying their stuff (not the English translated stuff, but real JAPANESE STUFF, so the artists can receive royalties).

The fact is:

As long as there's raw chapters, there'll always be someone to translate and scanlate them. SCANLATION GROUPS ARE UNNECESSARY as one ALWAYS pops up to pick up a popular project.

But... I've turned away from the English scanlation scene for now... I'm just completely disgusted with how things are right now... o_o So few good editors... SO VERY VERY FEW GOOD TYPESETTERS... so few reasonable translations... LITTLE OR NO QUALITY CHECKING FOR RELEASES (a QC credit on a credit page doesn't mean the job was well doen or done at all for that matter)... the downward trend of quality... the unbalanced attention some mangas are getting (Naruto, Bleach and One Piece...)... the stupidity of the leecher population... Keh! N-O T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U



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Apart from who I am, I don't want to be anyone other.

Um...you do realize that most groups that ask for donations are asking for donations so they can buy the mangaka's original work...right?
If they're asking for donations(Most of the time), then they're asking for help so they can get the original raw book/mag to scan and make their releases a better quality(Well...most of the time.)
SO basically, they ARE helping the mangaka, because the groups are using that money to BUY their stuff anyways.

I also agree with most of what SnoopyCool said.

My pet peeve are bad edits, the stuff I see for a lot of shounen/shoujo manga just ticks me off...like if they have gutters, a lot of times I see scanlation groups just leave it...no nothing, no leveling. Unleveled scans just make me drop the manga instantly, even if it's a good manga, quality is important. They're so bad, yet, if they spent just a little bit of extra time could make it look half decent. -_-

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♪MONSTARR~ will eat all your cookies and steal your bishies~♪ Φ_Φ

I'll spend a few words to defend legitimate donations and point out some that I find extremely distasteful.

I've asked for donations... I try to make it very clear that they aren't *required* to keep the group running, but they are certainly appreciated and help with the monthly manga purchasing (and shipping, which is terrible). We scan in everything we translate ourselves, which can get really expensive really quickly and donations are a real help when times are tough. My christmas was saved because I got donations in October that freed my bank account to buy gifts instead of manga. We try to make it less like shameless begging by giving out gifts to be who donate $5 or more (we buy magazines by the boat-load because we've caught up with lots of our projects and most monthly magazines give away gifts every month, which we then give to donators), but it's still a necessary evil for us... the bills for a popular download site are just too high for a group leader to stomach on their own most of the time.


There are also bad, bad, bad groups and sites that use scare tactics or beggar reasoning to convince people that if they don't donate they'll lose their manga forever and ever. The big one that comes to mind is Manga Download. Talk about "Oh know, the service we provide that you can do for yourself will be DEAD. Dead and gone! Unless you donate $1000 this month! Thank you for donating $2000 last month! We'll be dead if you don't donate $1000 this month!" They actually changed it recently so that they say "we'll be dead in ____", which, I guess, is a little better, but it's been a complaint of mine ever since my girlfriend first went there and I saw it... stuffing pockets nicely, I'm sure. I'd love an extra $400 added to my monthly income, I wonder if the leeches wouldn't mind just putting me on the payroll.

Ah, can't believe I missed this.
I phrased that badly if it got you to think that I called everyone who didn't reply a "fanboy/girl" to scanlation groups. I was referring to that one poster who gave 3-4 short lines that did not explain his points well (I didn't want to single him out, but I guess it just hurt my intentions). I did not mean to refer to anyone who has not posted in this topic. Apologies for that.

No, I have not been part of a speed scanlation group (although I have thought about it when I was roaming around after practicing editing a little). The reason why I thought they didn't care was because of how badly the stuff was done. I understand that it's magazine scans and that it's a huge pain, but the results from using the speed editing shortcuts just made me think that they really didn't care. Text placements are off, the grammar is atrocious, and the like.
It does prevent me from seeing the whole picture since I was never a part of speed scanlation groups. I was hoping this topic would have someone who was provide their side so that I could have a greater understanding.

Thank you.

EDIT: Well I guess insulting them wasn't a good way to get their opinion. My feelings got the best of me.

Last edited by MrEngenious at 3:33 pm, Jan 12 2009

I'll leave my input here. Personally, I hate drama between scanlation groups of all kinds, if you think that I'm offending any groups too much, then message me.

1) If you're competing for speed, you better have quality. Why read bad looking scanlations that look worse than printed copies? If I see a group that has speed and is faster than another group, I'll give them a chance and sample their work. If I see that it's bad at first glance, I won't even read the rest of it and I'll never touch that group again. People who read these speed scanlations (like Sleepyfans - so bad... *shudders* cannot believe what they did to Binktopia which made very decent scanlations) are disgusting and don't appreciate the art enough in my opinion. I will tend to wait for a good group to scanlate Naruto and Bleach, like M7 and Hitsugaara, before I read it.

But with equal decent quality, faster group wins.

2) Quality, but you shouldn't be awfully slow either. Fans are impatient, and they'll go for a lower quality if they think that you're not going to release. But see my rant above.

3) Depends. If one is clearly much better than another, than that one wins. If they're about the same, group I've been reading longer or the faster group wins.