This week's poll was suggested by fruggle. Of the list of scanlation variables, which do you feel is the most important?

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Opinion on ecchi
Choices:
Hate it with a passion - votes: 403 (6.1%)
Actively avoid it - votes: 1064 (16.1%)
Mostly ignore it - votes: 1407 (21.3%)
Love it! Only thing I read! - votes: 440 (6.7%)
I enjoy it, but it's not the best thing ever - votes: 2502 (37.9%)
No opinion really - votes: 777 (11.8%)
There were 6593 total votes.
The poll ended: May 5th 2018

Mixed bag. Necessary evil, perhaps?

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

As I don't have any proficiency in reading Japanese, accuracy of translation is hard to recognize, so mostly I see how good the editing and how often the group releases chapters, so I'll go with Regularity of releases mmm...

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I will change this world mmm...
So the world can change me mmm...

Chose Regularity of releases, because it was above the rest I could chose from.

Now we are talking about Scanlation here, which is fan scan+translation. So basing on that, rest of the ones that applies for me are -
>> Accurate translation of the original language & Readability of the English. Now this doesn't men that the translation needs to be 100% grammatically accurate, no grammar-Nazi here. And spelling mistakes tolerable for the most part. (Not a native english speaker, so I feel you.)I simply need them to convey the base of it in simplest way possible to give a 'GOOD' stamp. Now, I'll definitely appreciate a quality translation where possible, which I can stamp 'GREAT'. Saying that nowadays most of translations that comes out are of good quality, that even applies for hentai mangas (the word out there is, some of best/top-quality scanlation can be found there.).
>> Fonts. Yeah! it's very important. Some fronts annoys the hell out of me. Please stop with the calligraphy/graffiti and go with simple and clean fronts. For example just take 'Comic Sans', you don't need to hunt for it, you most likely got it preloaded by default.
It's still a saving on desktop/laptop, with big screen you can manage. But, on a smaller device like phone, messy fonts are a rather unpleasant experience. I find reading manga on my phone laying down my bed or couch way more comfy than on my desktop/laptop sitting/laying dawn whatever, So.

P.S. Not saying anything about "Clean" images (lack of artifacts), Color (or grayscale) balance and Image resolution because it's 2K18, ya feel me right?!

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Tv Tokyo - Anime & Manga ~ MinatoAce

After a huge struggle between "Accurate translation" and "Readability of the English," I finally went with accuracy. But honestly both are pretty essential to me, because I read manga for the story. If that story makes no sense out of no fault of the author, that's quite a tragedy, imo.

Totally agree. If the translation isn't accurate and readable, there's just no point in reading it.

The two most important for me are Regularity of releases and the Readability of the English. Its frustrating when there's a story that is interesting or you like it quite a bit, but the scanners may only be releasing a chapter or two per year and they are several volumes behind. Sometimes a whole year may go by without a release. Occasionally they may get motivated when a different group (often an individual) releases a few poorly translated chapters and you'll see a flurry or releases then it goes back to being inconsistent.

But I guess my biggest frustration is readability in English. There are some good mangas that look like google translate was used and it sometimes makes little sense. You are lucky if you get the gist of it. The other extreme is when someone is trying to make it so accurate that the English comes off as odd or "stilted" because you know that normal people don't talk like that. It too can suffer from some confusing or unintelligible dialogue. All this stuff distracts from the reading, because I'm not just looking at the pictures I'm interested in the story too. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate it just needs to make sense.

Accuracy of translation and readability of English usually go hand in hand. Someone who can't write decent English can't convey the meaning of the original either.

But I'm surprised at all the people picking regularity of releases over that. It's like saying you'd eat garbage as long as you could do it regularly.

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Though I have only found it a few times in some aggregator sites, there are times that you have a perfectly readable manga chapter and then one of the pages has the resolution of a potato so you either can barely read that page or you just can't read it altogether. Not sure if that's the scanlator's fault or the raws they got were like that.

As for the poll, I'm a bit torn. If it's a weekly manga, I would like it to be translated on a weekly basis, but I don't really care if the raws go out on Sunday and the translation is finished by Friday. I wouldn't put this on the quality of a scanlation, but on the quality of the scanlation group.

For the quality of the scanlation, imo, it would be everything below accurate translation (counting that option as well.) It also depends on what type of manga it is. If it's a battle manga, as long as the meaning gets across, the translation doesn't need to be all that accurate. If it's a mystery manga, however, you need an accurate translation or the quality of the manga goes down a lot.

Readability of the English is somewhere on the middle for me. It can have little mistakes here and there as long as the translation is understandable, but if you have some weird mumble jumble that only the translator can understand... then it's a bad translation.

You don't think redrawers matter much, until you stumble upon a scan so ugly, you realize how much those guys have been protecting your eyes. I would say this is a fairly good variable to say how good a scanlation is. Not quite sure what "clean" images (lack of artifacts) mean. If it's about the line art, having it cleaned well makes a manga a lot more readable which makes for a more pleasant experience for the readers, but this is about lack of artifacts so no idea. And the line art (sort of making the manga have more contrast) seems more fitting for grayscale balance.

Fonts are also a good way to determine the quality of a translation. Some fonts are just that ugly.

As long as you can read the chapter well, resolution usually doesn't matter that much. Still, the higher the resolution, the better it looks.

Not in my case as far as this poll goes. It's that, as this is presented, I'm not even really considering the "accurate translation" or "readability" options because, well, if it's not readable then I ain't reading it at all, those aren't really reasonable options to me, I just take those things as simply being understood.

Regularity of releases, just as the originals are done. These are serial works, regular releases is an integral factor of presentation and to the enjoyment of readers.

Accurate translation of the original language. Regularity is nice too of course. I don´t care too much about the image quality, as i can always get the raw page myself.

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But does the regularity of releases of a certain manga say something about the quality of the scanlation? I see quality of scanlation as how good the translation is and how well the manga looks (fonts, redraws, how clean it is...) How frequently a group releases an scanlation reflects the priorities of the group. You may have a group that takes a long time to release a chapter, but they are really high quality. I would be surprise to see someone say that's a bad quality scanlation.

I picked Accurate translation of the original language. I like Regularity of releasess but I feel that is more about the scanlation team than the quality of scanlations. For me at least, a good scanlation is all about accurate translation, and then if able, readability of the English. Everything else on the list more pretains to the quality of a scanlation group.

I am more likely to follow a scanlation group if they have regular releases, nice fonts, grayscales, and etc. If they don't do that, I might only read one series they scanlate or even drop the group entirely from my reading.

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Internet Lurker At Heart

I chose "Readability of the English". When I just started reading in 2008, the general language level was quite good. Now, in comparison, it can be plainly seen that there are many people with bad English in scanlation (at least in my corner of it). By 'bad' I mean mostly sentence structure and general flow. I don't really like grammatical mistakes, but we're all human - they happen. But when you just can't understand what's going on because one sentence is not connected to another...

readability is probably #1 for a series you have no attachment to
that changes I think, once you're a rabid fan of a narrow genre or mangaka where the quantity is finite and you may feel a need to experience and try and connect with a translation as accurate as possible.
other stories might peak your interest just for their portraits or highly detailed mechanical blueprints where you probably care a great deal that new text framing doesn't bleed into the artwork to accommodate extra font

Sorry for all cleaner, typesetters...

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