Most new new groups don't survive past 6 months, and we don't hear about their closure same as we don't hear about them being formed.

In general, I'd recommend judging the health of the community by the number of translators rather than groups. It's translations that are the bottleneck in scanlation, and many translators work with multiple groups. My impression is that the number of active translators has decreased somewhat over the past two years.

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It's funny, but I'm always seem to be missing editors the most so I can't agree with that statement either. ^^

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I guess you're doing something wrong, because editors are trainable from 0, unlike translators, so all you need is some volunteers with photoshop. There's one new sucker... I mean volunteer... applying every week across the groups I'm in. The fact that experienced editors are usually too lazy to train newbies is a different problem though. XD

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There's some pretty decent tutorials for learning to edit around.

I would say it's harder to find translators too. If you're not a big group, finding translators is the hardest thing to do. The only reason my group has three Japanese translators is because I've known all three of them for 3+ years. They've worked with me for that long, so they have a reason to stay. I'm really grateful to them for sticking with me and putting up with my nagging. XD Other than them, I've only had one other Japanese translator for my current group but she unfortunately had to quit because of college (She was great too! Dammit, a terrible loss.) I've also had a problem with finding editors until recently, but thankfully, I've gotten a couple of new staff members that have helped out tremendously. ^^ Plus, editing is very easy to learn if you put the time into it.

@bert: *raises hand* lol It's not that I'm too lazy...I just don't have the time. I barely have time to clean my own projects, let alone teach someone from square one. XD THOUGH, these days I am helping a proofreader of mine learn how to clean. I'm trying!

Last edited by StarlightDreams at 6:58 pm, Jan 12 2012

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I really miss Nevermore Scans. They just got started really good and had awesome projects. Here's hoping they come back!

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Yes, but is it just me or editing a chapter takes far more time than translating one. Either that or I'm having really fast translators because the editors always seem to be left behind.


Ah, very few new scanlators are like that noways. Enlist in the shoujo department some of the new scanlators have scans below average: bad translations, not proofread, bad cleaning, bad typesetting...it's like the entire "bad-pack" >.<.

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I have been a leecher for probably 4+ years, and I have seen MANY groups that I loved close down due to the lack of staff. Yet, I have only applied once to a scanlation site(as a proofreader) and they didn't give me a reply. >.<
At the beginning, I was just a hopeless leecher, but I then began to be an uploader to an OR, that is now closed, but now I am strictly a Batoto reader, only if the site doesn't have their own OR, but I do my best to leave thankful comments, because I know that thanking scanlators really boost up their morale and motivation.
Maybe I will learn how to be a good editor/typesetter/pr(currently trying to learn some Photoshop by coloring my own drawings) if I find a translator willing to pick up some mangas that I really want scanlated.

No. Good, proficient Japanese-language translators are not exactly easy to come by, either. There are some really fluent, good ones out there,and they probably work for more than one team. I've seen some translations that were just terrible quality and that's not just the fault of someone who isn't good at Japanese. (People who are good at English are important for making your stuff make sense and such)

Learning Japanese enough to translate manga (even if it has furigana) takes a LOT of work, much, much more so than learning to use photoshop, though I'm not denying that editing can be frustrating as heck! (><

Editing is pretty easy provided you have time and a good image editing program. I even knew how to do it for a while, though now I'm total crap at it, I could easily get back into it if I wanted to dedicate enough time to it

errr...I just wanna comment so the two people trying to connect can connect and understand...I'm the middleman! lol

Tessa; cmertb is talking about shounen/seinen titles in general and only japanese to english translators.

cmertb: Tessa is talking about shoujo titles in general and not only japanese to english translators.

The difference is huge when you only look at japanese to english translators and the male oriented genres. Not to mention when we talk about translators that actually translates correct. Yes, I'm finding lots of mistakes even in titles in both places (shoujo and shounen) but I guess that's how it is when your japanese gets better.

So while Tessa got lots of translators who are able to translate from other languages (chinese mainly but also others..) or love furi titles, cmertb is one of the translators who like other translators in shounen/seinen department are one of those who are in many groups since there are so few of them.

That's my 2 cents....now back to read some more raws cuz batoto went down for me <3<3<3

I agree. It's a funny story but It really looks like for shounen/seinen (i.e. male) manga there are more editors and for a shoujo/josei (i.e. female) manga there are more translators.

Last edited by Gleam at 2:08 am, Jan 29 2012

That is true, we also use chinese raws for some of our projects and half of them are manhwas so "all hail" to the wonderful korean translators. But right now we're not missing J translators either, just editors that can keep up with them and that can make things complicated as translations "came to life" only after they are being edited. And translators tend to leave if they don't see that happening as soon as they anticipated it.
And about translators for seinen projects...yeah, that could be true. We have 3 seinen projects over at EF and they are all moving in turtle speed, but I thought that was because seinen translators don't join shoujo groups, didn't thought it was overall.

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Agreed with most of what the peeps have said. I only started to get back in the game and had a decent release last month, but I may be forced to shutter it for good if no staff is recruited since the initial ones I recruited left and didn't bother to make contact.

At this point, I may be forced to improve on my Japanese and be a one-man army.

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It's kind of hard to find people that are actually determined to help and not leave after the first few emails are exchanged, too.
Applies do get sent in but many aren't willing to learn or lack the motivation to even finish their tests (that are definitely necessary in my opion because of various reasons) and so on and so forth, I guess what I'm trying to say is that good staff is very hard to find even if it looks like there are a lot of promising applicants sometimes and that can get discouraging.

About the whole thing with manga aggregator sites... that's a difficult topic. It highly depends on the group and what their rules for re-distribution are.
Some don't allow their releases to be re-uploaded anywhere but seeing as the internet is the internet people do it anyways. And sometimes when people keep breaking the rules groups start losing their will to contribute to a community full of people that ignore their wishes... while others are thankful for the attention those sites get them.

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Actually, I looked up release statistics on MU and I can say that the number of releases per day has been stagnant since January 2009. Until then scanlation had been growing, and at that point the growth stopped completely. It's not shrinking yet, though, just being stagnant. It's hard to imagine that its growth will ever resume.

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