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Now to the poll. This week's is from CatzCradle, and it's quite an odd one. In your opinion, which demographic is hardest to scanlate? Feel free to give any reason you want (whether you gotta look at naked people for hentai or you're so ashamed at how stupid some characters are in shounen. Maybe you think the language in seinen is harder to translate? Not that many of us would actually have scanlation experience in all of these demographics...

Now that I think of it, Mahou Sensei Negima! (shounen) was surprisingly hard to scanlate. It tends to have a bunch of text for 18 pages a chapter, so more to read for a proofreader and a translator. If you wanted to be accurate, you had to cross-reference the spells to non-Japanese languages. It took a bunch of work from the editors since there's a lot of redrawing if you wanna do it well. And all the above makes it hard to QC since there's so many things you need to watch out for.

You can submit poll ideas here (and try to keep them manga/anime-related)
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Which one you prefer the most?
Choices:
Hentai - votes: 2478 (21%)
Borderline H - votes: 2167 (18.4%)
Ecchi - votes: 3811 (32.3%)
Nothing of the sort - votes: 3337 (28.3%)
There were 11793 total votes.
The poll ended: December 7th 2013

There was too much discussion on where you lump yaoi, yuri, and smut in those choices...

Last edited by lambchopsil at 1:06 am, Dec 7 2013

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The ones with greatest amount of complex text are the hardest to scanlate.
Which means most of the Action series prevalent in Shounen are out of the competition. Everything else is on a case-by-case basis.

At a glance, Skip Beat (3-4 times normal amount of text) and Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei were the hardest of what I remember.

Has to be seinen. There are lots of reasons, the major ones being: no furigana at all, complex topics (I mean, some seinen have medical, mechanical, historical, etc. terminology that'd be difficult even for people well-versed in colloquial Japanese), long, complicated dialogues, and high dialogue:art ratio. And on top of that a lot of seinen have elaborate art in unusual styles (like Matsumoto Taiyou's), which must be hell to redraw.

How is any kind of smut manga difficult to scanlate? No one who's embarrassed by nudity would be scanlating it in the first place, so that argument is ludicrous. And the translation will be absurdly simple, since it's mostly sex talk / sounds

There are outliers, of course. I'm sure quite a few josei are very difficult to do a good job on. Then there's shounen like Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, with its obscure/oblique Japanese cultural references.

I haven't had that much experience with scanlating but with the little amount that I have, translating and editing/cleaning are usually the toughest parts, meaning you have to be very fluent in different languages and get yourself a good knowledge of photoshop. Personally I find that translating requires less labour work while cleaning sfx is one hell of a tiring job, so I guess I'll tend to choose shounen and hentai, because for the most part they are loaded with lots of effects of the actions (different kinds of action, if you know what I mean *wink wink* >: D ) that could create all type of physical and mental pain for the scanlators for sure

Last edited by misc at 2:30 am, Dec 7 2013

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I thought the ones with a lot of action are hard to scan, their needs to be a lot redrawing and fixing.
But I would rather think that the demographic has nothing to do with the difficulty. As it depends on each manga individually.

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Immediately thought of Legend of the Sun Knight. Intentionally long verbose cryptic talk (because the MC has to talk that way for his job). Ridiculously excessive use of sparkles, screentone etc. The scanlators even had a page in their credits about how hard it was, lol. Hilarious manga though!

Anyways, anything with tons text (no furigana or in a language like Chinese-- damn those tiny characters that look like other characters), lots of sfx (or censorship, lol) is generally a pain in the butt, regardless of genre.

As a scanlator myself, I think that Shojo by far is the hardest genre to scanlate. Something non-shojo like Bakuman is hard, of course, cause there's is too much text, but it's doable. Shojo is very hard because those characters have too much thinking to do. And they do it outside bubbles with complex backgrounds, so you have to redraw, redraw, redraw, redraw, redraw, redraw. A single panel can take from 30 minutes to one hour to redraw. Repeat that ad-nauseam, and you'll beg for mercy. Something similar happens with shonen titles, they use to have extremely big texts over very complex backgrounds every time they execute a special technique. Man, every time I read something like that I feel sorry for the guy on charge of doing that redrawing. Regarding the lack of furigana in Seinen titles.... well, if you know Japanese you don't need it. Maybe we are lucky for having translators who can handle seinen.

Last edited by Animexis at 2:12 am, Dec 7 2013

...does genre matter in terms of difficulty to scanlate? isn't it just when you have a lot of text, what kind of topics the text involve, where the text is, if the bubbles are laced with text and background (you know those "invisible" bubbles that have the background in it as well), how much detail is in the manga (how much redraw), etc? Each genre potentially has complexities no? But I don't have that experience so....yeah, scanlators' poll. I shall abstain from this week's poll.

Well, as an editor, there's one thing in the world that never fails to make me want to cry tears of blood - a page full of dust, guttering, screentones, patterns, sfx and complex backgrounds. Yup. All of them in there together. As a proofreader, there is nothing in the world harder to scanlate than something I'm not interested in reading. There are series in all genres than can be considered difficult or simple. I don't really think this comes down to genre but more to the task and how skilled the scanlator is.

If it's only about translating, then it's obviously Seinen or Josei, which often deal with more complex themes than Shounen or Shoujo. But if you're going to redo the sfx for example, a fighting shounen will become a pretty tough job. (Still find the poll weird though as it doesn't really depend on genre)

It's a toss up between Shoujo and Hentai. For me, as a cleaner/redrawer.

I haven't done much Shoujo, but I've noticed just how much needs to be redrawn, and it's nuts. Kinda glad I don't deal with it XD
Hentai, hah. Same problem. Too many transparent bubbles, because you gotta see everything right? I've cleaned hentai before where every single page bar one required a redraw, and there were like, 16 pages in the chapter with an average of maybe 3 redraws per page. Nightmare.

Shounen/Seinen gets annoying when there are too many speedlines.

Seinen/Josei because the many Guesslators who call themselves "Translators" have a harder time looking up the kanji one by one in their dictionaries and thus make awful translations.

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I think Sports (which is not included) is probably the hardest because there are not many groups interested in the genre. Plus the re-drawing for them must be a nightmare.

Hm...as far as translating goes, josei/seinen are the most difficult with the kanji and various technical, historical terms, etc. When it comes to cleaning/redrawing, definitely shoujo. I don't know a single shounen or seinen group for example that clean sfx or have to deal with those obnoxious gradients and patterns shoujo manga almost always have.

Hmmm... hardest... Probably those with a lot of technical terms. Medical manga like Wildlife, or even sports ones like Capeta. (Attempting to translate those when you don't have a clue about the subject matter in question is tears inducing. A dictionary doesn't help. At all. )

It's one thing to understand the language. It's a totally different matter when you have to translate chunks of terms which you probably have never seen in English before, let alone in Japanese/Chinese.

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