How Manga Was Translated for America
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Of course this is a bit of a double standard by me, there's a lot of lower quality fan scanlations, but I don't expect the same quality from a free fan service as from a commercial official one.
E: Just one example: try reading the most recent Chainsawman chapter on the official app by Shueisha. There's very visible jpg compression artifacts around text and all straight lines have very visible blurring issues if you look at a panel in detail. I remember the fan scanlations by, for example Jamimi's Box to be significantly higher quality than that.
It's not unusual for those involved in the fansub scene to be obsessed with figuring out how to encode shows to look their best with a given codec, with settings often being dialed in per-episode, while services like Crunchyroll and Netflix seem to have one-size-fits-all settings that have issues that are readily visible even on cheap commodity screens. Most notoriously, they're bit-starved with dulled colors, smudged motion, and extremely bad banding in dark scenes.
Crunchyroll seems to happily throw 6-8MBps at things, is that not enough with h.264?
Between the two Netflix is usually worse with dark scenes in anime. If I had to guess their settings are better optimized for live action shows/movies, which to my eye generally fare better with their encoding than anime does.
Crunchyroll is generally ok-ish but even at 6-8mbps it still sometimes struggles with high detail (grain for example) and motion, and as I mentioned earlier sometimes colors can be a bit washed out. Banding is also sometimes a problem but not to the extent that it is with Netflix.
So for HQ teams there’s often a love of the work involved, and more importantly there are no ROI calculations. If the redrawer wants to spend hours on SFX (then rightfully moan about it in the credits) they usually can.
The excuse is that they need money for buying books to scan or digitals, but imo unless they're working on many series, spending 1~3usd per chapter (at 4~8 manhours / chapter), isn't bad enough to warrant begging for donations. Plus the digitals tend to be free if they know where to look.
On a lighter note, not every group is like this, like you mentioned, some people just genuinely think some stories are worth sharing. Others just wanted to practice reading / writing a foreign language and figured they might as well write the translation down and share that.
That's for another time though. For now, I'll just cut to the chase and copypasta something I wrote a couple years ago regarding translation quality between professional and amateur work:[1]
Japanese has a very rich history and is also significantly more expressive than English is, so academic teaching of the language can only do so much. You really need to immerse yourself in Japanese literature/media and partake in just ordinary day-to-day conversations to simply begin to understand the depth of it all.
Translation is also hardly an appealing job unless you find love in the art of translating itself, speaking as someone who has done translating as a hobby (both FGO and otherwise). Almost nobody knows or cares about the effort that goes into translations, most readers only care if it "sounds right" in English. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people who read the bad translation pointed out in the OP won't realize it's bad. It's very hard to keep yourself motivated when your readers don't and can't give a crap about your work.
So combine a language that is very different from English with people who probably aren't all that motivated anyway, and most professional translations end up being shit. The work is thankless and giving more than the absolute minimum quite sincerely doesn't pay off because the readers don't know and can't care.
Good translations require passion from the translators and the editors, passion that simply just isn't there outside of the hobbyists and enthusiasts who enjoy the art of translating rather than doing it for their paychecks.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...
As one simple example the word "nakama" is almost impossible to translate properly into English. It's like a combined "comrade, crew, squad, friend, family" type of concept that has no English equivalent. Scanlations will typically have explanations for certain things on the side which adds a lot of depth to many stories.
My first reaction was to doubt it because I remember reading [0] that spoken languages have roughly the same bit rate ( 39.15 bits/s on avg ). However, bit rate is far from everything (and this is also written not spoken), so could you try to explain what creates the expressiveness compared to other languages you know?
For a specific example, "itadakimasu" (literally "I will take it.") spoken at the start of a meal is a complete bastard to translate to English. "Thank you for the food." would be a translation of the core spirit of the phrase, but it lacks the elegance and respect of the way it is conveyed in Japanese. "Amen" would be a western cultural/religious counterpart that most westerners could relate to, but this adds religious undertones that are not in the original Japanese.
Not to mention, "Thank you for the food." also overlaps with "gochisousama" (literally "Mr. Feast", "-sama" is an honorific) spoken at the end of a meal. Two very obviously distinct and different Japanese phrases, but the English translation ends up being more or less the same.
None of this is to say English isn't expressive, but Japanese takes the expression game to a whole new level; yojijukugo[1] are the epitome of this using just four words to construct and convey what would be entire sentences or even paragraphs in English.
In practice this means there's a lot of English words that get smushed together in Japanese[0], and a lot of Japanese words that get smushed together in English[1]. Japan also has a lot of shared cultural experience that Americans or Brits won't recognize, and vice versa, which translators have to spend time explaining.
[0] https://jisho.org/search/とおる
[1] https://jisho.org/search/知る vs. https://jisho.org/search/分かる
Maybe commercially it sells better to localise, but when you're consuming foreign media you're also sub/consciously discovering their culture. So having little notes about the little sneezing trope brings the world a bit closer one step at a time...
Explain the joke first and next time I'll get simmilar jokes. Don't replace the joke with one you think I already know.
But anyways, I'm playing devil's advocate but I'd imagine a sloppy scanlation of chapter 1 has very real consequences on interest in the later / better official release. By sloppy I mean distracting grammar mistakes, poor image quality, etc. I know I personally wouldn't give the official a chance if I mistakenly thought the plot / art was meh from the scanlation. And that's bad because it doesn't support the authors, who tend be super overworked.
Also, didn't mention the entire run of Mangajin[1], which was quite the resource for folks learning Japanese back in those days.
And there was substantial debate in the fandom concerning the ethics. How much margin over the price of a blank tape was acceptable before it became a for-profit piracy operation? Should fansubs cease distribution when a show got an official release? Even if that release was dub-only or had a worse translation?
Official translations often (1) censor a ton in both the text and the art to satisfy Western Puritanical sensibilities and (2) have drastically less cultural context than scans do --- scans often will have notes about references to myths/stories that manga are referencing or influenced by like creation myths or relevant stories/concepts from Buddhism or random bits of cultural stuff like why a character might sneeze randomly after being talked about.
I've yet to read an official translation that's as good as scanlations, and the notes are often more creatively integrated into the scans in a way that are useful when encountered whenever possible.
I still subscribe to the official translations out of some sense of moral obligation to send some money back to the creators, but scans are faster and higher quality often enough.
Think about what it requires - to cut out or replace any signs of the culture it came from, that would cause any friction with the target culture. To trick the reader into thinking the world is one big homogeneous mush, where works coming from the other side of the globe don't contain anything that would so much as confuse them. Nothing that would require a translator's note or explanation.
It's not translation, it's butchery. It's making a sausage come out on one end, no matter what parts come in at the other.
That's probably not the angle I would've chosen if the intent was to garner sympathy.
One is germane to the discussion. "I'm disregarding your argument because don't think your username is very professional" isn't, unless the discussion were perhaps about lack of decorum in online discussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Cloudflare_DNS_a...
Search HN, other posts about it.
Cause I run a mix of 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 I 'thought' the second was only a backup, but no, some algorithm.
So it mostly works from cache I guess from 8.8.8.8 hits, but every now and again it 'randomly' fails.
So try changing the .ph to the many alternatives in the wiki article you might have cached (HN sometimes uses .is)