The Decline in Published Manga Translation Quality

A professional manga translator weighs in.

Now, this is something I've noticed when looking at a lot of Yen Press manga. Things like Cage of Eden, Soul Eater and High School of the Dead. I don't know, maybe I just happened to grow up or get into manga at a time when a huge amount of effort was made into translating and relettering them -- all of the manga that I first read were always flipped, sound effects-ed, and written with literate quality English.

Viz seems to have stayed rather average, and quite above average with their releases of manga such as 20th Century Boys, but Yen Press's translations are internet scanlation quality. There was even a bubble where a character said "chivalry" and it had been left typoed as "chivarly". I can tolerate not seeing sound effects translated, but that is just very unprofessional.

That's why it's my policy for Yankee Goon Scans that we reletter sound effects and try to do a naturalistic dialogue style-- I'm just applying the standards that I was used to as a reader. It kind of pains me to see physical, hardcopy manga released by companies that are getting paid for their work, have such a slapdash level of quality.

Please Rehost, Share, Distribute, Hand Out and Spread YKMC

Let me get things straight: We don't give a fuck about online readers rehosting our scans.

We want you to rehost our scans. We want you to download our zip files and share them among your friends, print them out and hand them out on the street, do whatever you like to distribute and spread them far and wide. Yankee Goon Scans is about releasing this entertaining manga to the masses, and by golly, if the masses want to share it with the world, who are we to stop them?

So don't worry-- get the word out! We're behind you 100%!

157 Belatedly

YG staff

Chief Editor DrSunshine

Woop.

Chapter 157 DDL

156 Three Weeks Late

Really sorry, folks. Some of our cleaners had internet issues and stuff to deal with.

FUCK we really let you down when we said it'd be the week after. I really can't apologise enough. 157 will be coming a lot sooner, though, since we have the pages all cleaned and ready for typesetting. Just... not today. I rushed this chapter out today because I wanted to get things done ASAP, and I can't do any more right now.

156 DDL

Thursday? Woops we meant... uh...

Yeah... sorry. Translators have busy schedules!

But it'll be soon. Kusaru says she's going to translate on the weekend, so next week. Promise!!

Chapter 155

Do you realize how STUPID that sounds? DO YOU??!

Download Chapter

156-157 are incoming later this week! But since you were waiting so very long for Mahou-X's batch, I wanted to get something out for you guys as soon as we could. Keep a look out for the next ones.

Also, welcome to the new head of Mahou-X. May you reign in perpetuity. It's too bad to lose JV, she was a pretty awesome person during the rare times I chatted with her.

Mahou-X's Got Their Shit Back Together!!! Mazel Tov!!

Mazel Tov!! :D

We're working on 155-157 as I write this and we ought to release at the end of the coming week. (So give it till next Thursday).

155-- Typeset, SFXed, basically done, waiting on proofreading checks.
156-- Working on SFXs
157-- SFX done, waiting to be typeset.

I want everyone to think of a dance, execute it and then post the results here when we release.

Ideas?

So, since YK&MC ended, Mahou-X and we will --eventually -- catch up to and finish the manga. After that, a few of the core members of Yankee Goon scans, including me, want to continue scanlating. We're interested in good, but little-known or dropped manga, like YK&MC was a couple of years ago before it started getting quite popular among the online manga fan community.

We were wondering if you readers had any ideas or suggestions to toss out. Personally I've had my eye on Hana No Asukagumi, as I'm kind of interested in doing more manga with a yankees/delinquents-with-a-heart-of-gold theme. But I'm open to pretty much anything that's not-creepy and seemingly forgotten, these sorts of "hidden gems".

DrSunshine

PHEW GOD

Want your bad, bad romance...

Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151

PHEW. God, this was way too long in the process. Basically the issue is cleaners -- we need cleaners who, essentially, have lots of free time on their hands. Also, someone promised to do extra, but then had to go on vacation and couldn't find where she'd left the cleaned chapters! I even had to do SFX myself! The moral of this story is: "Always back up your stuff in many places, and inform your team beforehand if something unexpected happens."

What I mean by this is: If you've basically read our chapters, you know what kind of quality we expect from cleaners, so if you think you can do that, please please sign up to help us, and we would be more than happy to send you a Google wave invite.

Also, Mahou-X: It seems we're going to be busy for the next release. If you guys are really ahead, go ahead and do 161-163 for us.

Dr Sunshine

EDIT: Also, I know that ch149's title is not there. Nobody provided me with a translation for it in the script. ='(

EDIT2: The title of chapter 149 (thanks to Anon and other people) is "Love's Invasion <3 Armageddon". This has been corrected in the latest update.

Current Status

149 - Translated. Proofreading!!
150 - Translated. Finished lettering, SFX ~80%.
151 - Translated. All done!!

Explanation

You guys really do deserve an explanation. We're soooooooo late, because a lot of stuff came up at once: cleaners going on vacation all at the same time and starting summer classes, and people disappearing and reappearing left and right.

I really do apologise, but as the editor and not a guy who knows a whole lot about Japanese / has a lot of skill when it comes to redraws, there is not a whole lot I could do.

So sorry. We should get the next chapter or two up in the next week or so.

Birthday Gift

Wewt wewt.

I'm 23 today, it was just Memorial Day yesterday, and we have 3 chapters for you (and Mahou-X will probably follow up with the next 3 so it's 6 for you lucky folks!).

Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD:

143

144

145


I'm in a reflective mood tonight, so I'm going to reflect on what's happened with Yankee Goon since we began to help scanlate this manga. Cue the wavy water transition and the harp sound effect. It seems like forever ago, but we first uploaded our translations with chapter 63, on the 23rd of December, 2009. That's about a year and five months ago. Since then we and Mahou-X have managed to reach chapter 145! That's 82 chapters as of this posting - 82 chapters in 73 weeks, about 1.12 chapters a week. So we do in fact release a bit faster than the weekly chapters!

With the manga ending at 211, that means there's 66 chapters left. And, at a rate of about 1.12 chapters a week, that's about 59 more weeks. Sure it sounds like a lot, but hey, that means you'll have new Yankee-Kun every week (or ... 6 every month, depending on whether or not one group or the other gets tied up in REAL LIFE SHIT), for more than another year or thereabouts. We'll be able to "delay" the "end" of the manga (in English at least) for that long, so that's nice. And considering it was only first picked up for scanlations about a year after it had already been serialized, you really can't fault those of us who picked it up after it had already started.

Anyways, it's been a lot of work, but super rewarding. I'm looking forward to finishing working on YK&MC and to further collaborations with Mahou-X.

DrSunshine

EDIT: Shit. I meant to introspect and say profound words about my experience so far as Chief Editor / Head Sorta Guy of YG, but, being a math/science kind of fella I ended up writing a report instead. D:

EDIT2: Woops. Stoichiometry fail. 66 chapters /1.12 chapters/week = 59 weeks. Haha.

Latest Chapter in Chinese

Can any of y'all read Chinese?

Cuz here's the latest chapter that the Chinese scanlators have done.

Spoilers: It looks like a timeskip, and Chiba and Kumagawa have totally gotten together. Yey. :3 And still no Adachi in sight! What the fuck! And why is everyone all like "GYAA" at Shinagawa? Fff, I'm going nuts about this manga ending so soon.

Wellp.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-05-10/yankee-kun-to-megane-chan-school-manga-ends-on-may-18

Apparently, next week will be the last YK&MC EVER.

I'm hoping that it's at least a longer chapter than usual, because there's a shitload of plot threads to tie up.

...

And they have to fuckin' kiss goddamnit whyyy

Sorry About The Delay

But here's Chapter 139.

Again, many apologies to everyone who loves YK&MC, it's near the end of the semester for myself and most of my college-going crew here at Yankee-Goon, and that means FINALS.

It's in Mahou-X's court for now!

Cheers.

Chapter 138

PUNCH THE DEVIL!! YEAH!!!

Click to download.

Sorry it's late. These chapters have had a shitload of huge sound effects to clean and redraw.

Belated #137

Sorry for the delay, guys. People got busy with school all at once (including me).

Click to Download. Or don't click to not Download, if you're into that kind of thing.

Chapter 134 - A Mahou-X/Yankee Goon Collab

HOLY SHIT. Clark Kent is SUPERMAN!??!?! WTFFFFFFF--

Download

A Mahou-X and Yankee Goons collab special! We helped contribute to the editing and proofreading, they did the translation and SFX cleaning.

It's kinda crazy how close the two groups have become. They picked up our SFX translations, and we picked up most of their fonts. Just about the only way you can tell who's doing what is by looking at the font used for the title pages and whether it's "Hana Adachi" (YG) or "Adachi Hana" (MX).

ARGH SHINAGAWA!!! Chapter 133

You should all be making this face as you read this.

And, no, the title is not "Argh, Shinagawa".

Click to download~

HEH HEH HEH

>:}

FYI, Jverreuil of Mahou-X and I were talking one night and she said she was thinking of stretching this out over three weeks. Our translator, Kusaru, said she wanted to release chapter 133 page by page.

Love you guys.

Chapter 132 - Beginning of Painfully Stupid Arc

You'll get it when you read the chapter.

Get it here, folks.

Chapter 131

Get it while it's hot, folks!!!

(btw, sorry for yelling at some of you last time. We are doing our best!!)

Translation Speed

Hi Anonymous guys:

Anonymous said...

We'd have 'em sooner if you guys didn't assimilate and shoot down other teams' attempts to scanlate your namesake.

Also, just because something used to be worse doesn't mean it's good now.

So far as I recall, guys like amasokid and the guy who did the bonus chapters were one-time, single-person jobs who popped in, did a few, but were never heard from again, even after we contacted them and asked for their help to share the burden.

The idea was that we'd split up the work between these loners, Mahou-X, and ourselves. However, each of the loners more or less faded away after doing a few chapters, and we've never heard from them again.

Let me be quite clear: I would be overjoyed if there was, literally, a confederation of, like 5 different groups, all working on YK&MC simultaneously. At 3 chapters per group, we could do batches of 15. At a rate of 15 chapters scanned per month, assuming 4 new chapters a month from a weekly manga, that works out to a net of 11 per month. We are currently about 73 chapters behind. That means it would a mere 8 months to completely catch up. Less than a year!

Pretty much everyone at SomethingAwful thinks that turf wars over 'scanlation rights' is a bunch of stupid crap. In fact, that's why Yankee Goons doesn't put up any of those obnoxious "don't leech or rehost or reupload our stuff guys!!" signs. We want you to distribute this, because it's stealing, anyway! :P

I'll tell you why we were looking to coordinate with the "new guys". It's because of a very simple reason. It's not because we feel "proprietary" about YK&MC. It's because several people working on the same chapters at the same time is incredibly inefficient. If the new guys had communicated with us prior to releasing, we could have avoided doing the chapters they had translated and moved ahead. Or they could have translated later chapters. To do it any other way, in which the supply of dedicated scanlators is limited, but the demand for new chapters is great, is essentially irrational.

But where is the commitment, people?? Where is the quality control? The worst manga reading experience I've ever had was reading through One Piece and struggling to get through ~300 chapters of barely-comprehensible Engrish and scans that looked like they were taken with a mobile phone camera. Does the end really justify the means here?

If you would like to prove me wrong, I would like to challenge you to create a few scanlation groups of your own -- with quality that matches or exceeds Mahou-X and Yankee-Goons. That means make it read like an official manga release you'd see on the shelves here in the West, with good-quality writing, distinct character voices, sound effects and signs translated and redrawn, the works. Gather together someone who can proofread, a translator, and some cleaners. Once you do, report back to us, telling us you're ready to translate -- this is so we can coordinate so that two groups don't accidentally overlap and translate the same chapter, which would be a waste of everyone's time and energy.

Let's create a massive effort to catch up before the manga finishes serialization.

Go on. I dare you. A challenge like this can only have positive benefits to all.

Chapter 127: Stop Your Complaining, Stupid Readers

Remember that not much more than a year or two ago, we were lucky to get a chapter every THREE MONTHS.

Download it, punks!!

Chapter 126

Hey guys, new chapter is out.

Miyagi kicks ass.

Chapter 125 HOLLA

They're hollerin'.

Chapter 125

Releasin' simultaneous chapters like PROS, yo!

Check out Mahou-X's 124 here!

Chapter 120 updated with POSTERS

I only just realized today that I had uploaded c120 without the volume posters and NOBODY BOTHERED TO POINT THIS OUT TO ME.

Well, this is embarrassing, but better late than never, eh?

Click me for happiness.