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.