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.