Your fortune: Very Bad Luck

I always wondered this myself.
Also 200get.

>>199
Have you ever considered that a scanlator might have other interests?
That they might have periods they don't feel that scanlating is interesting?
Or that they simply all got gf's alltogether?

The fansubbers don't owe you anything, therefore they can do a chapter/volume when they want.
Most of them also have more than one project, and depending on their working style, some people do rather work on one project at the time.

The official translations of Genshiken vol9 are coming in the fall. It's easier to just wait for the scans after that.

NHK, I'd like to see translated quicker, but I understand it's kind of difficult.

It doesn't take long to do a slapdash job. To do a more thorough job, converting sound effects, signs, and everything else outside the speech bubbles, takes more time and skill. You can see the difference in results just browsing the IItran imageboard.
And then, if it's larger than a one-man team, add internal discord to the RL issues like >>201 said.

This is one of those reasons why I'd love to learn Japanese.

>>207

Yeah, despite people saying it's for fags, it does seem a relatively worthwhile language to learn. You can get around in Japan, use manga/anime/games before they're out in English, perhaps impress the ladies (although it will probably work against you if you already suck at life, and this is a chan), do fansubs etc

Japanese isn't all that difficult to learn; it's just memorizing all the kana and kanji (esp. the kanji) are a bitch. It has a fairly regular grammar, too. If you figure out the thought process that went into making the words, the language is quite a bit easier to pick up.

http://pepper.idge.net/japanese/

>Yeah, despite people saying it's for fags, it does seem a relatively worthwhile language to learn.

Oh for the love of Cracky... what the FUCK was that?

First off, it's probably one of the most complicated languages out there, because it has almost NO rules to how to categorize kanji and you essentially have to learn few thousand very fucking similiar pictures. As if that wasn't enough, what ARE applications of Japanese? If you want asian language, chinese has much bigger population and China is much more important than Japan, spanish is being spoken by one third of the world(Or so they claim), english is a given... but you want to learn the hardest language ever conceived just to read comics?
In that case you must be an otaku, which is synonymous with complete failure.

>>231 just because it's a somewhat difficult language to pick up doesn't mean you have to go on and belittle the language. An otaku would be more than glad to learn Japanese to read comics and it's not synonymous with failure. If anything your a failure because you're here though making fun of otaku. Why the FUCK are you here then?!

> I'm talking about stuff like Genshiken or NHK or even fucking Hellsing.

Maybe it takes so long because the only people translating that are fucking teenager warez kiddies. Those are all licensed, and any decent translator will not touch them.

>>231
lazy fag is lazy

.. and plain

>just because it's a somewhat difficult language to pick up doesn't mean you have to go on and belittle the language.

Why wouldn't I? We stopped using pictographs, oh, about three thousand years ago. And by we I mean Civilization of the West of course. Silly asians cling too much to the tradition to move on to infinitely superior alphabet.

And if you think everyone coming here is an otaku, or that being otaku is not in fact a failure, I do believe you need to go and review the definition of it.

> How fucking hard is it, really? It's ~120 pages.

I was an editor for a few years, and it's a fairly tedious and thankless "hobby", especially if you care about doing a good job. Same goes for translators.

Suffice to say, if a series is licensed many groups will just drop it. Scanlation is _not fun_, so there's no point in working on a series that will be done by a commercial house anyway.

Of course, then there are series like Naruto which continue to be scanlated, but Naruto appeals to kids with far too much spare time on their hands, thus keeping a steady supply of fresh meat for the scanlation meat-grinder. A big head-start helps too.

>>248
go back to bed. your ego has no power here.

>>276

It took you a month and that's all you came up with?

>>299
It took you a month and that's all you came up with?

>I was an editor for a few years, and it's a fairly tedious and thankless "hobby"

Honestly though, woult it be suddenly worth it if dozen hundred thousand people wrote you a "Tanks" email?
You know there are people out there who are thankful for being able to read it. I would've thought it's the reason people do it in the first place.

>>304
Ah, but it would still be tedious.

you guys are anime fags. problem solved.

You're a troll. Problem solved.

>>199

This is a really good question. As a former translator whose days were short-lived due to professional demands, I can offer you my opinion. I can't promise it's true for all or even most translators, but it was true for me.

If you can read the source material, it is "effortless" (relatively speaking) and you read it as quickly as your eyes and brain will let you. Translating for the masses is a whole other matter; you have to find the right words which both preserve the original meaning and make sense in the new language. This is especially difficult when translating from a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language like Japanese into an SVO language like English because so many "hanging clauses" don't carry over perfectly. And it's not just grammatical issues; the Japanese have words which mean more two ideas at the same time for English speakers (like "dame" or "ikenai"), and the same is true in reverse.

All of this makes the translation process — especially if you give a shit about your audience and want to deliver top-notch quality — an incredibly long and tedious one for most people. So most people either (a) drop out (like I did) or (b) take their sweet time with it so as to NOT burn out like the others. And then, every once in a million years, you get somebody like the translators for Dattebayo who put out highly-accurate speed subs. Because they're just gifted like that.

In an ideal world, everything you ever wanted translated would be translated by somebody like Dattebayo — quickly and accurately. But in the real world, people like that are few and far between, and for the rest of us, it's either "take it slow but do a good job" or "pick up the pace and to hell with accuracy."

Personally, my days of being a translator had only just begun this year; however, I had to put them on hold because of medical school, and it looks like it's going to stay that way for the next four years minimum. Could you say I'm being selfish? Sure you could. But you know what? It's my life, not yours, and if I have to choose between failing out of medical school so I can translate manga for the Interwebs or becoming a doctor and just keeping my 1337 Japanese reading skillz0rz all to myself, I'm going to choose the latter 10 times out of 10. This is the part where I said "I'm not going to say this is true for everyone, but it's my reason." And I wonder just what percentage of former translators are like me, and give up scanlating/subbing because of professional demands.

Peace, and good luck on getting the subs & scanlations you want asap.

>>231 First off, it's probably one of the most complicated languages out there, because it has almost NO rules to how to categorize kanji and you essentially have to learn few thousand very fucking similiar pictures.

lol wut

but you want to learn the hardest language ever conceived just to read comics?

This + the statement you made above = you have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Japanese is a hell of a lot easier than English for loads of reasons; the orthography may be the ONE AND ONLY area in which Japanese is more difficult, and even then it's not as if there's no way of categorizing kanji. We do it by radicals; we do it by onyomi; we do it by number of strokes; we do it by meanings; and these are just the four most common ways of grouping kanji.

Because they're either unwilling or unable to do it faster for free. It's not hard to understand.

>Japanese is a hell of a lot easier than English for loads of reasons

BTW Scanlating isn't just about translating. There's shitloads to do. First you have to scan all the fucking pages now that takes ages and is boring as hell. Not just any raws will do, they have to be large res and high quality too. Aside from translating there's also loads of editing to do to the graphics and it all has to be done exactly the same way as all the other 100 pages, someone has to quality check and fix the translation, more editing... etc. etc. etc.

Bottom line is. I'm sure everyone who does scanlating has another life/job/school to worry about and those things always come first. It's a team effort most of the time and if one person has life issues everything is delayed.

And in the end, what do they get from it? Shitloads of fans whining for the next fucking release. No gratitude no nothing because humans only make noise when they have something to complain about ffs. I have seen this firsthand. So FYI OP, This may come as a surprise but YOU are not their first priority. They scanlate whatever the fuck they like and many are not interested in the most popular mangas out there.

Japanese isn't that hard to learn but english is definatelly much easier and more straightforward. There are so many petty rules in japanese language, how to do it the most correct and polite way possible...because you can't even fucking directly say NO to a japanese person. You have to go around it somehow. There are a lot of cultural things to understand beforehand.

>>231
Believe me, there are more difficult languages in the world than japanese. Perhaps to an unilingual American all foreign languages are difficult... or to someone who knows just barely how to spell his own native language and learned (only to subsequently forget) a smidgen of spanish in primary education.

Kanji are a bitch though. Ever wonder why the nintendo DS sells like hotcakes despite its meager hardware? There's a japanese dictionary for it with handwriting recognition, that's why.

>>199
Super gay?

>>409
No way. Japanese may have complex keigo, but English is way more complex overall because:
a) for the same tense, we conjugate different verbs different ways depending on the subject. Japanese does not (e.g. "I do, he does" isn't a problem in Japanese)
b) for the same tense, we conjugate different verbs different ways even if it's the same subject (e.g. the past of "I fight" is "I fought", but the past of "I light" is "I lit")
c) for different tenses, all Hell breaks loose in English (e.g. "I go" turns into "I went". WTF. In Japanese, ikimasu becomes ikimashita. Simple. Easy to see the preserved root. "I do" to "I did." "I buy" to "I bought." "I live" to "I lived.")

Where Japanese is more difficult than English is keigo and orthography. THAT'S IT. In every other sense – verb conjugations, volume of words in the language, etymologies, immediate accessibility to scientific terms – English is way harder!

In my opinion the language you first learned have an important meaning as to what other language is easy or not to learn. As I was brought up with swedish I thought english was a piece of cake and that spanish was just a little harder but I know that japanese is harder to learn since it differse much from swedish, english and spanish. Sure english conjugate verbs differently for each person and japanese doesn't but that is what's hard to get used to. After using almost the same rules in more than one language the brain have a tension of sticking with that.

This thread is still alive?

>>576

I don't give a fuck about grammar, because it's dickwaving about rules. If you want to go technical, english has 24 different tenses. Except it's really 12 and passive form, and from these 12 about 5 are commonly used and you can go by changing your sentences to use only these.

What you fail to realize is that to read japanese you need to remember thousands of images, which are very fucking similiar to each other too, when in every other civilized language you just put words together from an alphabet. Latin alphabet has 23 letters, add a safety margin of 10 for various "non-unicode" languages and you have 33 pictures you need to express everything you want.

I read (or heard) that the average japanese person is around 20 years old when he/she first can read a newspaper without checking through books all the time for finding a sign's meaning?

>>576
You're cherrypicking a few irregular verbs to prove your point. The majority of English verbs follow patterns, and there certainly are irregular verbs in Japanese as well. Yes, there are more irregular verbs in English than Japanese, but if you're going to make a point you've got to be specific.

a lot of texts are informal to begin with
the translation ends up informal as well

>>583
I'm presenting you with problems that Japanese graduate students have voiced to me and I am sympathetic with. You can accuse me of cherry picking verbs all you like, but I think most people will agree that I shouldn't have to stand here and pick the cherry tree of every last cherry before I can retire. If you'd prefer I list every English verb, I could do that, but I'm not going to for perfectly sane reasons. You and I both know I could keep listing words all day long in English whose conjugations aren't predictable and simply have to be rote memorized. That's what makes English such an exciting language from a linguistic POV – so much evolutionary history contained in our words!

All I can say is, I'm glad I learned Japanese as a second language and not the other way around. Would have been a nightmare to have to go from Japanese to English. Absolute nightmare.

>>578

>>What you fail to realize is that to read japanese you need to remember thousands of images, which are very fucking similiar to each other too, when in every other civilized language you just put words together from an alphabet.

Yes, because somebody who speaks, reads, and writes Japanese is likely to forget such things as the existence of Chinese characters. My bad, thanks for reminding me!

>>Latin alphabet has 23 letters, add a safety margin of 10 for various "non-unicode" languages and you have 33 pictures you need to express everything you want.

In alphabetic orthographies, there is no meaning of a word contained in the orthography. It is nothing but an arrangement of letters, and it's up to the reader to know how to decode those letters in the first place for him to form a sensible word. In a pictorial orthography (like Chinese characters), you have to invest a surplus of time and effort in the initial learning of radicals and the basic 200 characters, an investment which (according to you) makes the system already inferior to a Latin-based alphabet. But the benefits are reaped in the long run when a child of 10 or even 8 can tell you the meaning of the word "deciduous" just by looking at the characters used. An English-speaking child could never do that; he'd either have to be told what the word means, or else he would have already been told at some prior point in his life what it means. For there is nothing in those letters 'd e c i d u o u s' that would clue you in that it has anything to do with trees, or more specifically trees whose leaves are shed in autumn; yet the meaning is right there in how the Chinese and Japanese write it. And the kid would be able to read it already because, ages ago, he learned those basic drawings for "tree", "leaf", and "to drop or to fall", all of which are used in the writing of "deciduous." These are characters Western students of Japanese would learn in their first year of study.

Do you mean to tell me that Japanese children don't start writing until the age of 9 or 10? Or perhaps you mean to tell me that English-speaking children know words like "deciduous" from the age of 5? Because if it's neither, then we've reached the conclusion that there is at least some merit to using a pictorial orthography over an alphabet. Some. I didn't say an alphabet was rubbish, but I reject your arrogant claim that kanji is. There's a good reason the Westernized Japanese have held on to kanji for the last 50 years despite adopting McDonald's, Madonna, and four poster beds, and it's got nothing to do with national pride or heritage. Kanji obviously works whether you care to admit it or not.

>>587
You can still often infer meaning from many English words by identifying common root forms. Not that it's an exact parallel.

http://www.friends.hosted.pl/redrim/Reading_Test.jpg

There's a "file" field here for a reason.

>>589
Man, even though it was disproven days after publication, this is one of those things that just REFUSES to go away! >_< Anyway, the paper isn't being completely straightforward with you. It claims that "all that needs to happen is that the first and last letter stay put; anything else is acceptable and you'll still be able to read it," but that's not what their sample words are actually representative of. If you look closely, you'll notice that there is not one instance of complete vowel-consonant segregation with Front-Back inversion. In other words ...

• they wrote "Cambridge" as "Cmabrigde" and not "Cmbrgdaie" or even "Caibrmgde". Their version only has two conservative typos (an a/m swap and a g/d swap) instead of a radical letter rearrangement.
• they wrote "letters" as "ltteers" (a simple moving of the double t from in between the e's to outside of them) instead of as "lreetts"

So on and so forth. When you consider what Cambridge University's motive was for conducting this research, it soon becomes apparent why all of their examples resemble probable typographical errors and not (as they claim) the full gamut of permutations where only the first and last letter positions are conserved. Their purpose (if you recall) was to find out why it is that the human mind can read a word with a typographical error almost as fluidly (if not precisely as fluidly) as it would the correctly-spelled word. (I'm sure we've all experienced this phenomenon before. It does make for interesting research!) So of course they examined typo-like words. Excited with what they found, they (very presumptuously) lay claim to the fact that only the first and last letters matter. This is faux science and should not be excused, even if it is coming out of an institution as revered as Cambridge.

All you need to do to fully convince yourself of the ridiculousness of their claim is to consider a lengthy word like "sesquipedalian." I'm sure the Cambridge team would've spelled it as "seqsuipedailan," instead of something like "ssqpdleuieaian". The former misspelling represents a believable series of typing errors; the latter one, while improbable, is the proper test necessary to prove their claim.

The Cambridge paper (and the controversy which followed it) revealed that so long as the overall integrity of the word is preserved, spelling is irrelevant. But all words do have a breaking point beyond which they cannot be solved fluidly and must be decoded methodically. And that "integrity" continues to be an area of interest for linguists.

>And the kid would be able to read it already because, ages ago, he learned those basic drawings for "tree", "leaf", and "to drop or to fall", all of which are used in the writing of "deciduous."

Last I heard, each kanji has several different meanings(which is the main flaw of all ideograms) which pretty much renders your whole argument obsolete. Who cares if a child can put together "leaf" "fall" and "tree" if these can also several different things and it can put it together in other ways?

And it's obvious that kanji works, but alphabet works simply better.

>Last I heard, each kanji has several different meanings(which is the main flaw of all ideograms) which pretty much renders your whole argument obsolete.

That's why you write in a sentence instead of a word. When you only say "like", it can mean "you like her" or "you are like her". Japanese words will have same amount of confusion like English if it doesn't use kanji. It takes more time to learn Kanji, but it offers more specific terminology.

>>592
It renders nothing useless. Don't you get it? Even if each kanji has multiple meanings (e.g. 高 could mean tall, high, or expensive depending on the context), seeing it in a word still gives a Japanese kid three guesses as to the word's meaning. Whereas seeing the word "deciduous" tells an English-speaking kid nothing. Absolutely NOTHING. He has to ask somebody what the word means or look it up in a dictionary. So the Japanese child is already light-years ahead of the English child.

In other words, you're nagging that the Japanese kid has narrowed down a 32-bit password to four possibilities and that that's not good enough because he shouldn't have to "guess and check" all four possibilities to see which one is correct, but then you suggest that the English kid, who would have to guess all 2³² possibilities by hand because he's got zero clues, is somehow better off. (rolls eyes)

eptoixcen
pcosesinrg
lsroes

your miss-understanding the argument.

the idea is that if 'a person' not nessisarily a kid, knows what a word means.

the idea of a character having several possible meanings (as stated) is a bad thing. as according to you yourself ". 高 could mean tall, high, or expensive depending on the context" as an example...
whereas as another example deciduous can mean only 1 thing.

so the person in the japanese sence would still have to guess the meaning even knowing the word, whereas the english person would instantly know the word. (in these cases)

What? We have exactly the same thing in English, and in fact most languages. They're called homonyms. You can figure them out by context, can't you?

Blast from the past

>>594

Nice example, where the Japanese kid already recognizes the character, where the english speaker simply doesn't know the word in question. Totally analogous...

>>199
unless you are paying these people, you need to ask this question more nicely.
Also, they have to keep track of bubbles, erase the japanese, stay clear, include explanatory notes, convey dialects, edit the text to fit, etc. and as the credits in every download explain, they are always understaffed.

Go download queen's knight or Corseltel no Ryuujitsushi scanlations if you want to see what rush jobs look like you inconsiderate.

>>199
The reason you're not seeing NHK scanlations is because its published in English by Tokyopop.

>>1225

I don't know what's worse, that you're replying to a year old post, or that I'mactually still here to read it.