Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Recently I've been translating the manga "Tou-chan wa Itsumo Shigotoba" for a bit of fun. I've done several other JP>EN translations in the past, namely short doujin work or one-off twitter comics, but this is the first time I'm doing a full serialised manga. I'm uploading it to Mangadex so you read it here if you'd like. It's a slice-of-life 4koma recording the mangaka's every day life with his wife and two daughters, it's very sweet.
I imagine most people who visit this site also read manga, and the majority of that manga is probably translated through private "scanlation" efforts from online groups. It's a strange little economy operating in the greyzone of copyright law, by dedicated teams of unpaid volunteers who run sophisticated pipelines to produce translations often of a quality on-par with the professionals at much faster speeds. I'm by no means a part of that world, I don't hand the time or resources to dedicate to such a hobby, but I have has the chance to poke my nose into it and see behind the curtain a little in the years I've been around these people.
As the portmanteau "scanlation" implies, it is a two main stage process with scanning, followed by translation. Traditionally the "scanning" stage requires an agent in Japan. Someone who is able to buy the physical release directly whether that be a magazine or tankobon from retailers, or doujinshi/printwork from events. These products usually end up having to be sacrificial; the only way to get a good scan of a book is to flatten its spine, and often even cutting out the spine to split them into individual pages is necessary. These scans, or "raws" as they're usually called, normally aren't directly associated with a specific translation group, but have rather just been uploaded for the Japanese market, or just because someone happened to have it. Some groups however, especially those who work on popular weekly releases like Shounen Jump, do indeed have agents in Japan who will provide only that group with the raws. Nowadays digital raws are becoming ever more common, being ripped from digital releases or apps, but print media remains the most common.
Once these raws are digitised, they usually need to be cleaned of scanning artefacts before translation work can commence. Where digital rips are available they are almost always preferred as you don't have to go through the painstakingly boring effort of cleaning, which personally I think is a bit of a shame as it takes away part of the connections between the Western otaku sphere and the Japanese. Once the raws are clean and publicly accessible, a group will often "claim" a manga by declaring their intention to translate it, or implicitly do so on release of an initial chapter. The general etiquette is to avoid working of manga that are already being translated by others, but sometimes "translation wars" do occur with groups racing to "snipe" releases to claim some form of prestige. Just as it was back in the day with the anime fansubbers, jokes are often made of the "scanlation cartels" who control the flow of raws and punish renegade groups who don't abide by their claims on series. These are mostly just jokes, but the sort of person who gets into the scene is often the sort that can take things far too seriously...
Usually the translation process itself is split into translation into pure-text, followed by a typesetting stage placing the words back into the images. For bigger groups these two jobs will usually be done by separate people, although even for solo projects like my own they'll be completed as separate tasks rather than concurrently. I found the best way is to write the translation down into a textfile as you read it through for the first time until at least the end of a chapter, giving you the opportunity to go back and change previous phrases if the context changes later on. This is important as there is grammatical context required to create a good English sentence which won't necessarily be given by the equivalent Japanese sentence. Gender of people involved is a common example, but it can be something as simple even as the subject of a sentence or the setup for a punchline in a few panels time. If you were to translate directly into the images you would run into such problems very fast (as well as other logistical issues). This is one of the main reasons machine-translation is still so inferior at manga translation than human, it is very difficult for an MTL LLM to take future context into account without building an entire framework for it, which as far as I know nobody has done yet.
After translation comes the often underestimated task of typesetting. It's certainly more of an art than a science; to fit new English sentences into gaps designed for a totally different language is difficult for several reasons. Japanese is basically always written vertically in manga, while its hardly every appropriate to emulate this in English. Japanese words have far fewer characters, with the density of information being considerably higher per character used (mostly just because of kanji as vocab, actual Japanese grammar can be quite lengthy). There's no one-size-fits-all solution, and it's a fun challenge to work out inventive ways to squeeze in your desired translation in while keeping the original meaning. Sometimes synonyms have to be switched around to fit a certain bubble (although I'm a firm believer that synonyms don't exist as there's always a subtle difference in meaning), and sometimes a non-vital clause needs to be dropped here or there for expediency. This dance brings me onto another interesting (and controversial topic): the translator as an artist.
When we read a translated work we have no interest in the translator, we simply want a perfect recreation of the original authors intent in a language we can understand. This is pretty obviously impossible, and the work will always be transformed in some-way by the translator. Many translators take this unfortunate fact incorrectly in my opinion, and lean into impressing their own ego into their translation rather than trying to hide it. Take the myriad "feminist translations" of the Greek Classic for example, the translator placing their pride and ego above the actual task at hand. While when it is made clear that the intent is to transform the work in your own image from the get go it might be permissible (although I would hesitate to even call them "translations" at that point), in my opinion to deliberately poison someone else's art with your own ideas is highly disrespectful to the original author.
My philosophy is that a translator should endeavour to be invisible, their imprint on the work minimised so that the reader forgets it is even there. In Japanese Kabuki Theatre there is the concept of "黒衣" (Kuroko), these are black-clad stagehands which help move props around the stage. The idea is that the audience understands that the kuroko are "not there", and the play should be watched without considering them or their actions. It is not the kuroko's aim to be noticed, quite the opposite, a master kuroko will be able to disappear even while in sight of everyone on a stage. Their presence is a necessity the impact of which should be minimised. Such is the role of the translator.
The final step is of course publication. The world of scanlation publication is in a massive period of flux at the moment, with many of the big aggregator sites going offline or being scraped off most of their series. Batoto has been around for a very long time, and its overnight disappearance was more shocking to a lot of people than mangadex's downfall. But even as these aggregators disappear, the hydra grows more heads. Once a scanlation is online it can basically never disappear, whether its held on some torrent listing, a private P2P tracker or even FTP dump site (all hail madokami), it will be somewhere.
