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What Is Scanlation?!
Chara has made this page so that people will stop wondering, and
so that those who think they know the process but don't will once
and for all be set straight. Here I will go through the steps of
scanlating as they would happen in an ideal/typical group, but it
is not precisely how things go on in Be With You Scans.
This is so that evil-doers can't infiltrate us that easily, and
also so that those learning here acquire a general knowledge of most
groups, not just us.
BASICS
Raw: When a manga has just been scanned, it is called a
raw. A raw is the manga still in its language. Ideally, raws are in
Japanese, but there could also be Chinese raws, Korean raws,
or even French raws. Scanning English raws is very rare and more
illegal than usual.
HQ and LQ: This usually refers to where the scans came
from. LQ (low quality) is when the manga has been scanned from the magazine;
for example, Naruto runs in Shounen Jump magazine one chapter a
week, and is then later released in volumes containing several
chapters. Magazine scans are usually the ones with crappy
midtones and lots of 'dust' on black areas. Many groups will wait
for the volumes to come out so they can scan that instead. Here
in Be With You Scans, we bring you the latest Tsubasa in LQ
magazine releases and later follow up with a HQ (high quality) volume scan
release (the re-edits). LQ scans are typically more
frustrating difficult to edit, but there can be a wide
range of differences in editing HQ and LQ. Some editors who
specialize in one may find it difficult to switch to the
other.
Redrawing: You've all seen those double pagers in manga.
Many people think it just comes like that. NO. No matter how well
scanned the pages were, double pagers always turn out to have a
gap between then when you try to piece them together. The gap
could be 1 cm or wider. In these cases, the editor has to
manually redraw and clone the space in, so that when they are
finished it looks like one complete, seamless image. You also
need to redraw when the artist placed Japanese text directly on the image;
you need to take the text out, redraw it, and place English text
on top. Often this is the hardest part of editing, and comes with
practise.
THE PROCESS
One: Ideally, the scanner buys a hard copy of the manga.
They melt the plastic binding of the volume/magazine with a
hairdryer (though I've heard rumors of a microwave) so that the
pages come out as unadulterated as possible, and then scan each
page with a very nice scanner. However, it is more common that
the group finds the manga online (there exist many places where
you can download a raw of the manga that someone else
professionally scanned) and use this instead. The now-digital
copy, or the raw, gets sent to the translator.
Two: The translator translates the manga. Again, ideally
the translator is Japanese-English, but Chinese-English
translators are much more common. The translation gets sent to
the proofreader, who checks the accuracy/grammar as well as consistency/flow of the script. This
is NOT merely finding spelling/grammar errors, as many people seem to think.
The completed script is sent to the editor. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION
Three: The editor cleans the raw up. They make sure the areas that
are supposed to be black are black, and the areas that are
supposed to be white, white (they usually scan in as varying
shades of gray). They take out the Japanese text and put in the
translated English text. They remove any 'dust' (gray specks on
the page that aren't supposed to be there) and if there was text
on an image, or if there was a double-pager, they will clone and redraw the page
until it looks seamless. All this is almost always done in Adobe
Photoshop. The editors may also resize the image or save it
in certain formats, so that when everything is done the filesize
is smaller for you to download. BWYS recognizes this as the
hardest job in the process, because editors frequently need
drawing skills to redraw, and it takes practise to be able to
clone well. As you can see, unlike your childhood English
classes, editing is not proofreading the script. It is
graphically fixing the actual manga artwork so that you get an
English version of how the author intended you to see their
work. Being able to white out Japanese text and paste English
text in the bubble is not enough. CLICK HERE TO SEE WHAT THEY
DO
Four: The edited manga is sent to the QC, or quality
checker. They make sure there are no typos and that the quality
of the editing is constistent and flawless enough to uphold the
group's reputation. A chapter is almost never ready for release
on the first try, so the QC sends the editor a list of things to
fix. Eventually the chapter is fit for your downloading.
Five: The finished chapter is sent to the distro; people
to put in their fserves, XDCC bots, torrents, this site gets
updated, etcetera. You may now leech.
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