Friday, August 20, 2010

Ero-Otoko's Guide to Translating and Editing



Since the ol' decensoring guide seemed to have gotten a good reception, I thought I'd add some tips for adapting ero-manga generally. Thus, the decensoring guide is now the guide to translating and editing. So, whether you're a translator, an editor, or a decensorer (or you're just curious how I do what I do) the guide ought to have some useful advice.

Enjoy.

Multiupload
E-Hentai Gallery
23 Images, 14.5mb

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

I only skimmed through your guide. I know you are damn good at what you do and I don't fault you in any way. But I wanted to take this opportunity to nitpick about scanlating in general on points I don't think you brought up.

I hate when people mess up the black/white levels too much. People with badly set monitors try to gain perfect black and white levels but don't realize they're fucking up a ton of shading while doing it. The shading closest to white basically disappears. Hayama Kotono is often guilty of this, to name one.

Resized scans. I almost always delete it immedietly if I download something resized to 1100px when the raws I got are 1600px or something. Makes me rage so hard and happens ALL THE TIME with regular manga scanlations. Probably because of people reading outdated guides from early 2000 where they recommend miniscule resolutions.

Lastly, re-saving color covers and non-edited pages only to compress them further and ruining the quality more.

Anonymous said...

Simply love it. Pure awesome.

And I agree with most of your points on translating, sad to see translating stuff painfully literally is still considered good form by A LOT of people lol.

Thought of writing something similar (albeit in text form), but you covered a lot of points already.

Anonymous said...

page 22, is missing.

2Hip

Ero-Otoko said...

Doh, thanks. It's fixed.

Thanks for comments all around.

tadanohito said...

Well done. It's good to see that I'm doing things right. (Heh heh!)

I agree 100% with your opinion of translating into natural English. The more I translate, the more I feel that way too.

Again, I have to say excellent work.

Ero-Otoko said...

@tada
What'chu talkin' 'bout? You've been "doing things right" for longer than I have (particularly in terms of natural sounding dialogue and whatnot).

Cheers, comrade.

Imari said...

You sir, are awesome. Many things that I've always thought about, particularly with regards to literalism in translating. It's something that translators have to be constantly vigilant for. And more that a few things that I've never considered before. Learning is fun!

I'd recommend that any new translator or editor should read through this when they start.

MewMew197 said...

Just wondering, what kind of fonts do you suggest for editting?

Ero-Otoko said...

Thanks for the continued comments.

I probly shoulda mentioned some suggested fonts in the guide... oh well...

Anyhow, common text fonts I use:
Digital Script
SF Toontime
Laffayette Comic Pro (actually, I haven't used this much, but I've seen a lot of translators use it, or something much like it)

SFX/flavor text fonts
(approximately ordered by frequency of usage):

Complete in Him
Straightjacket
Twelve Ton Goldfish
All Caps
Mouth Breather
DeathRattle
Smack Attack
Damn Noisy Kids
Rise Up
Badaboom
Christopherhand
Catholic School Girls
Hand of Sean
Manga Temple
Cookies
Air Cut
Brushed
LeviBrush
Wylld Stallyns
Zud Juice

...and probably some others I'm missing.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, coming across this guide is useful for someone like me.

Vinny said...

http://littlewhitebutterflies.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/rat-tail-lucky-star-file-eng-red-vodkasomeone1001/
Have you seen this? What I'm asking about is not the manga itself, but those little squares lighter or darker than the main color of that area, like in title or in their hair, on preview page. If I'm not mistaken, this happens if you save with lower color count (16-32) image, that have a lot of artifacts or just was scanned from a comic with bad paper. Anyway, the question is how to avoid it? I mean, while still saving it with low color count. Leveling most likely won't help, since it'll ruin the image in process. Obvious decision would be filling it with one color, but then there would a problem of choosing that color, and another problem is that you'll have to go through all the page with that filling tool and it could be time consuming. I suppose there must be some tool to fix that color dispersion(?) in areas with close colors. So, do you know such tool?

P.S. Even though the guide wasn't much of use for me - I don't know japanise and already have your decensoring guide - still thanks for it. But can you please add there sorce for used mangas?

Anonymous said...

Woot a wonderful guide =)
But can you say what manga are those images ? :p (especially page 5, 9 and 14 ? for the other i think i know most of them)

Ero-Otoko said...

Since I got a couple requests for it, the manga used in the guide are (in order of appearance):

(Senke Kagerou) Sweet Life Please!
(Futanarun) Futanari Senka
(Haru Wamusato) Gaman Dekinai!
(Tuna Empire) Manga Nazenani Kyoushitsu
(Shimeta Yarii) Koi Suru Houkago
(Z-Front) Pai-Rela
(Horihone Saizou) Kobin no Kami-sama
(Milk Gohan) Chijoku Gakuen 3
(Bosshi) Mizugi Kanojyo
(Kenji Kisizuka) Sex Education
Something from Yakiyama Line ("Binetsu no Mezame" I think)

...and then the ones in the decensoring portion I mentioned in the guide.

Ero-Otoko said...

Oh, also @Vinny
Yeah, I messed around with that page to see if I could do anything with it. I can't figure it out. There seems to be an adjustment in photoshop called "posterize" that does something like what you described, but the results weren't good.

As for what causes it? I'd guess it's some sort of scanning or image conversion issue, but that's outside my experience. It sounds like your guess is better than mine.

Editor said...

Nifty-assed guide.

Re: clone tool, redrawing lines and backgrounds; have you tried this 'content-aware fill' thing? I'm using the gimp plugin 'resynthesizer' (or something) and it's pretty fuckin' magic.
Say on page five, where you're replacing the out-of-balloon text (nekkid text lol), all you'd have to do is select the text, grow the selection beyond the outline, and let the computer fill it in. Probably not perfect, but put in your text and fix anything odd that still shows and, yeah. Much easier than redrawing everything, at least for me. (looking back, her hair is probably too complicated for this to be a good example, but I swear man magic).
Also great for decensoring (though I never bother with that for some reason) or fixing any random streaks or splotches. I love it.

Agree wholeheartedly on the 'natural English' topic (though I do no translate), apart from a few particular words and the suffixes and titles. I like the suffixes and titles, fear I'm coming down with the weeaboo... Take that awesome story you did that I read recently, to me 'auntie' sounds kinda weird and creepy. This's opinion, not really advice... and so pointless. Sorry, this paragraph was twice as long.

I would suggest for your guide, and for yourself I guess, looking into .pngs. Your scans are probably .jpgs to begin with, but why be part of the problem? This is not directed at you, or even the scanners but I fucking hate jpeg artifacts. Here's page three of that sweet story (thnksbtw) saved as .png (and cleaned up a bit but you don't gotta do that). It's... not much bigger. And the difference is maybe even noticeable?

Very least, I'd make a note to not save your work in progress as .jpg, that gets really messy. Also Anon's suggestion to be careful messing with the levels, I've learned this the hard way. I hope.

Totally empathize with the conflicting desires to pass on neat tips and not make an ass of yourself, by the way. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. :D

Oliver said...

I've read your guide, E-O, and I think your guide is missing two things :

- explaining how to set up a shape in which photoshop will type (more adjustable than just drawing a rectangle)
- typing along a line or a shape (useful for the cases when a SFX is inside a speech bubble)

Otherwise, thank you very much :)

Anonymous said...

Download link is dead, all multiupload links are dead, depositfiles is still there but says the file was deleted

thanks for all your efforts!

ParmShellwood said...

Thanks for your efford making this guide, Ero-Otoko!. But the link in Multy-Upload is Dead..Could you please reupload them?, Thanks in advance.

Unknown said...

Thank you for all your fine work I for appreciate it. I love adult mangas and doujins but since I don't read Japanese the only way I can truly read them other than looking at the pictures is through the efforts of people like you. I enjoyed the sample pages of your translation guide but I can't seem to open it up to read the rest of what you have done. I think there is something wrong with the link.
Thank you.