Who'd Guess It Would Be So Hard?

I've loved reading manga for as long as I can remember (which, granted, doesn't say much since my memory sucks, but it's been at least a decade), and over the couple of months, I've gotten the desire to do something involving scanlations, because that's mostly what I read, since it's the latest stuff from Japan. It started when someone on 4chan's /x/ (paranormal) board said they wanted to translate Junji Ito's Hellstar Remina. I offered to help, and the anonymous translator said it'd be great if I could clean all the pages so he wouldn't have to. All I did was white out the text in the bubbles, no getting rid of text over pictures or anything like that. I did it in MS Paint. It was kind of fun, to be a part of something that a lot of people would enjoy.

Unfortunately, the anonymous translator never released Remina, and I have no idea what became of him/her, but that's not important right now.

Today, I was checking out MangaHelpers, and I saw that they had interviewed translators HisshouBuraiKen and Cnet128. At the end of his interview, cnet mentioned that he'd like someone to make a scanlation of the first chapter of Ice Revolution with his translation, since the only available scanlation of it has an inferior translation. "This is my chance!" I thought. "It won't be impossible for me to take his translation and put it on the raw, and they're both easily available here on MangaHelpers!"

I knew it would be hard, but I didn't think it'd be as hard as it is. What type of font to use, what size font to use - first decisions to make and already some trouble. But the big problem, comes from text that's not in a bubble but on the page. What do I do? Just put a box over it, as long as it doesn't really change the picture? How do I make that transparent box I sometimes see? Should I actually edit out the Japanese characters and try to redraw the image? I have MS Paint, and I'm not that good at using it!

Though I'm still unsure of the answers to those questions, I did the first page, and I'd like to know what you guys think.

Raw image:

Image with translation:


The only real difference between the two is the bottom panel. In the original, the text is on the picture, but I didn't know what to do, so I just put a box over the text and put the translation.

Does it look alright? Does it look like crap? I'd like to know. Constructive criticism is welcome.

PS - Sorry for the giant wall of text, but I felt like telling a story and not just asking for help.

I've been practicing my cleaning for a while now, and yeah, it ain't easy. Been trying to erase and redraw those text-over-picture characters that seem to dominate alot of manga. Ever tried cleaning a chapter of akumetsu? Dear gods. It's like having to redraw an entire page -_-.

That said, it doesn't look bad. The font you picked is alright and seems to fit in, even if you lazied out on that last panel. The one thing I would change there is to add a black frame around the white stuff, elsewise it looks too obvious that you just put that box there yourself.

[size=10]Well, I think the font is good. I'm not the type who needs a fancy font when reading. And I think the bottom of the image, the part that was covered, looks good as well.

However, here are a few Suggestions.

Maybe you can put a border around the white block with text (on the bottom of the page, that way it looks like the first two). I don't know why but I think it'd look better that way.

And though I'm no editor myself, another suggestion would be to download a program called GIMP (if you have the time and space on your machine). It's a free program that's relatively easy to use. I believe there's a tool... Unfortunately, I can't even remember the name of it. But yes, there's a tool.. and what this tool does is enable you to smudge the image/move parts of the image around. If used correctly, you could easily put the text on the image and make it look as though the image was never really touched.

And finally, if you don't go with the suggestion mentioned above. There's Lunapic.com. It's a simple site and using it, I think you'll be capable of putting text on images without a white box in the background.

Just suggestions. I believe the first suggestion would be best. But who knows, maybe other members can give you a few helpful ideas/tips.

Oh and good luck with it, maybe they'll use your image.[/h]

edit: Late Post. Lol, I suppose the border/frame idea is a good one though.

The image you did was good except for the last frame where you forgot to put in the black frame.

it honestly looks like an amateur did it. no offense dude. I'm not saying i can do any better either. the bottom piece needs to be fixed

Try this font instead of the one you're using, it's the most common one used by scanlators.

it's not that bad jebus, you used a matching font IMO
but it'll be much better if you cna edit the text without bubbles (though i know that it's hard >__>)

It's not the best I've seen, but it pretty good. Cept for that Last frame.
But I guess that would be the hardest part of all..

But if your gonna continue, good luck. and Practice lots~

I think it looks fine. Though the last text on the bottom still bugs me. Maybe adding a border to it to make it look like the other text boxes would help.

Thanks. I was wondering what font they used. I just picked Arial because it's better than Times New Roman and is commonly used.

So, it seems that the biggest problem is that the bottom panel doesn't have a border. That's easy to fix.



I'd really like to be able to just remove the original text and not get rid of any of the artwork, but I don't want to spend hours just to do that. It's not that big of a deal. If it was something more than just part of a skating rink, that'd be different, but it's nothing important, so I think leaving a box works fine. Hopefully, there isn't a lot of that sort of thing in the chapter. I don't believe there is.

I tried that site HentaiElder posted, but it seems to work just like MS Paint, only in a browser. If there's a way to remove just the text and replace it with other text, I can't find it. I might try GIMP later on, but I don't want to install and learn a program right now. The raws look fantastic, so I don't need to do a lot to get the translation on the pages.

tsuyoshiro, you've worked on Akumetsu? I love that series! And yeah, I feel bad for anyone cleaning that series. That's a tough job.



Well, I am an amateur. I don't expect it to really look great. But I've found that with scanlations, the quality of the translation is often more important than the quality of the cleaning and typesetting (is that what it's called?), as long as the raws were of good quality, that is. I'm not sure if anyone agrees with that, so I'll still try to make the pages look as good as I can, but I've read a lot of series where the cleaning and typesetting were a little below average, and I was still able to enjoy the series just fine.

Ok, I know now I'm just being picky, but you should also center that text in the last box so it meshes with the other boxes and isn't touching the edge like that. Naturally, this is a purely aesthetic preference of mine, so I wouldn't worry about it.

I tried to have it centered, but typing letters on an image is retarded with MS Paint, so it's unbelievably hard. Fortunately, I remembered (long after I did the page, unfortunately) that I can copy that little box and then move it around to make it look better.

I'm planning to redo the first page with the advice you all have given me, and I'm feeling more optimistic that I can do this. At least it isn't unbearable. :) Thanks, everybody.

I guess that's one of your main problems, the fact that you use mspaint. At the very least, switch to paint.net found here. It's free, it's better than mspaint, and it's a pretty small program that won't hog your HD space.

Thanks. All I've ever known about is MS Paint and Photoshop, which is a bit too big and requires a bit too much learning for me.