I just realised that, aside from my first post, we haven’t actually done any reviews of actual fansubs. The other two were just reviews of machine translations and official subs. So, to continue the trend of not doing what we initially set out to do on this blog, I figured I might review a manga scanlation today.
For the uninitiated, I’ve actually been scanlating Mieruko-chan over at MangaDex for a little while. Our release of chapter 16 was unfortunately slightly significantly delayed, so some guys from /a/ decided to pick up the slack. From what I can tell, some other guys on /a/ were unhappy with the quality so they decided to snipe them for chapter 17. Now that my group has finished our releases, I think it’s time to see how well these /a/nons held down the fort.
Chapter 16
Well, I’m on the first page and I’m already disappointed. This isn’t English, it’s Japanese written with English words because the weeb that “translated” it is just weebsplaining. “Wa” and “ara” aren’t onomatopoeic expressions that exist in English and “sensei” is not an English word. I’ve also never heard anyone so casually refer to someone’s womb. Also why is the font in that one bubble 1/4 the size of the rest? And bonus points for not taking the zero effort to mask the text on the side.
Page 2 isn’t much better. The 2nd panel straight up doesn’t make any sense. I’ve probably mentioned it in my previous post, but trailing off and expecting people to infer isn’t a thing in English like it is in Japanese. Hana is expressing reluctance at changing the baby’s diapers, so something along the lines of “aww, do I have to?” would be perfect. “That’s a bit…” doesn’t mean anything.
I’d also like to point out that “while you change her diapers” is a question that makes zero sense to me. Not to mention the entire disregard for punctuation across the page. If you really need to use an interrobang, at least write it correctly. It’s an interrobang because the interrogation mark comes before the bang. A tilde isn’t used like that in punctuation either, and what the hell is “?…”?
Anyway, we’re going to be here all day if I keep point out the same mistakes so let’s just speed it up a bit.
>automatic line breaks in typesetting
I died. So, in Japanese it’s very common to call someone’s name/title (however you refer to them) to convey emotion, as this is implied by context. This isn’t a thing in the west, though; people actually say what they think. Putting aside the seething weebery, in this case Hana is clearly upset about what she just heard. The implication is “That’s so sad, miss!”, so you would want something to that effect… Not “zenzeeii”…
What is the point of making the text vertical? And not even keeping it consistent? I get it when there are space constraints in tiny bubbles, but there’s even more space on the problem side. I don’t understand the logic here, it just hurts to read.
This one is a flat out mistranslation. Honestly, it was bound to happen. Miko is talking about changing herself and not just ignoring the ghosts like she usually does. She’s saying she could be more like Julia, or like the granny that gave her the holy bracelets (not bread, btw).
Yeet.
Is that fucking comic sans? And unlike me, Hana would never say “fuck”. Also was the moth in the vending machine or on top of the button? Make up your mind. More importantly though, I have issue with that last line. She’s literally repeating the Japanese equivalent of “let sleeping dogs lie”, which any dictionary will tell you, and it just has the object (dog) replaced with “moth”. “Let sleeping moths lie” is such an obvious conclusion to draw from this but even that was somehow messed up.
I could probably write another few paragraphs of complaints but I’m pretty done with this chapter. Let’s see how the next one fares.
Chapter 17
My first question is why are your scans so low res? Even the other anons managed to get the full res scans. And nothing on the cover is translated either. This doesn’t bode well.
Ah yes, I loved going to “shop” to get my lunch at school.
I bet you can’t say that ten times fast. It’s “chocolate chip” or “choc-chip”, you can’t half-ass it and just go in between because that’s how it is in Japanese. The word order is all messed up because it’s just copied from the Japanese too. What’s a choco chip melon? Why is “big” written at the end?
Low effort. There’s an idea in Japan where Autumn is the season where people tend to have bigger appetites (among other things). Though, if you’ve never lived in Japan, you wouldn’t know this. I doubt our translator /a/non knew either. As it stands, it doesn’t mean anything to anyone. Just throw in something generic about Hana having a big appetite.
If you translated that 2nd line literally, word for word, it would be “that’s violence against stomachs”—a perfectly workable line. I don’t know how you could come up with “an assault to the stomach”.
Other than what? She wasn’t even saying anything. And of course she doesn’t remember anything about the new teacher; he’s new. In actuality, she’s saying that something about him seems familiar, but she can’t quite remember what it is.
If you read this one backwards, it actually (almost) makes sense. You were pretty close, /a/non-kun. Just had to swap them and fix up the grammar and punctuation and you would’ve been most of the way there.
I feel like there’s a dad joke waiting to be made here, something about Hugh Mungus. “Huge…” isn’t a sentence, and it’s obvious what she thinks is huge here. Put two and two together.
This one’s pretty tough. It’s pretty common for manga authors to stick “(monotone)” at the end of sentences in Japanese, but it’s definitely not a thing in English. Just pick up any comic book. The way it is here, it looks like part of her speech and it throws me off to see parentheses in dialogue. My group typically addresses this issue by choosing stiffer wording and going with a different font to convey the fact that she’s really acting.
Hahaha this stupid loser.
I can’t read the first thing Julia is saying and the second line completely messed up the tone. She’s being haughty and defensive because she just got called out for eating lunch on the toilet. “What’s wrong with that?”
Well, yes, that would be the logical conclusion. She’s actually saying that she has the ability to see the ghosts, so she needs to keep it together and watch out for her classmates so that they don’t get hurt.
So this translation isn’t necessarily wrong in a vacuum, but the wording is very controversial for such an ambiguous line. Reading the discussions, a lot of people gathered that the ghost was warning her to stop looking at the new teacher. This may be the case, but it also may not, and this wording contradicts a bunch of other possibilities. A more generic “don’t look” fits the bill a lot better, because it’s just as likely that the ghost is telling her not to look at it.
I could go on, but if I did then we’ll probably never see the light of day, and I think I caught all of the major offenders. Let’s just wrap it up here.
Well /a/nons, you certainly tried. Honestly, given the average quality of manga scanlations, it wasn’t too terrible despite my blatant bashing. By fansubbing standards though, it was pretty bad. And these are the standards we adhere to at FKU. Granted, there’s only so much you can do without an editor and your main communication medium being an image board full of autists.
At any rate, thanks for giving people something to read while we were gone I guess. Feel free to give it another shot, and I’ll be happy to provide some more feedback. Though, you could probably just look at our releases.