Inside Scanlation

HisshouBuraiKen: Hi! My name is Matt, better known online as HisshouBuraiKen. I've been translating anime and manga for the better part of five years now. The main manga series I've worked on are Naruto, Gantz, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Yuu Yuu Hakusho, as well as numerous other smaller/shorter projects. On the anime side of things, I've been doing translation checking (and in emergencies doing the full script) for the Naruto Shippuuden and Bleach anime, as well as being the song translator for both series. Currently I'm also translating Eyeshield 21 for Crunchyroll as well.

HisshouBuraiKen: I got the idea to start translating while reading a particularly bad scanlation of Naruto and thinking, "And thousands of people are reading this and thinking it's good? I know enough Japanese now, I'm sure I could do better." The community was about the same as it is now, if not a little more splintered. There were fewer big "hub" sites like MangaHelpers.com; each series had its own ring of sites, each with their own community.

HisshouBuraiKen: For manga, I technically translate freelance as I've found, with few exceptions, it's hard to keep a manga team together for a long period of time, especially if they're a one-project group. That being said, I did give early access to Binktopia and TMI-Scans for a time, and currently post my Naruto translations on Japflap's forums as well as the usual public sites.

As for anime, I've only ever belonged to Dattebayo, which runs like a well-oiled machine. For the record, everyone in DB is really awesome and not a bunch of cruel jerks like the public would have you believe. We're all just a bunch of regular people with a slight smartass streak and a healthy sense of humor.

HisshouBuraiKen: Songs! Songs can be very difficult to get right, especially when you have limited time to work on them and have to transcribe them by ear before you can even think of translating. Because Japanese has a lot of homophones and the singers sometimes break up the words in weird ways or pronounce things funny, songs usually get a couple of revisions (unless I can find the lyrics online).

HisshouBuraiKen: I read through it once, grab my electronic dictionary and dive right in!

HisshouBuraiKen: The answer to both is Hidan (a character from Naruto). Few remember that I was the one who translated him as a foul-mouthed ballbuster. Most liked it, a few disagreed with my interpretation of him, but in the end, I really feel I gave the character a voice.

HisshouBuraiKen: I was the one behind the La Tasca song. If you know what I'm talking about, you know how funny that fact is.

HisshouBuraiKen: The difference is surprisingly little. With a script in hand, an episode is a longer with none of the pesky formatting for bubbles and panels. Without one, it tends to be a

HisshouBuraiKen: The two scenes are very similar. I'm still sitting at my desk with my dictionary, my headphones and a bunch windows open, the difference being that for manga I get actual physical raw volumes and a nice little check a few weeks after I'm done.

HisshouBuraiKen: In a word: English. If you can read back a sentence and say, "If that character were a native speaker of English, that's how they'd say it," you've done a good job. There are so many translations that are so literal, strict, and as a result, bad, that it sometimes feels like you're reading the original Japanese more than a translation.

HisshouBuraiKen: Anything that deals heavily with a specialized field, such as law, science, literature, what have you, is difficult because it requires a lot of research and learning vocabulary you wouldn't normally know.

HisshouBuraiKen: Well of course, the ladies of Dattebayo (chichiri and rhole) have always done an excellent job. Outside groups I'm obviously biased towards, I will say that Labaamen, the translator who did Kaiji for Triad, earned the rare "HBK approved" status.

HisshouBuraiKen: I'm not really a fan, the more "pressure" these groups put on themselves to be first, the lower the overall quality is. This especially irks me with series I work on because occasionally my translations will suffer as a result (when a group misspells things, omits punctuation or emphasis, and so on).

HisshouBuraiKen: I hope it will continue to be a conduit for new series to earn fans, and classic or obscure series to see the light of day. I think that if the industry survives long enough to make it to the 21st century, we'll see more official digitally distributed official manga chapters and volumes.

HisshouBuraiKen: This may come as a shock, but I really don't follow any particular group. I read all my manga in Japanese, and if I think my wife will be interested, I give her the name and let her pick whatever group she likes best. Same for anime, although we tend to watch more obscure stuff that only has one group.