No.13205
Hello comrades, I'm here with a proposal: let's start a scanlation group to bring leftist manga to a non-Japanese audience.
>Are there any leftist manga???
Yes, for example the masterpiece of Japanese communist literature Kani Kousen (The crab cannery ship) got three manga adaptation. Two of them are available in digital, and I suggest we start from them.
>What do you bring to the table? You're aren't one of those "idea guys", right?
I'm a scanlator: I translate, clean pages and add text. I can do basically anything you need to do to release a manga, except I'm not too good with PS and since I'm not a native speaker I also need someone else to do editing and proofreading.
Oh, I can also provide raws and I have uploading privileges on mangadex.
>How do we organize?
That's something I can't answer. I know that d*scord is a big no-no, but I don't know many alternatives, so I'd like to hear your proposals.
So, what do you think?
No.13206
>dickord
Use #Matrix chat m8, drop-box and Mega.
No.13208
>>13206I already use mega and dropbox, but I honestly don't know a thing about Matrix lol
No.13210
>>13208You don't need to know much, we already have a Matrix server (sadly hosted on the main Matrix server and not a dedicated one).
No.13212
>>13210I hope it's not too hard to setup
>>13211if you have the whole thing we might work on it
No.13214
>>13205That sounds really cool. Unfortunately, all skills involved are skills I have no experience in.
No.13215
>>13205I wish mangadex would stop completely blocking tor…
No.13253
>leftist
>manga
Lol doesn't exist
There are lgbt shit but leftist? Lmao
No.13256
>>13214One of the skills we need is "be a native English speaker"
No.13257
>>13256Not even that one, lmao. I have good spoken English, but there are better ESL writers here… I can help translate it from English to Spanish. Hadn't thought of that.
No.13259
>>13258Cool. When do you think you'll be done with cleaning the text?
No.13260
>>13258Sorry, I'm old school. I use PS and my knowledge of Japanese. I do use DeepL to check my grammar though.
No.13261
>>13259Unfortunately I didnt even have a properly running computer. I am literally posting from a 6 year old phone with 1GB RAM right now.
>>13260Yeah I know these sort of things wont replace manual effort but the idea I was throwing out is that taking advantage of various selections of deep learning neural network AI programs available these days it may be possible to get by on a pretty small scanlation team once the limitations are figured out so no time is wasted using it for something that wont work at all.
No.13262
>>13261I'm all in favour of technology phasing out the boring parts of scanlations such as editing out every little bit of text, but the technology is not quite there yet.
No.13265
>>13258>machine translatingplease do not
No.13277
I'm very interested in this. The thing is that I don't have Photoshop or GIMP nor am I a native English speaker lol.
Also can someone post some resources on how to do a collaborative manga translation project?
>>13208I didn't either until a few months ago. It's not that hard.
No.13281
>>13253Hello newfag
>>13248>>13211Is Marx Girl just coomer shit or
No.13282
>>13281>coomerHello newfag
No.13285
>>13282The actual newfag is the guy who thinks that leftist manga doesn't exist and that LGBT themes count as "leftist".
On the other hand, I haven't read Marx Girl for obvious reasons (it's only in Japanese), but I have read about it before, when we were still on Bunkerchan. However the only two pics of it that were posted in this thread (the cover and one page with a pantyshot) look like coomer shit.
No.13286
>>13281>>13285coomer boomer zoomer doomer
Shut the fuck up.
No.13307
Apparently Marx Girl was at some point licensed in English. From what I've read it doesn't have much to do with marxism, it's more about art. There are a few spicy scenes, but nothing too lewd. The raws of the first volume are available here:
https://simplyhentai.org/g/119313I'll give it another read as soon as I have time, then I'll let you know if it's worth scanlating for us. There's a kindle version available so I already know where to buy the raws.
And stop calling everything that shows a bit of skin "coomer shit": we aren't mormons nor talibans.
Anyway, here's a few pictures of the authors taken from his twitter. The last screenshot says "Shame on you, you fucking right-wingers". At least we can confirm the author is left-wing.
No.13309
>>13308it's really not that long.
No.13311
>>13309It's long for an h-doujin I think
No.13313
>>13311It's not a doujin and it's not even H.
No.13357
>>13355The reviews on amazon are good and for what I've read no one complained about a "leftist bias" which is a common complain whenever a manga shows sympathetic communists. The most negative view I've read complained for the outdated view on homosexuality, but the author is an old man so I guess it's not that weird. According to JP wiki he published weekly comics on Akahata, JCP newspaper, which I guess it means he's at least a little bit leftist.
No.13373
>>13372Or alternatively as a way of getting started, just do some one shots from Garo Monthly Magazine. There are loads of raw scans on archive.org.
No.13374
>>13372Good idea, but I'd rather do short stories and one volume manga and only then starting with serializations.
>>13373Can you link them?
Oh, it would be great if we could find at least another JP > EN translator lol
No.13502
>>13357>The reviews on amazon are good and for what I've read no one complained about a "leftist bias" which is a common complain whenever a manga shows sympathetic communists.To be fair, a lot of leftist artists are good at creating stuff that the average person can enjoy without realizing it was made by a leftist (see:
Disco Elysium, practically everyone loved it and no one knew the creators were actual leftists, despite it being implied in the game itself, until they explicitly thanked Marx and Engels at the Game Awards. Also Miyazaki, I guess.)
>>13372>>13373both sound good, I agree with the second anon
>>13374>it would be great if we could find at least another JP > EN translator lolHow many in this thread know Japanese?
No.13507
>>13502OP here, we can do even with just me as the translator but of course this means we can only do one release at time.
Anyway, next week I'll probably start working on one of the kani kousen manga as a test to see what we can do together. If someone could link me a retard-proof guide to set up Matrix I'd be grateful.
No.13509
>>13507>If someone could link me a retard-proof guide to set up Matrix I'd be grateful.Sure:
https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction#how-can-i-try-it-out No.13510
>>13509Well shit, I can't host my own server lol.
Should I look for a public homeserver?
No.13521
>>13510Doesn't leftypol have its own server? Use that one lol
No.13528
>>13521Uh, I didn't think about it.
No.13546
I could look around other sites to see if I can find someone to help. What is needed still? Everything? Lol
No.13548
>>13546I'd grateful if you could find someone willing to work on cleaning and typesetting.
BTW, I'm gonna post stuff on the 2D/Leftist room on leftypol's Matrix.
No.13549
>>13374>Can you link them?https://archive.org/details/monthly-magazine-garohttps://nyaa.si/?f=0&c=0_0&q=monthly+magazine+garoThe torrents on nyaa should be seeded; don't mind the zero seeders. But when in doubt just use the mirrors on archive.org or mediafire links on the 'deadscanlations' blog. There are also links to other scanlations groups doing Garo stuff on the old Habenero blogspot page too iirc.
https://deadscanlations.tumblr.com/https://pepperanon.blogspot.com/Unrelated, but bless elemhunter for finishing Joshi Kouhei No.13550
>>13549As for other one shots, you could also consider some of the stuff from Sakura Illustrated. The old thread is still up:
https://leftypol.org/anime/res/5156.html No.13551
>>13548I know what a cleaner does but what does a typesetter do? Place the translated text in it's proper margins in the panels?
No.13553
>>13549Thanks!
>>13550Interesting stuff, there's definitely some value in translating them.
>>13551Yes.
No.13564
>>13502>To be fair, a lot of leftist artists are good at creating stuff that the average person can enjoy without realizing it was made by a leftist yeah, but that kinda sucks in its own way. i don't want media to be preachy but it sucks that people don't gain more class consciousness despite being faced with leftist themes
No.13607
There's no such thing as a marxist manga
Stop this retardation
No.13609
>>13607Engels would like to have a word with you about his Stirner manga.
No.13670
>>13621Great practice, anon. By the way if you're gonna upscale raws then be sure to turn off noise reduction. A lot of old manga are really 'noise' heavy and it's very easy to lose detail in the process. Both pages you posted are full of blocky jpg artifacts, for example.
No.13671
>>13670They were choke-full of jpg artifacts even before I upscaled them. I used the level 0 denoise from waifu2x because anything more would ruin the drawings. The best solution would be to apply photoshop noise filter, but there are 210 pages and it takes a while to adjust levels for every page.
No.13672
>>13621Instead of upscaling why not just find a better scan? Maybe try a reverse image search on Tin-Eye, Google, and Yandex with largest image set to find the best quality? I mean even if you upscale after it will turn out better.
No.13673
>>13672Because it's a niche manga and I couldn't find any rip. I should have checked bookwalker before trying , but now it's too late and I don't want to buy it again.
If someone knows of a way to how convert a AZW3 file in HQ png, feel free to explain me how I could do it.
In alternative, this manga can be bought on bookwalker here:
https://bookwalker.jp/de861c97f6-51bc-4619-8892-ed424673f732/and ripped using this tool
https://github.com/xuzhengyi1995/Bookwalker_Downloader No.13677
>>13673> If someone knows of a way to how convert a AZW3 file in HQ png, feel free to explain me how I could do it.If you have the de-drm'ed ebook file you could do the following:
1. Install Calibre ebook program.
https://calibre-ebook.com/download2. Download, install, and configure the Kindle Unpack plugin
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1715293. Restart Calibre
4. Load the azw3 file into Calibre and select it
5. Use the "KindleUnpack" plugin button in the main toolbar (that is the default location, it may be hidden or placed somewhere else). Once done, Calibre should automatically open the default destination folder with everything extracted.
No.13679
>>13677I didn't know about this plugin, but I tried it and the quality of the pictures is the same.
I experimented a bit, and found out that if you do denoise first and magnify later there are slightly less artifacts. I could try to do this or I could give up on magnifying and simply denoise the pictures in 900x1200. Wish I had the patience to denoise every picture with photoshop, I already did it in the past but 210 pages are a lot for me.
No.13750
>>13745Yes, you found out that covid is dangerous to people with diabetes and other conditions, congratulations.
No.13751
>>13739Oh wow, that sucks.
Also I wish I get a picture as cool as that in my obituary.
No.13812
>>13808oomer oomer oomer oomer oomer oomer oomer oomer
No.13824
>>13818youre right, no post littered with memes can be considered a sound argument
No.13839
>>13808Sometimes reshippers are cheaper than buying straight from a source and shipped that way. You also can buy second band if the condition is good but none of that money goes back to the artist. So depends what you have in mind.
No.13898
>>13808>Does anyone know of any better way to import goods, or does a person have simply to take the typical costs of delivery?I've always used goody japan and tenso buyee to import stuff from yahoo auctions japan and amazon.co.jp respectively. The last time I ordered something was at peak pandemic when all air mail was halted and I had to wait many more months than usual for it to ship by sea but that might not be the case anymore. I've heard good things about mandarake.co.jp. You'd be surprised how cheap most old tankobon are even on amazon; paying in literal pocket change and spending the rest of your money on not-too-pricey shipping fees is still the way to go for the most part.
No.13972
Sorry OP having trouble finding anyone to clean and typeset so the group could actually be a group and Im skilless. Modern corporate social media has destroyed internet communities so it's harder nowadays.
No.13975
>>13972Not to encourage 4cuck, but /a/ and /d/ do manga and hentai scanlation groups, you might find some links to people that do it there.
No.13976
>>13972normally it's not that hard to find people willing to do stuff liek this, the problem is that I want to create a group dedicated to leftists manga and that's a bit harder to do.
Anyway, I'm thinking of buying a new digital copy of kani kousen from bookwalker in the hope that the quality will be better than the kindle edition which is a pain to work with.
No.13983
>>13976I sort of know a Japanese guy I can attempt talking to if he comes online to see if he owns any leftist manga he's willing to scan if you can find more people. Unfortunately he can't properly type English to point it's extremely difficult to understand him sometimes so he's useless as a translator or typesetter.
No.13984
Isn't typesetting just erasing speech bubbles and adding the translated dialogue? Cleaning on the other hand sounds like a pain in the ass.
Is it mandatory to use proprietary software like Photoshop too?
No.13985
>>13984Someone correct me if Im wrong. Typesetting is aligning the text along with font type and size in the speech bubbles to look aesthetically pleasing and readable. I think cleaners do the erasing and redrawing. I have seen some scanlation teams just skip more detailed cleaners all together and just put translation notes on the side for sound effects and what signs and written letters read and focus only on dialogue and monologue being edited. I think typesetting occasionally overlaps with cleaning because sometimes artistic skill is needed to reproduce a certain font in another language if one isn't available that looks good. Though if it's just erasing text bubbles that often can be done by the typesetter no a seporate person necessarily.
No.13986
>>13984>Isn't typesetting just erasing speech bubbles and adding the translated dialogue?No, typesetting is choosing the appropriate fonts, size and adding text.
>Cleaning on the other hand sounds like a pain in the ass.It generally is, but in some manga it's a no-brainer.
>Is it mandatory to use proprietary software like Photoshop too?No, that's just what I use and what I know how to use.
>I have seen some scanlation teams just skip more detailed cleaners all together and just put translation notes on the side for sound effects and what signs and written letters read and focus only on dialogue and monologue being edited.translation notes for SFX is lazy as shit to be honest. I'd rather just add the translation near the original SFX.
No.13994
>>13986>translation notes for SFX is lazy as shit to be honest. I'd rather just add the translation near the original SFXWhat's best proven depends on the style of the text and what's around it.
No.14156
>>14154This seems very funny
No.14178
>>13984I've always thought typesetting at its most basic must be easy as shit but then I find a bunch of scanlated manga made in fucking lowercase Comic Sans. What were they thinking?
No.16283
>>16230>>16231Scans of Sakura Illustrated were posted here and to archive.org over a year and a half ago. It includes the original English translation of the chapter you mentioned (you can also find it on mangadex iirc)
Here's the thread:
https://leftypol.org/anime/res/5156.html No.16343
>>16283yeah I know lol I'm pretty sure I was the final push that got the scanner to do buy and scan em. just saying it would be cool if it was fully translated
No.24362
>>16283>>>/anime/5156 >>5156 is how you link to other posts anon. Also bump for an actually good thread that should get more people into this.
Unique IPs: 41