Himegasaki Sakurako Is a Hot Mess - Ch. 44

[SUPER7X]

Supporting Seven Seas and their fake titles is bad actually. If you want to support the author, buy the Japanese volumes.

 

[nxneil13]

To be honest, as long as the guy doing MTL is doing proofreading nowadays the translation ain't that bad. Ofcourse there are translations like "EndManga" which is an abomination...

EndManga? can someone explain?

 

[NotSomeone]

Yep, cool, I am never reading this again I guess.
English is my second language and I only read mangas translated to english because there's no scanlation scene here, only for the most famous and mainstream things, and even then these translators use english and spanish translations as base and not the raws.
Online subscriptions are extremely overpriced because of the currency exchange, so are physical copies but those have the extra problem of shipping and import taxes.

 

[NeloDante]

EndManga? can someone explain?

EndManga MTLs taking pictures, therefore it takes the background noise and mixes it with the text. Many times it cut the text in half and translates something completely different. They also put their awful watermark that... also gets half translated at times ruining the translation further.
I'm talking about stuff such as "Mackarel" as the sound effect of rain, "dizzy and YON" as an action, "Do I still have a fever?" when talking about someone else and clearly it should not be in first person, random squares where the text should be eating completely the "translation", "People are [Character name]" when it tries to say that they like the character... The MTL is also one of the worst you can come up with since, again, it tries to translate random words and put them (poorly) together.

It's an abomination.

 

[Apep23]

Thanks for the works gentlemen, hope we meet again somewhere

 

[arcsalvo]

I respect the decision to stop scanlating, so long as the licensor isn't a bad one likes Seven Seas Entertainment, where manga licenses go to die checks really quick uh oh, it's them again.

Yeah, if someone else could pick this back up, that'd be great. If not, oh well, I'll just keep reading on here and on subscription Manga sites that are actually a good deal, like Mangaplus, Viz, Azuki, etc.

It's not like I'll ever run out of manga to read, even on pay sites that I rotate through the same way I rotate through my streaming TV subs.

 

[happypurple]

These companies are perfectly capable of releasing simulpubs or batch releases, seeing as how many different pay-by-chapter sites there are.

Funny thing is, not many people know this, but the reason simulpub releases are hard to do, and the reason why so many simulpub sites follow shit coin systems, is down to how JP publishers license their manga out. Simulpub rights and volume rights are two completely different animals. Most JP pubs dont want to work out some bespoke agreement (by jp standards) with respects to monetization (I.e. viz's manga subscription) which is why you have the manga up's and comikey's of the world. The logic is that it was a viable business model in JP, so no need to take a risk on something even tho it would prolly fit the EN market better. There's no catalyst to induce enough JP Pubs to put their product on a subscription model , we're not going to see a netflix, spotify, or crunchyroll for manga (with the exception of maybe that AI slop company orange). and so the american market is very resistant to coin based systems causing a chicken and egg scenario where vendor and customer disagree on value to the point that it affects the investment and rights management of the products to the point that it prevents a netflix or spotify type situation. thats my theory, anyway.

add onto that extra stupid bullshit like app store age rating bullshit, and the splits companies like amazon/ect take on digital distribution, and you've got a good case for sticking with volumes.
Also, the magus bride simulpub does not inspire confidence in 7s simulpub abilities, so if anything maybe we dodged a bullet

Otherwise you would have wiped off all the scans you've already made, since they would, theoretically, negatively affect the sales of the early volumes.

agree with a lot of what's in your post, but, (and I might have alluded to this earlier, IDR) if ppl are gonna pirate, they're not gonna care if it's a scan or an official (unless one or the other is shit quality.) my scan's up on a thousand shitty aggregator sites that dont pay attention to author DMCA, let alone a scannie asking politely so i'm not gonna waste my time.

I can't let this go. If anything, your (and Cuteness Appreciation's) scanlation is a reason they're picking it up in the first place, even if it wasn't the deciding factor. Comic Cune is a pretty niche magazine, but it's had 4 series get an anime adaptation. None of those series have an official english release, but there's a couple that have, outside of Himegasaki. Killing Me!, Cheerful Amnesia, and Sekai de Ichiban Oppai ga Suki specifically also have complete unofficial and official english translations (complete next year for Cheerful Amnesia). I Don't Know Which is Love, made by the same mangaka as Cheerful Amnesia, has an official translation and an up-to-date unofficial one. Spirits and Cat Ears doesn't have an unofficial translation, but it's by the same mangaka as Blend-S, which is getting an official translation starting this month, despite the existing unofficial one being completed last year. All of these series, with the exception of Himegasaki, are published or going to be published by Yen Press. Even if the translators aren't religiously following what's popular here, I would say they generally have the same niche tastes as the people that come to this website. So at worst, it's coincidence that Seven Seas picked up something that's been regularly, unofficially translated for 4 years. If they wanted to take down your scanlations because they thought it was worth the effort, they are well equipped to do so and will make themselves very clear.

I appreciate your perspective, but I think you're giving fan translations too much credit. In aggregate theres zero doubt in my mind fan translations have in the past and continue to this day played a big role in the normalization of JP content in the west, but for specific scanlations? not so much... I've heard from plenty of folks in/around the industry that insofar as an individual fan translation has any affect at all on a pub's decision to license, they have a mild cooling affect, this is without considering the popularity of the work. I'm not inclined to put much faith in that sentiment one way or another, since If a scan could tip the scales i'd figure pubs wouldn't want to license that comic in the first place. At the end of the day, pirates will just pirate the official if they want to pirate, a fan translation doesn't change that. I've scanned really popular series to completion that don't get officials for one reason or another. Out of all the manga i've scanned, this and probably one or two others others by my estimation are the only ones i can think of where my scan specifically could even possibly have affected the decision to license positively.

Keep in mind that MD does not have view counts, and follower count is not a reliable metric since this is a multi-lingual site.

It's certainly no coincidence that if you go onto my group's titles page and sort titles by followers, official translations are only found at 15k and above, and roughly half of those are licensed, but that's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario, and the data is skewed by the fact that we don't go out picking up things if they've got an official TL. Take windbreaker for example, ~3k follows when we stopped scanning it, kodansha licensed it in english (which they were gonna do regardless of our scan since they've got an american branch that translates all their manga, and windbreaker was really popular in JP) and it's got 14.9k follows on MD now and an anime now despite the last english scan having our drop notice on it. The reason for this rise in followers? a fair few are probably EN, but if you look at the chapter uploads, you'll see the foreign language groups.

I think in the case of himegasaki the pub liked the artist's other work, realized this manga would fit well in their portfolio, and the popularity on this site (and arguably by extension the scanlation itself if you want to give my group too much credit) at most is just the cherry on top. I don't think it's fair to attribute much of the popularity of titles on mangadex to the existence of an english scanlation, or even a publisher, because there are plenty of fantastic manga that don't get tl'd (one way or other) and a ton of shit manga that do. plenty of manga popular in other languages/markets. Any publicity is good publicity, and pubs can give a lot of publicity, but time and time again history shows that if the product itself is good ppl will read it one or the other regardless of if the TL is a scan or a pub.

Sakurako is good enough that it would've been popular regardless of if the only time it got a TL was from 7s, or from fans.

Concerns about getting into legal trouble didnt enter at all into my decision to drop, btw. If i ever seriously try to go official i'd drop every series out of principal. I'd decided when I'd first picked it up that I'd drop it if it got an official. I've never received so much as a peep from authors or pubs, even when i'm posting tl's on an artist's twitter posts and @'ing them. There are thousands of scannies out there just like me. squish me and someone else fills my niche in the manga ecosystem. even if they did give a shit, what are they gonna do, doxx me? kick down my door? send me a strongly worded email? tell santa i've not been a good boy this year? They may technically have a cause of action against me depending on the circumstances, i'm not concerned because if they gave a shit about the EN market they would translate their stuff and i wouldnt enter the picture, but even then, they're not gonna go after some rando for his 20$ net worth and used couch. its not like i'm going out of my way to profit off them, or keep going when it's clear theres interest in an official english, so I don't consider anything I've done immoral. I know real professional English comic artists and when I tell em' about what I do they don't think it's wrong bc i'm not doing it to make money, or for immoral purposes.

anyway, to get back on topic, for the record, and the 4 people still reading, the only two manga I think I've POTENTIALLY had a positive impact on getting an official are
https://mangadex.org/title/3ee24c64...jin-no-onnanoko-ga-isourou-suru-koto-ni-natta
& https://mangadex.org/title/acdbf57f-bf54-41b4-8d92-b3f3d14c852e/aishiteru-game-wo-owarasetai (and the second one is a bit of a stretch, since INK isnt even my group, i just did qc)
as for manga I have reason to think my scans specifically were negative if anything,
https://mangadex.org/title/f67c73a1-09ba-4047-8771-5299ae71f750/ because I kept scanning it to the point that it started to become mid, which might've potentially turned folks off? idk
https://mangadex.org/title/ac99bb12-c788-4f7d-95c1-1264d0d943b4/maid-skater because the author had mentioned on twitter he was looking into getting it translated into english, been strongly considering dropping it as a result, even tho it's still really up in the air if it will get an official.

Supporting Seven Seas and their fake titles is bad actually. If you want to support the author, buy the Japanese volumes.

The title is the least offensive thing about this license. Irl "pitiably cute" is hyper ESL/concussion tier English. No one is gonna convey themselves like that. "Hot mess" is an actual phrase, and fits the series quite well. I'm upset I didn't use it myself, looking back. If you want to be upset, be upset about the logo design.
I get you're opposed to localization of titles in general, but the fact is, this is an English book, not an Engrish book. obv I don't approve of calling onigiri jelly donuts, adding random shit about the patriarchy, or completely making up a title like that gamer girl manga, but this title is completely innocuous and if anything you're making light of the actual serious issues with EN pubs if this is what you want to boycott the official for.

If it was for the speed of publication, lack of availability in certain regions, an issue with this specific manga's TL or print quality, ECT ECT I could understand, maybe even support, but the title is a complete non-issue. The publishers can title the series whatever they want, the purpose of a title is to be short and memorable, and for a TL'd work, it's gotta be true to the original, and be understandable to the target language/audience. The title for this manga fulfills all those purposes. The title would be weaker if they left it as direct as they could've, which is counter productive to the whole endeavor in the first place. no business in their right mind is going to actively choose to make their title less comprehensible to the average reader (and loose potential revenue) in favor of a more literal translation that conveys the same concept in a less eloquent way. this isnt one of those cases with generic isekai manga where the paragraph synopsis for a title is one of the genre's charming selling points

 

[SUPER7X]

Accurate translation is ESL.

Your translation theory is dogshit.

 

[happypurple]

Your translation theory is dogshit.

you are either so stupid you can't understand basic english (which would explain why you believe what you do), or are intentionally trying to misrepresent my position. nowhere in my post do i say "Accurate translation is ESL." and if you were worth listening to you would've elaborated on your argument without having to resort to completely misrepresenting my own.

 

[LeBronBron]

Caught up with this today. I hope sakurako wins. And her nf is a fucking dickhead asshole

 

[zepherix89]

Much like apathy, a series being licensed by seven seas is death. Is anyone going to even remeber this series by the time it takes seven seas to catch up at their leisurely pace?

 

[Kushinda]

By the time Seven Seas catches up you could get N1 and just read the actual Japanese manga tbh