Himegasaki Sakurako Is a Hot Mess - Ch. 44

[CrowGoesCaw]

Thank you for your service on TLing

 

[Flame-2-Haze]

Thank you for the translations. Hope another group decides to pick it up and translate it, providing they're proofread well enough to be readable.

A chapter without the main couple.

 

[happypurple]

thank you all for your supportive comments

im very worried this being dropped means ill never see the conclusion because the “official translation” will stop updating like it has in so many other cases. scanlations are the way to go

If the publisher ends up dropping it, I'll be back. I really doubt they'll drop it tho. They think it'll make enough money that they've gone ahead with a physical release right off the bat before they even start selling it, so I'm really not worried about that.

glad it got licensed, but sad that we will have to wait a long while to catch back up to this point

True. If you want to blame someone though, blame us for setting expectations. The business world is very different from the fan scan world. personally I'd rather wait for peak than search for a new needle in a haystack that might not be there, but thats me.

damn why'd it have to be Seven Seas to pick this up.

Personally I'd have prefered viz, but I'm still glad its licensed and am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since i've yet to see the TL. ik they've had controversies but I believe they can still potentially follow through. god knows I've cut corners lol.

mixed feelings with that notice...

I'd have loved to continue working on it, but It'd bother me if my scan potentially cut into the artist's revenues. IK that must sound strange considering what we do might still technically be piracy even if there's no official translation, but that's how I feel.

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...

I'd be pretty disappointed if it did get picked up by another group, especially if the quality is lacking, since that'd only make things worse for the author/publisher at this point. I'm aware that if folks can't comfortably afford, or legally purchase the manga, that piracy is realistically what's gonna happen. just another fact of life, not unlike how we saw the need to drop the series because of the official translation. End of the day, whatever happens happens, at least I can know I made the right choice. Still, if this gets MTL'd imma be pissed, because the manga deserves at least as much as someone who speaks EN and JP doing TL

 

[HighPriest]

Ah, man, that's a shame. Seven Seas is never going to translate this up to this point, and if they do, it'll be years from now.

That said, that's not on you. Thanks for the translation.

 

[spiffinn]

Thanks for scanlating this series!

 

[CerealBawks]

I'd be pretty disappointed if it did get picked up by another group, especially if the quality is lacking, since that'd only make things worse for the author/publisher at this point. I'm aware that if folks can't comfortably afford, or legally purchase the manga, that piracy is realistically what's gonna happen. just another fact of life, not unlike how we saw the need to drop the series because of the official translation. End of the day, whatever happens happens, at least I can know I made the right choice. Still, if this gets MTL'd imma be pissed, because the manga deserves at least as much as someone who speaks EN and JP doing TL

Well then you'll be saddened by the (old) news that Seven Seas uses MTL for their scans.

 

[AnacondaHL]

Thanks for the TLs

regrets over lost love opportunities

 

[happypurple]

Well then you'll be saddened by the (old) news that Seven Seas uses MTL for their scans.

Am aware they used mantra for the magus bride simulpub. I hate shit like mantra and orange since it sucks and has the potential to stifle scanlation and the artform in general, but as far as i know they still use humans for tanks so nr applicable here.

 

[salamiowl]

whelp. time to learn japanese, i guess. most official translations are slow as fuck and im not tryna wait til im 900.

you gotta wonder tho, what the hell takes them so long? its not like they have any reason they should need to wait, the chapters are already all there for them to translate.

 

[happypurple]

whelp. time to learn japanese, i guess. most official translations are slow as fuck and im not tryna wait til im 900.

you gotta wonder tho, what the hell takes them so long? its not like they have any reason they should need to wait, the chapters are already all there for them to translate.

A licensing deal needs to be worked out with the artist(s) and JP publisher (usually on a per volume basis) (if it's a popular series you might need to outbid other en publishers) Everything needs to be translated, proofread, copy edited, lettered/retouched, revised again and again. Graphic design for the actual book, logo design for the logos/ect, if it's gonna be printed add more time for revisions and time to distribute the book physically/negotiate with retailers. They're absolutely not just twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing all day like us fan translators. It's their profession.

Everything is dependent on everything else. add to all that scheduling the different people involved (minimum seven in the case of this particular publisher), payroll, customer service, project management, royalties/approvals for rights holders, marketing, risk management, maintaining good relationships with all your partner companies/freelancers, legal/international contract BS, ect ect

it's a long time to wait and I understand the impatience, but honestly it could be sooooo much worse. most ppl have no idea. I could go on and on, but suffice to say there's a reason I'm still a fan translator and not out here licensing manga and going the official route. There's so many manga I wish I could bring to market legally myself, but I don't have the time, money or talent to do it all on my own.

it's not like these companies just sprang up out of the ground, a lot of work goes into them from a lot of different professions and if it was easy to get into, more ppl like me would be into it. at this point i'm just glad that my scanning the manga didnt stop it from getting picked up, since i fear (maybe without good reason) that may have been the case with past projects I've worked on.

i know it can be hard to accept, but in life even entertainment needs to make money in order to make sense, even with manga. I'm not gonna go out of my way to pirate and hinder the artist profiting off their hard work, or even the EN publisher who makes questionable at best creative decisions at times. there's a lot of real value in what EN publishers do, but people get too distracted by "woke mind virus" and "nagatoro sus" to appreciate that the appetite for JP media internationally has had incredible growth, and despite the bullshit MTL garbage I hate, the best days of manga may yet be ahead of us.

 

[zdude18]

A licensing deal needs to be worked out with the artist(s) and JP publisher (usually on a per volume basis) (if it's a popular series you might need to outbid other en publishers) Everything needs to be translated, proofread, copy edited, lettered/retouched, revised again and again. Graphic design for the actual book, logo design for the logos/ect, if it's gonna be printed add more time for revisions and time to distribute the book physically/negotiate with retailers. They're absolutely not just twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing all day like us fan translators. It's their profession.

Everything is dependent on everything else. add to all that scheduling the different people involved (minimum seven in the case of this particular publisher), payroll, customer service, project management, royalties/approvals for rights holders, marketing, risk management, maintaining good relationships with all your partner companies/freelancers, legal/international contract BS, ect ect

it's a long time to wait and I understand the impatience, but honestly it could be sooooo much worse. most ppl have no idea. I could go on and on, but suffice to say there's a reason I'm still a fan translator and not out here licensing manga and going the official route. There's so many manga I wish I could bring to market legally myself, but I don't have the time, money or talent to do it all on my own.

it's not like these companies just sprang up out of the ground, a lot of work goes into them from a lot of different professions and if it was easy to get into, more ppl like me would be into it. at this point i'm just glad that my scanning the manga didnt stop it from getting picked up, since i fear (maybe without good reason) that may have been the case with past projects I've worked on.

i know it can be hard to accept, but in life even entertainment needs to make money in order to make sense, even with manga. I'm not gonna go out of my way to pirate and hinder the artist profiting off their hard work, or even the EN publisher who makes questionable at best creative decisions at times. there's a lot of real value in what EN publishers do, but people get too distracted by "woke mind virus" and "nagatoro sus" to appreciate that the appetite for JP media internationally has had incredible growth, and despite the bullshit MTL garbage I hate, the best days of manga may yet be ahead of us.

Where do you get the raw chapters? It always seems like comic-walker is like 2 months late on these chapters. Is it only in print or is it available earlier online? (I'm willing to pay a few dollars per chapter to read it raw if it's available online somewhere)

 

[FlsRoger]

Fuck. I don't live in the US, so there is no way for me to keep reading this anymore...

 

[mallet]

thank you all for your supportive comments

If the publisher ends up dropping it, I'll be back. I really doubt they'll drop it tho. They think it'll make enough money that they've gone ahead with a physical release right off the bat before they even start selling it, so I'm really not worried about that.

True. If you want to blame someone though, blame us for setting expectations. The business world is very different from the fan scan world. personally I'd rather wait for peak than search for a new needle in a haystack that might not be there, but thats me.

Personally I'd have prefered viz, but I'm still glad its licensed and am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since i've yet to see the TL. ik they've had controversies but I believe they can still potentially follow through. god knows I've cut corners lol.

I'd have loved to continue working on it, but It'd bother me if my scan potentially cut into the artist's revenues. IK that must sound strange considering what we do might still technically be piracy even if there's no official translation, but that's how I feel.

I'd be pretty disappointed if it did get picked up by another group, especially if the quality is lacking, since that'd only make things worse for the author/publisher at this point. I'm aware that if folks can't comfortably afford, or legally purchase the manga, that piracy is realistically what's gonna happen. just another fact of life, not unlike how we saw the need to drop the series because of the official translation. End of the day, whatever happens happens, at least I can know I made the right choice. Still, if this gets MTL'd imma be pissed, because the manga deserves at least as much as someone who speaks EN and JP doing TL

These companies are perfectly capable of releasing simulpubs or batch releases, seeing as how many different pay-by-chapter sites there are. Viz was never picking this up though, they've been trying to shuck ecchi manga off its catalog for a while. This is why Seven Seas picked up the volume releases for Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san, Ayakashi Triangle, and 2.5 Dimension Seduction, despite that the latter two were simulpubed through Mangaplus and the former two were both published in WSJ. Part of the AyaTri simulpub was even done by Viz's own translators for the WSJ sunday releases, till it was shifted to Jump+.

If supporting the artist is your ultimate concern, the best way to support them is to buy new copies of japanese volumes as close as possible to the release date. That's the only metric anyone outside of Japan can affect, that would in turn affect whether or not a series continues. English releases come out way too late to make any kind of difference for gauging how popular a series is, and the cut from those is close to nothing for the artist. Like I said before, the soonest Seven Seas will release volume 6 is possibly 2027, using the rate Nobukuni-san releases at. Young Animal releases biweekly, but Comic Cune releases monthly, so its japanese volumes get released at a slower pace. Sekai de Ichiban Oppai ga Suki was in Comic Cune and its later english release came out a year after the corresponding original came out, which themelves were spaced out by about a year. Maybe Seven Seas will release faster then Yen Press, but it doesn't seem likely.

A good number of japanese artists already think scanlations cut into their bottom line, despite there being no way for them to even make money on foreign audiences that aren't buying japanese volumes in the first place. Continuining to scanlate it when an english release of the same volume won't release for years won't have any discenrable effect on sales, postive or negative. 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. A lot of these publishers have people that came through scanlation circles and continue to keep track of what's popular on these sites. Where do you think the cheeky Seven Seas name comes from?

whelp. time to learn japanese, i guess. most official translations are slow as fuck and im not tryna wait til im 900.

you gotta wonder tho, what the hell takes them so long? its not like they have any reason they should need to wait, the chapters are already all there for them to translate.

If you want to be charitable, there might be an issue with how the rights for volumes that haven't come out yet in japan get negotiated. In addition, if the translator plans to have a print run and are uncertain when they get the rights and materials, they have to plan around that uncertainty. I don't really know how companies haven't figured out better systems to license and print after at least three decades of this niche of the publishing industry's existence, but I'm not surprised.

But even with that in consideration, batch dumping the physical volumes doesn't make sense, because often times the people buying aren't the ones who've been keeping up with the series through scanlations. I think people overestimate how many scanlation readers there are, so it's easy to try to frame them as the make-or-break demographic for previously scanlated releases. But it doesn't make financial sense to do physical releases to cater to a demo that is so allegedly unwilling to buy these releases in the first place. Publishing physical copies has gotten significantly more expensive than it was in the heyday of physical bookstores. The risk is worth it if you're trying to snag people that haven't read it, but are otherwise interested in something similar. And given how many series Seven Seas and Yen Press have been pumping out, there's enough to keep them in business. So why release volume 5 at the same time as volume 1, when the only people who have read 1 either already know japanese, or read a scanlation? Better to release volume by volume and drop a series when the money isn't good.

For digital only releases, the pay-by-chapter sites already do batch releases to catch up with the latest chapters of currently running series. As far as I've gathered, the licenses to do a simulpub and to do a digital volume release are different, just because they're translating from either the magazine release or the volume release that might have changes (like redrawing, rewriting, or removing black bars) or additional bits added by the mangaka. For some of the Mangaplus series, you can see some of the differences in translation on the simulpub release compared to the corresponding chapter in the volume release.

 

[BalrogDeMorgoth]

That was a rather random chapter

 

[salamiowl]

A licensing deal needs to be worked out with the artist(s) and JP publisher (usually on a per volume basis) (if it's a popular series you might need to outbid other en publishers) Everything needs to be translated, proofread, copy edited, lettered/retouched, revised again and again. Graphic design for the actual book, logo design for the logos/ect, if it's gonna be printed add more time for revisions and time to distribute the book physically/negotiate with retailers. They're absolutely not just twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing all day like us fan translators. It's their profession.

Everything is dependent on everything else. add to all that scheduling the different people involved (minimum seven in the case of this particular publisher), payroll, customer service, project management, royalties/approvals for rights holders, marketing, risk management, maintaining good relationships with all your partner companies/freelancers, legal/international contract BS, ect ect

it's a long time to wait and I understand the impatience, but honestly it could be sooooo much worse. most ppl have no idea. I could go on and on, but suffice to say there's a reason I'm still a fan translator and not out here licensing manga and going the official route. There's so many manga I wish I could bring to market legally myself, but I don't have the time, money or talent to do it all on my own.

it's not like these companies just sprang up out of the ground, a lot of work goes into them from a lot of different professions and if it was easy to get into, more ppl like me would be into it. at this point i'm just glad that my scanning the manga didnt stop it from getting picked up, since i fear (maybe without good reason) that may have been the case with past projects I've worked on.

i know it can be hard to accept, but in life even entertainment needs to make money in order to make sense, even with manga. I'm not gonna go out of my way to pirate and hinder the artist profiting off their hard work, or even the EN publisher who makes questionable at best creative decisions at times. there's a lot of real value in what EN publishers do, but people get too distracted by "woke mind virus" and "nagatoro sus" to appreciate that the appetite for JP media internationally has had incredible growth, and despite the bullshit MTL garbage I hate, the best days of manga may yet be ahead of us.

i figured there'd be some of that stuff to slow down the process, i just thought most of it would either be one and done rather than an ongoing thing, would be more dependant on the release schedule rather than the other way around, or would be something you have figured out before any deal was made. even once every few months seems awfully slow for something thats already got 5 and half volumes to work from. it wouldnt be such a big deal if it didnt also mean theyre likely gonna be behind on new chapters for a good while too. idk, maybe they'll be faster with the digital chapters, but im not gonna get my hopes up on that.

im not necessarily saying theyre just waiting around, its just frustrating that it takes so long for something that really seems like it could be done faster if not for red tape slowing things down (especially for the digital version). and i wouldve also thought that working with the jp team, theyd have tools available to them to help make the process smoother, which would make up for some of the hurdles. not just for translation either, also as it relates to redraws and graphic elements. depending on the artist, and whether they work digitally and in layers, they could save loads of time by just having access to the original files and the underlying artwork.

as for the worry that your past projects may have prevented official translations, i highly doubt it. id say if anything, it would help create the demand for an official english version. otherwise thered be no english audience for them to even sell to, theyd have to rely on building one up for themselves, which would be a deterrent.

not that im blaming anybody for dropping the translation, i understand why you would, and i do think its good to support the official release. id just rather support the official japanese release instead if its gonna take the english team years to catch up (assuming they ever do).

 

[thedinowarrior]

Hopefully someone else picks it up. It's so annoying having to wait years to see if the official release ever catches up to the current chapters.

Highschool DXD 😭

 

[mallet]

it's not like these companies just sprang up out of the ground, a lot of work goes into them from a lot of different professions and if it was easy to get into, more ppl like me would be into it. at this point i'm just glad that my scanning the manga didnt stop it from getting picked up, since i fear (maybe without good reason) that may have been the case with past projects I've worked on.

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.

 

[SciFiMisc]

Great. Itll either take years to catch up, someone else will pick it up when they get annoyed with how long its taking to catch up/how unavailable the "official" release actually is, or no one will pick it up and this will fade into complete obscurity. Always fun when that happens, super great.

 

[strayalive]

I'd be pretty disappointed if it did get picked up by another group, especially if the quality is lacking, since that'd only make things worse for the author/publisher at this point. I'm aware that if folks can't comfortably afford, or legally purchase the manga, that piracy is realistically what's gonna happen. just another fact of life, not unlike how we saw the need to drop the series because of the official translation. End of the day, whatever happens happens, at least I can know I made the right choice. Still, if this gets MTL'd imma be pissed, because the manga deserves at least as much as someone who speaks EN and JP doing TL

I can respect your reasons for dropping the series and thank you for your service, but I definitely hope you're disappointed sooner rather than later. We aren't talking about a digital simulpub here so presenting the situation as binary is misguided -- there's no shortage of people out there who read scanlations that simultaneously buy physical copies. Personally I fully intend to buy the physical releases (already preordered the first volume) while reading whatever MTL we get for new chapters.

 

[draxdeveloper]

wait, is this caretaker girl always around ? have no memory of her

Same, who the hell is she?