Majin Mura no Bubul

[MangaDex]

 

[AspiringMangaReader]

Word of Warning: This is going to be pretty long. For those who want the TL;DR version? I used a machine TL as a base to just figure out the basics with the sentences otherwise being written out by me so that they had the necessary personality and very little of that machine TL jank. Also while I do intend on maybe going through later and doing a more thorough clean of the pages? I realized it would take a very, VERY long time and opted for something that's not as meticulous but good for the time being.​

Starting the thread right now because as soon as it's uploaded, I do want to get ahead of the curve on certain things, such as the nature of this manga's translation process. The base of it was done via machine TL. Mainly DeepL and Google Translate and by that I really mean it was a base. Aside from maybe one or two times where I felt the translation given was good-enough? What I otherwise did was eyeball the sentence and then rewrote it for the purpose of cutting down on that jank. This I fully acknowledge is not perfect and in no way, shape or form is this me trying to spout off about machine TLs somehow being the way of the future or garbage like that. I've seen enough instances of crap machine TLs from the official release of the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga and even just translations from ye olden times back when people used MS Paint to know how rough things can be and I fully invite and welcome better translations if they come down the line. Hell let me just go out on a limb and say that this is not something for anyone to attempt if they are not a fan of meticulous labor. The amount of time I'd have to spend looking up and copying kanji, go between DeepL and Google Translate either because the result it gave was so baffling I needed to double-check or just provided me with romaji and also just realizing that a kana I put down was wrong and that the one I needed was so barely different that it made me curse the existence of this writing system is ridiculous. It's why I'm very open and transparent about the use of these methods. I'd rather not have there be some false impression of how this came to be and also I am not a cheerleader of it.

The thing is, I don't speak or read Japanese. I started on learning the process and can recognize some characters pretty easily but otherwise I'm not what you'd call proficient or even at "Nihongo jouzu" level. What I am is a fan of Akira Toriyama's who was devastated when he passed away earlier in March who has decided to take manners into his own hands in regards to some of his manga which have even after years of waiting still not been translated and as far as I know? There are no plans from scanlator groups to tackle some of these works and considering the nature of some of them, it's likely we won't be seeing fresh scans or translations for the many years to come. Take Bubul for example, this is a manga that has no official collected release or even a digital release. This means the only way you're owning this story officially is to scour the internet for the exact issue of WSJ this was published in which considering the nature of the paper quality that magazine has and the amount of years it's been basically means that if you want it perfectly intact you'll need to be prepared to shell out some serious duckets. In a perfect world of course these would've had translations already... well that and Toriyama would still be around.

Now then, speaking on some of the choices I've made now that the main elephant has been addressed, properly lent the tea it so kindly asked for and it is off on its merry way, I mainly used Curtis Hoffman's summary of the manga (Which you can check out here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160831120643/http://tsoj.manga.org/db/tori_new.html#m3_tag) to get the basic plot and used it for some reference for the character names though I chose to render the main human dude's name as "Patch" and not "Patchi" since honestly I kind of felt Patch did most of the work in getting the pun across. I also for the most part as noted in the little disclaimer page made edits to add the necessary personality. Basically if you want to know what that means? I am not a staunch purist for direct translations but I'm of course not about completely rewriting and changing the meaning of the original work. I aim for a happy medium something more akin to the style of official translations. What this means is on occasion you'll find bits where the dialogue is punched up a tad but it's not to such a massive degree where it stops being the writing of the original author. Next there's the matter of cleaning these scans. So these come from the kindly user of AkiraToriyamaManga who long ago uploaded the raws for this story which were scanned directly off of the issue of Weekly Shonen Jump it was printed in. This release had no cleaning done to it whatsoever and also seeing as how this was a magazine? There was a lot of ad blurbs and more. I made the conscious choice to excise that, aiming for a look that's more akin to what one might find in an official volume. As for the cleaning process itself? Well, this is where things get interesting.

So a few days earlier, I made this post which showed off how I was cleaning the pages: https://forums.mangadex.org/threads/wip-bubul-cleaning.1696694/

My process here was simple. I made two new layers in the program Paint.net, filled one with white and then for the layer above it? I went about tracing over the pages in black. Then since I kept the original manga page as the layer below everything? Once I implemented the translation, I went about erasing parts where the screentone should be visible before applying a light sharpening filter to that screentone and then flattening, resizing and saving. It results in honestly one of the cleanest pages possible but there's one problem. It takes an agonizing amount of time and when I calculated everything in my head? I realized that I might end up spending a whole month just tracing before I even get to translating. With that in mind, I chose to try out a few different methods as I went about translating the pages. Some worked better than others and admittedly it's not the cleanest. The thing is, at a certain point I realized that by worrying so much about this? The most important part, that being the translation itself, wouldn't get done in a timely manner so I chose to cut my losses and focus on that part. Now I will say right now since now it's out there? I am totally fine with potentially just going back, doing the process and then replacing the pages but I'm not sure when that will be so this is the best. Hey at least now scanlator groups have a base to work off of if they want to make their own translations.

That being said, I really do hope people enjoy these and if not? Hey, it's okay. If you use it as motivation to make a better translation? By all means do so. Like I said, the purpose was really more to ensure more of Toriyama's work could be read and with this? I believe this means for the most part that all his Shueisha work is now done and available to read.

 

[Lalatiozao]

B

Word of Warning: This is going to be pretty long. For those who want the TL;DR version? I used a machine TL as a base to just figure out the basics with the sentences otherwise being written out by me so that they had the necessary personality and very little of that machine TL jank. Also while I do intend on maybe going through later and doing a more thorough clean of the pages? I realized it would take a very, VERY long time and opted for something that's not as meticulous but good for the time being.​

Starting the thread right now because as soon as it's uploaded, I do want to get ahead of the curve on certain things, such as the nature of this manga's translation process. The base of it was done via machine TL. Mainly DeepL and Google Translate and by that I really mean it was a base. Aside from maybe one or two times where I felt the translation given was good-enough? What I otherwise did was eyeball the sentence and then rewrote it for the purpose of cutting down on that jank. This I fully acknowledge is not perfect and in no way, shape or form is this me trying to spout off about machine TLs somehow being the way of the future or garbage like that. I've seen enough instances of crap machine TLs from the official release of the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga and even just translations from ye olden times back when people used MS Paint to know how rough things can be and I fully invite and welcome better translations if they come down the line. Hell let me just go out on a limb and say that this is not something for anyone to attempt if they are not a fan of meticulous labor. The amount of time I'd have to spend looking up and copying kanji, go between DeepL and Google Translate either because the result it gave was so baffling I needed to double-check or just provided me with romaji and also just realizing that a kana I put down was wrong and that the one I needed was so barely different that it made me curse the existence of this writing system is ridiculous. It's why I'm very open and transparent about the use of these methods. I'd rather not have there be some false impression of how this came to be and also I am not a cheerleader of it.

The thing is, I don't speak or read Japanese. I started on learning the process and can recognize some characters pretty easily but otherwise I'm not what you'd call proficient or even at "Nihongo jouzu" level. What I am is a fan of Akira Toriyama's who was devastated when he passed away earlier in March who has decided to take manners into his own hands in regards to some of his manga which have even after years of waiting still not been translated and as far as I know? There are no plans from scanlator groups to tackle some of these works and considering the nature of some of them, it's likely we won't be seeing fresh scans or translations for the many years to come. Take Bubul for example, this is a manga that has no official collected release or even a digital release. This means the only way you're owning this story officially is to scour the internet for the exact issue of WSJ this was published in which considering the nature of the paper quality that magazine has and the amount of years it's been basically means that if you want it perfectly intact you'll need to be prepared to shell out some serious duckets. In a perfect world of course these would've had translations already... well that and Toriyama would still be around.

Now then, speaking on some of the choices I've made now that the main elephant has been addressed, properly lent the tea it so kindly asked for and it is off on its merry way, I mainly used Curtis Hoffman's summary of the manga (Which you can check out here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160831120643/http://tsoj.manga.org/db/tori_new.html#m3_tag) to get the basic plot and used it for some reference for the character names though I chose to render the main human dude's name as "Patch" and not "Patchi" since honestly I kind of felt Patch did most of the work in getting the pun across. I also for the most part as noted in the little disclaimer page made edits to add the necessary personality. Basically if you want to know what that means? I am not a staunch purist for direct translations but I'm of course not about completely rewriting and changing the meaning of the original work. I aim for a happy medium something more akin to the style of official translations. What this means is on occasion you'll find bits where the dialogue is punched up a tad but it's not to such a massive degree where it stops being the writing of the original author. Next there's the matter of cleaning these scans. So these come from the kindly user of AkiraToriyamaManga who long ago uploaded the raws for this story which were scanned directly off of the issue of Weekly Shonen Jump it was printed in. This release had no cleaning done to it whatsoever and also seeing as how this was a magazine? There was a lot of ad blurbs and more. I made the conscious choice to excise that, aiming for a look that's more akin to what one might find in an official volume. As for the cleaning process itself? Well, this is where things get interesting.

So a few days earlier, I made this post which showed off how I was cleaning the pages: https://forums.mangadex.org/threads/wip-bubul-cleaning.1696694/

My process here was simple. I made two new layers in the program Paint.net, filled one with white and then for the layer above it? I went about tracing over the pages in black. Then since I kept the original manga page as the layer below everything? Once I implemented the translation, I went about erasing parts where the screentone should be visible before applying a light sharpening filter to that screentone and then flattening, resizing and saving. It results in honestly one of the cleanest pages possible but there's one problem. It takes an agonizing amount of time and when I calculated everything in my head? I realized that I might end up spending a whole month just tracing before I even get to translating. With that in mind, I chose to try out a few different methods as I went about translating the pages. Some worked better than others and admittedly it's not the cleanest. The thing is, at a certain point I realized that by worrying so much about this? The most important part, that being the translation itself, wouldn't get done in a timely manner so I chose to cut my losses and focus on that part. Now I will say right now since now it's out there? I am totally fine with potentially just going back, doing the process and then replacing the pages but I'm not sure when that will be so this is the best. Hey at least now scanlator groups have a base to work off of if they want to make their own translations.

That being said, I really do hope people enjoy these and if not? Hey, it's okay. If you use it as motivation to make a better translation? By all means do so. Like I said, the purpose was really more to ensure more of Toriyama's work could be read and with this? I believe this means for the most part that all his Shueisha work is now done and available to read.

Bro you have the magazine??

 

[AspiringMangaReader]

B

Bro you have the magazine??

Unfortunately I don't. To explain, basically a user on imgur uploaded the entirety of Majin Mura no Bubul and at pretty ridiculously high quality. Now just so we're clear, I don't condone piracy if I can help it... but considering this is a long out of print Jump issue and hey this thing hasn't been translated at all, I grabbed those images, cleaned them up to the best of my limited ability and did my work. It would definitely be better if I owned the mag or had access to all the pages but that's the problem with stuff like this sadly, you gotta take what you can get and unfortunately I can't add this to the description.