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Kids these days...

Back when I joined, we didn't have any fancy machine translators. We had books, one series, and we had to share the series.

You youngbloods have it easy nowadays, to a point where 'you don't need English' to actually understand the story.

 

She*


There is a very small amount of people that speak Japanese outside of Japan, if compared to the amount of Chinese outside of China.

Remember that a while back China had over 2 billion people, while Japan has a declining population since quite some time ago, not to mention it's one of the smallest countries out there.

It's simply a difference in scope, more people speak Chinese, so there are bigger chances of someone that speaks Chinese to feel interested in translating, than someone that speaks Japanese does.

Not to mention how the manga translation community is a lot stronger than the Manhua one, so this also takes translators away.

 

fumu there also place you have no access to books and need to wreck your brain using hard copy dictionary to understand one line

 

Yet scanlation scene seems to be declining in recent times, mostly due to the lack of translators.

 

*looks at how many mangas gets updated daily on any aggregator*

If it is declining, I'm certainly not seeing it.

 

I mean sure there are plent of scanlation updates on the huge binge-style series but quite a few of the more niche manga and manhwa (or however else the SKorean one is spelt) have dropped from weekly to monthly and sometimes longer between updates. In fact one of the good ones I found recently hasn't been updated in a looooooong while and since I only read it on an aggregator and they don't link or have a url of the scanlation home I've got no idea how to find out whats happening :/

 

Ah, you probably just read different genres than me, I still read plenty of mangas, manhuas and manhwas that get updated as frequently as the raw source.

I read a lot of pretty unknown stuff btw, and yes, my list of stuff that has been dropped by the translators keeps on growing, but... Honestly, it has always kept on growing, this much hasn't changed for me at all. I didn't see any change.

If anything, I have seen a boom in webtoons being translated, both by fans and by official sources (Lezhin and Line mainly), but I still know a good chunk of fantranslations that release just as fast as the raw~

... Most stuff I read have monthly updates though, weekly updates are limited to shounen jump stuff to me, and you can read almost everything from shounen jump on mangastream, which is the biggest fantranslation group atm, so they keep things updated as fast as the raw~


As for checking the source, it's not that hard, google the manga (or manhua/manhwa/webtoon, doesn't really matter) and type mangaupdates in front of it (ex: Fukumenkei Noise mangaupdates), one of the top results will link to a site very similar to NU, but without links to the translation due to legal issues, still, they'll have the name of the translation group.

At that point, you just need to google the name of the translation group and you'll find it, it's pretty easy overall~

 

I'm just speaking of personal experience, as most of the translators I used to work with in mangascalations have stopped. Several big groups have also disbanded in recent years, and pretty much every group that has releases I follow is constantly trying to recruit redrawers and jp translators. Actually, it seems to me that there have been an influx of korean/chinese series that are keeping aggregators rolling.

 

I mean, who wouldn't want them?

 

Ah, I'm only talking from my own experience too! >.<

As in, on how much I have read, I haven't seen any change on the scenario overall... But yeah, some groups I constantly saw have been pretty inactive or even disbanded recently, I don't remember seeing an update from Chibi Scans nor Phoenix Serenade Scans recently IIRC...

At the same time, people leaving and new people coming is totally normal, I'd say it's really hard (definitely not impossible though!) to expect people to keep on doing things for free once they finish college. If a group had only old timers, it wouldn't surprise me to have them disbanded after a while.

And well, regarding the recruiting...

Mainly this, since the time I read on onemanga I remember seeing tons of recruitment pages on whatever site I was reading, they have been there since forever AFAIK.

 

Specifically redrawers and TLs. The most desired role most of the time.

 

Most series put the translator's site on first or last page. But keep in mind that SOME translations are done by the aggregator sites themselves. I know at least 2 aggregator sites that translate series themselves.

 

I only know one translation that is uploaded at aggregators, but I do know they exist~

A bit annoying is that I never saw anything from that translator on MU, I guess they don't list stuff uploaded to aggregators... *grumbles*

 

MU does list stuff that was done by aggregators, when TDG was done by an aggregator on MU, they listed it. Clicking on that said aggregator I see may 7ths they released SBM which was listed.

Maybe they chose not to be listed?

 

I think they honestly don't know MU exists, they don't seem to care about it, it's the translator for Matantei Loki Ragnarok later chapters and Matantei Loki Ragnarok Shin Sekai no Kamigami, last I checked he wasn't listed at all! >.<

 

Maybe, put people can put up releases too. So if they don't do it, I would think someone else would? You can try adding it yourself and see if they start picking it up going forward.

 

I would, but I tried registering at MU some 5 different times and the confirmation e-mail never arrived, so I gave up~