Hello everyone. There are quite a few Hypnosis-related Mangas out there that have not been translated and probably never will, unless we take up the arms.

I have found a way how everyone can translate Mangas from Japanese to English. Well, found is a little bit exaggerating. Basic skills with Gimp/Photoshop are needed (because you have to clean the images and you have to edit the already entered Japanese Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana so that it can be translated. It is a lot of work and takes quite long, and the quality will be nowhere near the quality you see from translation groups, but if you got a couple of Mangas you always wanted to translate, here is your chance.

The Question is, would it be okay, if this stuff gets posted here, even if the translation isn't very good?

To make it short the needed tools are a Picture editor, a translation tool (I am currently using "Translation Aggregator") and an OCR program to scan the japanese letters. You can use http://maggie.ocrgrid.org/nhocr/ for the OCR scanning, it works pretty good (you may have to make the letters bigger). Then it's just a matter of copying the letters as graphic into a clean file, rearrange them to horizontal (that is the time consuming part) and then get the file scanned by the webpage. You then get the characters which you can paste into a textfile and later translate. These translations mostly contain only the meaning of the sentence and you have to put it into a correct sentence yourself, but you will have a good understanding about what is happening.

I know this is hardly new (ppl translated Visual Novels with AGTH 5 years ago), but I thought I would let you guys know anyway. :) It's also a good way to get some Tag translation for a couple of Images on our Board.

I would not encourage the posting of machine-translated manga.

The method is interesting, though.

It's no copy and paste (good god that would be aweful ... some of this translated sentences are just ...) - at least for me. So the question is, would you prefer a mediocre translation (translated via machine but completly reworked sentences that fit) or no translation at all ...

I'd always go for a mediocre translation ...

Here? I'd rather have no translation than one given by a machine, even if it were rewritten to be coherent. Machine translations will always be machine translations, and their accuracy will always be spotty at best. Translating a few words may yield acceptable results, but more than that is doubtful. At some point, you're likely to end up with a result where the only option is to guess at what's being said, and I don't want guesswork translations posted.

Now, if it were just for my own amusement, I wouldn't mind reading some machine-translated manga, provided it had been edited to be readable.

Have to agree with Mindwipe on this one. It just doesn't seem...right.

If you want to do this, though, I see no harm in collective a bunch of download links to the downloadable manga in a forum thread, though. That way those who ARE interested could have their cake and eat it too.

Yeah, Japanese is a language where it's very dependent on the context of the surroundings. While I may live with a machine translating French or something, Japanese is better left to a human with working knowledge of that language.

There's no question about it. However, in my case these Mangas are 2+ years old and won't ever be translated (at least the chances are very slim). Oh well .. I'll just translate them for myself then ...

There's really no way to get around this: if you want a decent manga translation you're going to have to either learn Japanese or pay for a translation from one of the translation groups out there. Either way it's going to cause somebody some time and money.

So what we should really be doing is compiling a list of translators that accept commissions and the prices on which they operate. That or we each look to enroll in our respective local Japanese language schools. I've already decided on the latter but I'm not adverse to paying for translations until I reach the intermediate level (which will be a long while from now).

So to review:

- a prioritized list of manga we'd like translated
- a list of translators who accept commissions and their prices
- a list of people here who'd be willing to pay for those translations

I personally don't think anything else would suffice.

Well, I think scanlating the Mangas I found so far will be enough for me and I might get a little training in Japanese this way as well, because if the scanner is not picking up a specific sign, I have both Katakana and Hiragana tables open to post it into the OCR Image.

It would be a lot easier if it were just the language and not extra signs. The signs aren't even that big of an issue, it is the Kanjis. The common ones are aroung 2k+ - the common ones!

Funny thing is, I even have a kanji to romaji and hiragana/katakana to romaji translator open, because I can make a better sense out of a couple of sentences, if I read them that way (I guess 20 years of anime finally pay of).

Well, thanks for the input. The method described above is fine for personal use though, and i hoped we could find a small place somewhere here where we could post them with a lot of warnings in place (label them as fantranslation or something like that), would have been nice, but oh well ...