My reasons for choosing to study the Japanese language are varied, but I’d be lying if I said that manga (Japanese comics) didn’t have at least a slight influence on that decision. I have fond memories of holing up in the corner of my local Borders bookstore with a stack of manga at my side. But my beloved Borders eventually shut down, and I eventually took to the internet to find more content. Admittedly, some of these uploads were… occasionally less-than-strictly-legal publications called scanlations. Scanlating is a common fan-translation term that refers to the process of taking raw (otherwise known as untranslated) scanned pages of a manga, editing out the original Japanese text, translating that text, and then implementing the translations into the cleaned versions of the scans. For many fans, scanlating is simply a fun way to pass the time and flex one’s skills unpaid. For major publishing companies—such as Kodansha USA, Tokyopop, VIZ Media, and others that have been supporting the growing interest in the medium with official publications for years—it’s a painstaking business effort, and one that requires a great deal of DTP work to pull off.

Contrary to what many may think, faithfully localizing content for non-Japanese audiences does not simply mean slapping English words into blank text boxes. It also means carefully editing out sound-effect bubbles, mimicking fonts to convey character voices, and editing a variety of other aspects of the visual medium to localize it for foreign language-speaking audiences. 

Background

As I looked to the final project for our Desktop Publishing & Audio/Visual (DTP & A/V) class, scanlating seemed like an obvious choice. That left me to decide what to use for materials. Every year, the Japanese publisher Shonen Jump hosts a contest wherein fledgeling manga authors submit one-off comics, usually in a longer-than-standard 40-50 page format. I was able to find one such example in a comic called “Count Over” by Masaoki Shindo, which was uploaded in its entirety online (link here). As an action series, it contains a wide variety of sound effects, as well as various voice-conveying font styles. Not only that, but as a special one-off prize-winning publication, it includes a colored cover page. All of these things made Count Over a tantalizing choice for cleaning and translating.

While this project was not my first time to attempt scanlating, it was the first time that I had the opportunity to do so with the Adobe suite of products at my disposal, specifically Photoshop CC 2018. Leveling-up to a more souped-up version of the free-to-use programs I’d originally learned on definitely had a learning curve attached to it, but as I’ll outline below, Photoshop made many different aspects of the project not only a breeze, but a treat to work with.

Step One: Cleaning the Scans

The first thing that I had to do for this undertaking was take the original Japanese pages and edit out the text within the speech bubbles, as well as any sound effects in the backgrounds of scenes. While there are some official publishers who keep the sound effects in their original Japanese, I wanted to take advantage of Photoshop’s editing capabilities and see just how well I could integrate the English sfx of my own.

I decided to start with what I thought would be a challenge: the colored cover page. Jump had already done some of the work for me, by including the author’s name as well as the title in English on the front page, so I decided to leave those be. There are several series out there that have done similarly, since the brand appeal of the Japanese can actually be a selling point rather than a detraction for fans. However, the summary text in the background could not be left as it was, so I took to editing that text out with Photoshop’s handy content-aware fill feature. What I thought would be a difficult matching task actually proved to be as easy as a few simple clicks, and voilà! The original text was gone, almost as if it had never been there!

I repeated this process with the black and white pages as well. For the mask, I used a 100% opacity brush tool on a separate layer, which allowed me to navigate some of the more difficult speech bubbles and backgrounds. Going into editing the black-and-white pages, I had thought that content-aware fill would help speed the process up just as it had for the color page. Sadly, since the images were monochrome, the content-aware fill actually had a harder time isolating subtle background patterns from surrounding lines. I’d had high hopes, but in the end, for many of the trickier sound effect placements, I had to dig in and manually edit things out.

Once the text was out, I was also able to use the brush to add in background lines where they’d been exposed by removing sound effects and text. See if you can spot any of the places where I had to correct in the following examples (for my sake, hopefully you can’t)!

From there, I moved on to translation.

Step Two: Translating with Picture Lists

Considering how much time I had for the project, I was only able to fully edit and translate the first five pages of Count Over. Even then, the process of compiling the picture list was a time-consuming one. There was no way for me to easily extract the text, so I had to manually type up my own list to import to the CAT tool, sound effects and all. Once it was in the tool, thankfully, translating the text proved to be a breeze. The only complication—if it can even be called one—was how often I went back and nit-picked my translations to fit the bubbles, which is a perfect lead-in to the next section.

Step Three: Implementing the Translated Text

Implementing the text was actually a two-fold process. First, it required that I physically fit the text into the speech bubbles and other text-areas. To keep things as aesthetically pleasing as possible, I tried to scale font size and text shape to the bubbles as much as I could. For the speech bubbles, this didn’t prove to be too time-consuming, but sound effects required a bit more effort.

First, I went online in search of free-to-use fonts to help convey the same tone as the Japanese. “Manga Temple” ended up being my general speech font, and I used it sparingly for some of the simpler sound effects as well. For the more explosive sound effects, the appropriately-named “DeathRattle BB” was a perfect fit. On their own, they were both fine enough, but Photoshop also has a transformation feature that helped take those visual effects to new heights. Specifically, the arc style allowed me to create explosion effects that seemed to jump directly out from the action.

Final Thoughts & Takeaways

While it was a pain-staking and overall time-consuming process, Photoshop proved to be a delight for editing these five pages. As I mentioned before, I’ve tried my hand at scanlation in the past, but it was always using free, third-party programs. While these programs are a huge boon for amateurs looking to explore image-editing, they lack some of the more dynamic features that Photoshop offers.

So, even though it took me almost a full day to master the process and implement those skills, Photoshop still managed to drastically cut the time I usually spend editing, and produced a much more polished final product. All in all, though I could nit-pick these pages to my dying day, I’m genuinely happy with the final product. With final exams out of the way, I have a feeling it won’t be long before I’m diving back into Photoshop to finish the last 39 pages of this project!

To see all five localized pages, you can download the zip file (containing the original png pages, the translated psd files, and the localized png pages) here, or you can continue reading them below.