Scanlating

[ggqt]

I was just wondering why it is not possible to scanlate a light novel.

[rpapo]

I was just wondering why it is not possible to scanlate a light novel.

There's not much point. When you scanlate a manga, you are replacing relatively small areas of vertically oriented text in Japanese with roughly equivalent areas of horizontally oriented text in English (or whatever other language). It takes some skill to do this, both in translation, and in graphic manipulation. But in doing so you preserve the essence of the manga: the artwork.

With light novels, however, the essence of the book is the text, and graphics are only used occasionally, for a little spice. That text is also far more elaborate than what you find in manga. It's not exactly literary in it's style, but it is far more so than what you have in a manga. It is more complicated, and needs more work to render into English (or whatever other language). There is no point in preserving the Japanese text order on the page (columns top to bottom, moving from the right side of the page towards the left), you might as well do it in English text order, with an English text font.

Bottom line: you need a word processor, not an image processor. Scanning the text buys you very little, except perhaps the ability to store the pages on a thumb drive for reference as you're working on your translation (been there, done that). That's presuming you've bought the printed book, of course.

[ggqt]

Ah, Okay, That makes a bit of sense. I figured it would not be as simple as just running a scnalating program and fixing a few grammatical errors. If it was I assume a lot more light novels would have been translated by now.

Anyway, Thank you for your input and information. Guess my only hope is to become fluent in Japanese and import the actual books for all the stories I want to finish.

[rpapo]

Ah, Okay, That makes a bit of sense. I figured it would not be as simple as just running a scnalating program and fixing a few grammatical errors. If it was I assume a lot more light novels would have been translated by now.

Scanlation is done even less by mechanical means than novels. The text is simpler, grammatically, but far more stylized. And to my knowledge, nobody relies on mechanical means to translate Japanese books. Anything beyond simple sentences turns into garbage when presented to a computer translation program (like Google Translate).

Anyway, Thank you for your input and information. Guess my only hope is to become fluent in Japanese and import the actual books for all the stories I want to finish.

Good luck. I've been studying Japanese in my spare time since early 2008, yet even now I typically have to consult the dictionary at least two dozen times per page.

[Mystes]

I was just wondering why it is not possible to scanlate a light novel.

PDFs could count as "scanlating".

[rpapo]

I was just wondering why it is not possible to scanlate a light novel.

PDFs could count as "scanlating".

Only if they are completely raw...

[Ways]

I was just wondering why it is not possible to scanlate a light novel.

PDFs could count as "scanlating".

thats just weird.