Oriko Magica vol 2 plans

We'll do the scanlation party thing again, but this time, I've ordered from Amazon, so it should arrive 2-4 days after it (officially) releases in Japan. In the meanwhile, the first 12 pages of chapter 4 have been ripped and translated on the site.

Oriko Magica: Change of Plans

It seems that Share/PD scanners are not putting this on the top of their agenda, probably because Oriko and Kazumi are spin-offs. Anyways, another group called Yurikai has announced that they have gotten their hands on their copy. My copy will arrive on Monday. We will proceed to pick up wherever they are then.

Oriko Magica Plans

Here are the proposed details for the Oriko Magica open scanlation party. All of the details can be changed right now, so don't be afraid to suggest anything right now.

Site

The project will take place on the new backup site, anonscans.org. This server also isn't mine; it has locked up for a few minutes twice during this past week when I was testing the note plugin with Jiya, but it's fine otherwise.

The Cat Diary board is open if you want to see what Oriko Magica's board is like. Play around with it, just don't brea-actually, what am I talking about? Break it as much as possible so I can fix the bugs. I know that there's an annoying client-side bug with the photo notes that I haven't gotten around to fixing yet (sometimes, the text area disappears after the note gets selected).

Notes

The notes work similarly to those on Danbooru, flickr, and the like. Mouse over them to look at them, click on one to edit it, etc. The "New Note" button is also fixed on the bottom left of the screen so you don't have to scroll all the way up or down to make a new note. There's also a keyboard shortcut for it: "Alt+N".

"Version Management"

I put in a "version management" system. It's actually just uses tags to track progress. This page tracks the progress of all pages with a valid page tag (ex: Oriko_Magica_v01_c01_001). Here are the stages that it tracks.

Obviously, most of these steps will be skipped. For example, most editors will probably just do cleaning and typesetting together later in the game; cleaning is just there because there's no translations to typeset early on. TLC can be skipped if the lines are obvious, or if there isn't any lines at all. There's just a lot of them in order to be flexible.

There are three QC stages in order to try to get three people to QC; each person moves it up a stage. Again, it can be skipped.

Anyways, the left box moves the image horizontally, and the right box uploads a new image with the correct tags for those stages. The same could also be achieved just by modifying the stage_* tag.

Registration

I feel hypocritical for saying this, but you'll have to register to use any of the above. While it doesn't keep anyone out, it just takes a few database queries to remove malicious changes if everyone had unique IDs. Thus, I am requiring registration. However, I am by no means trying to keep anyone out. Everyone is invited.

Standards

These are proposed standards for translations and typesetting. The goal of this project is fast scans, so some corners are cut, like using the same font family for three styles. Again, don't be afraid to suggest better ones.

Translation

• "魔法少女": Magical Girl
• "キュゥべえ": Kyuubey
• Honorifics: yes
• Name order: original

Everyone has a different way of translating honorifics and keeping or switching name order. To keep things consistent, I propose that we just leave the names as is.

Typesetting

• Dialog font: AnimeAce 2.0 BB
  • Shouting: Bold
  • Thinking: Italics
    
• Scary font: CC Carry On Screaming

Other fonts are up to the typesetters; just make it look good.

Schedule

Of course, this is just the predicted schedule. No one knows if it will leak or not.

1. May 10-12: Some vendors may sell it before the listed release date, May 12. Plot spoilers and cam shots of some pages may leak out.
   
   
2. May 10-13: It might take a while for the scanners to get it up. I'll definitely be relentlessly F5-ing regular raw sites:
   
   • Orange Hiyoko
   • Raw Bunko
   • raw1st
   • Nyaa/TT
   
   Share and PD don't usually get volumes first, but they're good backups. Of course, someone might post the link on /a/ as soon as it comes out, so that's a good place to look as well.
   
   
3. In case I'm AFK when it releases, just do it on /a/. I'll get the board up as soon as possible.
   
   
4. The duration of this project might vary, but I'm thinking that it will take 2-5 days. I'll be putting all of my time and effort into this, and DKThias and others says that they'll help.

FAQ

• How will I be credited?
  On M^U: Everyone will be credited as separate groups, with anons grouped into the 4chan group. Ex: "4chan & /a/nonymous scanlations & DKThias & ...". Tell me your group name on M^U if you want me to credit your group.
  Credit Page: I don't really have credit pages (other than the statistics pages), but I'll put in yours if you want.
  
  
• How many volumes will Oriko Magica have?
  Oriko Magica is confirmed to have only two volumes by the summary of the second volume.
  
  
• How will it be released?
  I'm still not decided about this, but I think that we should release by chapter. We could release a v2 batch later if necessary.

Anyways, that's all I have to say for now. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

"Scanbooru"

My previous statement about how I was going to approach Oriko Magica was kinda vague. I'll expand on it in this post.

Problems:

• Oriko Magica is a 150-page spoiler bomb. Excuse me, it's a series of 150-page spoiler bombs, one per month. Since the Madoka manga stuck to the anime, it wasn't very interesting (at least to me) besides the explicit detail in the Charlotte scene.
  
  Due to its explosive potential, this is a manga that needs to be translated yesterday, and I don't usually say that. I'm sure that a lot of other people are dying to work on it as well, considering that a few anons (including DKThias) churned out Madoka vol 2 in a few days.
  
  
• Madoka vol 2 was an example of a scanlation effort on /a/ done right. Nevertheless, a few days ago, I saw it go wrong. A couple of anons were working on the Lotte's Toy manga, much to the chagrin of Facepalm Scans. However, someone else pointed out that the editor was putting in the text in the wrong bubbles. The anons stopped, presumably embarrassed.
  
  I can't really blame them, since chan-style image boards aren't really made for scanlation. During the little experience I had of scanlating on /a/ (while using someone else's translation), I found that it's easy to lose track, even with scripts like backwash.

Proposed Solution:

• As I've said, someone suggested by e-mail that I should develop some sort of soft translation software. I probably misconstrued what he meant, but in any case, I dismissed the idea at the time.
  
  
• I occasionally visited the Madoka general to see what's up, and maybe help translate a few things, like those few magazine scans that talked about film theory in Madoka a few weeks ago. I would frequently see the anon who is of purportedly French origin (named "Some french anon") editing Madoka pics and doujins. One time, I noticed that he was asking for sound effects translations, so I pointed him to the motherlode of sfx translations. He said something to the effect of "well, that's not useful for me, since I can't read it". I then realized that he had been editing all of these pictures with translations from Danbooru and some anons in the general thread. He can't even read Hiragana or Katakana, and yet he produces fairly good edits.
  
  I haven't been keep up with it (there's probably an image pack on the wiki), but he must have edited hundreds of images without even so much as speaking with the translators who put up the translations on Danbooru. That's the kind of efficiency that Oriko Magica needs.
  
  
• My proposition is that we also use a Danbooru-style image board for the scanlation of Oriko Magica. I don't know if anyone has ever attempted a full-blown scanlation effort like this. Nevertheless, I want to give this a try.
  
  The basic procedure is like this:
  
  Note that the editing is still done offline with Photoshop (or whatever). The image board is just a mode of collaboration, and is not meant to be a full scanlation suite.
  
  The diagram collapses many jobs into a few (and forgets QC, just like me). It's presumed that the image gets downloaded, worked on, and re-uploaded by many people doing different jobs. The point of this solution is to try to make the scanlation as parallel as possible; you can think of this as an assembly line of sorts.
  
  One feature of Danbooru-style image boards that will be abused is tags, because it is important to keep track of which pages are at which stage.
  
  
• Obviously, we can't use THE Danbooru for this. Danbooru's code is open source, but it requires Ruby on Rails and all of that jazz. I tried gelbooru 0.1.* last time, but it was buggy for me. The last choice left is...Shimmie, which I didn't even know about until I read the Wikipedia article on image boards. Back then, I thought that there wasn't a photo note extension for Shimmie, so I implemented one. However, right after that, I noticed that someone was indeed developing one. Nevertheless, I can't get it to work, so I'm using my implementation in the meanwhile.
  
  It works fine so far, though there might be a few injection attack vulnerabilities here and there, or something like that. Shimmie is surprisingly extensible, and it even comes with a Danbooru skin.
  
  

Advantages:

• Parallel scanlation: Ideally, instead of having to wait for other team members for everything, the translating, cleaning, typesetting and editing will all happen at the same time, so the required time is shorter than their combined time.
  
  
• No group structure required: Members of an orchestra aren't required to know each other. They're just required to come to the rehearsals and the performances and perform their parts together. Just like how the musicians can do their parts from their scores, I trust that given a scene like the screenshot above, editors/cleaners/typesetters would know what to do.
  
  
• No messing up the order of the bubbles: The translated text is right on the bubble, man!
  
  
• Doubles as an online reader: A bonus of this idea is that once it's finished, it can be put under a tag or a pool, and readers can be pointed to that pool if they prefer to read online (hey, it's better than having them read it online elsewhere). Moreover, it doesn't even have to be finished; readers can see the manga being scanlated in real time. Scanlating on chan-style image boards also has this benefit, but with photo notes, even if translation has finished but not editing, readers can easily read the translations, just like on Danbooru.

Disadvantages:

• Inconsistency: There exists a saying: "too many chefs ruin the broth". Given the translation wars that I've seen happen in the general threads, I have a bad omen about this. For the record, I use "magical girl" purely because the incorrect Latin bugs me, but if the majority overwhelmingly votes for "puella magi", I'll go with that. If we have an even split, everyone will just do what they want. I would rather have an inconsistent translation than no translation at all.
  
  Furthermore, font family, styling and sizes will have to be agreed on beforehand. The standard dialog font will probably be AnimeAce BB 2.0, because that's what all of cool kids are using.
  
  
• Requires Many People: I'm afraid that I'm just talking to myself and that no one will participate in this. In any case, I'll go ahead with this plan even if no one comes.

Anyways, after I translate 7o3x ch 6 and the next Ryuushika chapter, I'm going to test it with Jiya in private, fix anything that pops up, and probably do it in public with Cat Diary.