Arcana (Anthology Series) Vol. 4 Scanlation Project

I guess this is kind of sudden for a first post, but… I’ve got a month or so of holidays to spare, with not very much to do, I would think. Therefore I plan to try my hand at a scanlation project of sorts.

As of now, I have been studying Japanese for more than 3 years, and although I would not dare to say that it’s anywhere at all near perfect yet, I’m pretty sure I have most basic grammar forms pretty much down pat. I’m still lacking in my vocabulary, though, so I think scanlating would be perfect for helping me improve in that aspect. I don’t have much experience at all with scanning my own volumes and editing/cleaning them (so far I don’t know how to properly edit the problem of blurry parts of the page D: ) but I’ll try my best. ;D

So – you’d probably be wondering. Scanlation of what?

Recently, I bought a few volumes of Arcana (アルカナ), the Zero-Sum original anthology series. So far they’ve published at least 10 volumes in this series. In each volume, they’ve requested various artists who get their work published in the magazines Zero-Sum WARD and Monthly Comic Zero-Sum (月刊コミックZERO-SUM) published by Ichijinsha (株式会社一迅社) to create one-shot manga based on various themes. One new volume is released every 4 months, apparently.

It’s not that this series has never been scanlated, but only a few stories, and mostly from the first few volumes, have been scanlated before. Refer to this page at MangaFox … I also don’t always agree very much with the way other scanlators phrase their translations, but that’s probably just me… One other thing is that I feel scanlations should use a greater variety of fonts. I mean, you can’t even tell if there’s any capitalisation with that “good” ol’ American-Comic-Bookish font. And some groups don’t change the font even when the font changes to cutesy or scary in the actual raws. That is sad. :c

In any case, what I really love about this series is that in each volume, you get to see a plethora of art styles and storytelling, from gag to dramatic. I wouldn’t say that they’re always all interesting or well-drawn, but the just the variety is pretty much good enough for me, and I haven’t seen anything that’s really too horrible so far. Plus some of the artists are regulars and always create epic one-shots! Some examples include Minekura Kazuya (Saiyuki), Kouga Yun (LOVELESS), Takayama Shinobu (Amatsuki) and Shindou Arashi (Makai Senki Disgaea, which doesn’t seem all that awesome for a manga, but her 4komas are so epicly hilarious in Arcana.)

I don’t own all the volumes (yet), but I do own volumes 1, 4, 6 and 9 for now. Each volume is pretty thick (anywhere from around 10-20 stories each), so given the spare time I have I’ll only be aiming to complete part of or all of one volume.

Just for your information, here’s a list of the various themes for all ten books so far:

*Vol. 1 – Butlers [執事]

Vol. 2 – Thieves/Phantom Thieves [賊・怪盗]

Vol. 3 – Princes and Princesses [王子＆姫]

*Vol. 4 – Vampires [吸血鬼]

Vol. 5 – Japanese-style (Wafuu)/Samurai [和風／侍]

*Vol. 6 – Special Forces/Groups [特殊部隊／集団]

Vol. 7 – Mages/Wizards [魔法使い／術師]

Vol. 8 – Butlers II [執事Ⅱ]

*Vol. 9 – Transformations/Personification [変化☆擬人化]

Vol. 10 – Conflicts/Secret Societies [闘争／秘密結社]

*I only own the volumes demarked with an asterisk (*) so far.

In bold is the volume I am planning to scanlate, at least for now. I feel that out of all the volumes I have, Vol. 4 has really got the highest number of interesting and well drawn stories, so I’d like to at least cover those. Edit: I’ve joined Spica Scans in the meantime, so that after I do translations of one-shotsI am at least assured that they will someday be typesetted into quality raws :D

It’s not like I have a vampire fetish or anything, especially after that horrible Twilight movie came along. I can’t really judge the book since I haven’t bothered taking time to read the whole damn thing before, but judging by its cover snippets of the movie which I saw while my brother (of all people) was watching it was proof enough for me that the actors just. Could. Not. Act. The sparkly skin part was especially excruciating, actually. But I digress.

If possible, I would really prefer that someone else be the raw-provider(s?) and/or cleaner(s?) (since I’m a total noob at both and I think my scanner isn’t very good…), and maybe even do the proofreading after I actually get to work with the translations (especially with all the very bombastic kanji without furigana ; m ; ), but I don’t know where to ask D: And most of all, I’m shy. -blush- >///< Well not really but I prefer lurking to posting taha.

Actually, I have an idea I would really want to try out… I think it would be more interesting and less of a hassle for everyone if I could tag the manga pages with the translations, a la Facebook (well not exactly) or Danbooru… And all you people learning Japanese would find it easier to compare English and Japanese text and learn, while proofreaders who have already mastered Japanese will have a much easier job. In addition, there would also be no need for editing apart from getting the raw scans to be in HQ. Of course, uploading might be a pain if there really isn’t any website which can help do this effectively, but ahwell.

Anyway, I obviously think it’s a good idea but I don’t know how I’m ever going to pull that off D: No idea what site I can use to help me do that since Flickr doesn’t seem to show annotations when pictures are embedded on WordPress, notes don’t show up when you download the large size and I don’t even know if I can make rollover images on WordPress. Damn. TTATT

Help… Does anyone have any ideas? I might even have to shift to blogger. D: Rollover’s better than nothing…? But that’ll require proper editing in of the translation.

 

Well then, hope to report back with some progress in the near future.

P.S. Sorry for the usual ramble. And in addition to that, sorry for the emoticons littered all over the place. I’m sorry they’re not even worthy of being called kaomoji due to the horrible execution.

P.P.S. By the way, does anyone know what the official pronunciation for inaniloquence is?  /fail

P.P.P.S. I need a nice custom image header. Any ideas?