How I clean and translate a doujinshi (cassino's NO:under)

I meant to make a post on this two weeks ago and totally forgot...great going me :/
Anyway here I'm gonna talk a bit about the process I went through working on NO:under (and basically every other doujinshi I've done) so if that sounds like something you'd like to read about, here you go.

Contents:
Part 1: Translation method (with some talk about typesetting)
Part 2: Cleaning

See under the cut for the full post.





PART 1: Translation method (Feel free to skip this if you just want to know the fun parts)
Ironically, translation is by far the least time-consuming part of my doujinshi translation.
My Japanese is already fairly fluent, but even if you're a beginner, I believe it's entirely possible to create good translations as long as you know what you're doing. Google Translate is rarely, if ever, your friend (although it is a ridiculously powerful tool when it comes to handwriting recognition.) Japanese dictionaries, like Jisho and Weblio, are what you really want to look at. I encourage those among you with decent grip on beginner Japanese...learn through experience, and by experience I fully mean translating with a good dictionary that doesn't give you just the most basic definition of things. You will pick up so many new words this way!
Translating isn't just converting foreign text into native tongue. I'd argue the primary focus of my translations is rewriting the Japanese script in a way that feels natural in English. Yes, I'm talking this seriously about translating gay anime porn :P
I'm an exceedingly unorganised person and there are far better ways to do this, but what I tend to do is write up the Japanese script in a Notepad document and just number things so I vaguely know what panel is where, and then translate from that in an identical Notepad document. I just prefer not having to look back at images all the time...some manga fonts can be quite hard to read (and it's worse if the doujinshi is already in very low quality, which makes some kanji borderline indecipherable). This way, I'm only getting confused about the tiny little letters once lmao

(I hope the image here isn't cut off horribly...it gives you an indication of what my scripts look like anyway)
Once I've done cleaning - I'll talk about that in a second - I enter all of the text on in Photoshop. I might make revisions to the translation in this point if I decide it doesn't sound very good, or flow very well. Some parts of the script might get cut up to fit within speech bubbles at this point as well.
Talking about fonts - it depends what the work is. For my cassino translations, I've been using the font Viz uses (Whizbang) in their official release of the Evangelion manga, because I like how authentic it looks combined with her very Sadamoto art haha. In past I mostly used Komika Hand and Komika Axis, and I'm using this on my Summer Children translation still. Please do not use comic sans. Komika is free. Typesetting the bubbles like, with the spacing and everything, it's not necessarily something you can teach...or at least not something I can teach. I just eyeball it.
In terms of translation style, let's take a look at some examples from my last work, cassino's NO:under.

Just on the first page, I have two pretty good examples of what I'm talking about here.
The Japanese dialogue here is literally more like "I'm surprised. It's unusual for you to come here." and "If I do something bad and you hate it, that's fine. Tell me."
The first frame is not horrible in English, and this is definitely just my personal preference, but I dunno. Something about "This is a surprise." just sounds better to me than "I'm surprised." Do you get what I mean? lmao
The second frame is borderline awful. The way he phrases it, it's a bit of a difficult sentence to understand in Japanese as a non-native speaker anyway, so I could be rendering it a bit incorrectly to begin with, but I think my point still sticks. I know Karl is a bit of a socially inept asshole but I doubt he'd say something like "If I do something bad that's fine :)". It doesn't sound like that in Japanese! The word for "bad" here, ダメ, is just a sort of vague negative word, it isn't really literally "bad". Sometimes it means something more like "no." Some Japanese just does not translate very well literally to English.




PART 2: Cleaning
OKAY. HERE'S THE FUN PART. I'm gonna have to chop this down into a few separate parts because there are a lot of different elements to doing this.

PART 2 A: Literally unusable scans
Let me be completely transparent here. If a scan is such garbage quality the entire way through you can barely read the text or see the images, don't fucking use it. It will be a gigantic waste of your time. You are better off just buying the doujinshi second hand if there are no other scans. Use Mandarake.
HOWEVER, sometimes I will make the executive decision to use a shit scan when there is no other option for me. Back to NO:under and its first page here.

No offence to the person who scanned this, but what the genuine fuck happened here? The rest of the doujinshi is clean enough it's totally salvageable, but this is so fucking disgusting GGHHFGD it looks like someone threw noise on it in Photoshop. I am horrified. I don't know if you can see this, but you really need to. Here's the page on e-hentai. WHAT the fuck am I supposed to do with this, you're probably thinking, when you're me a month ago staring at this awful thing. Because this is a recap page from NO?, this page is completely missing from the cassino collection my friend scanned for me. In most cases, I could just use Photoshop's Levels functions on it, but the noise on this is so severe it just makes it worse! I would have to trace over this thing frame by frame, but THANK FUCKING GOD it's a recap page. This page is why I'm making this blog post. I want you all to know the pain I had to go through piecing this thing together from the doujinshi it came from. It wasn't as bad as if I had to trace it, yes, but jesus christ still!

It took about 2 hours to remake this page from start to finish. I had to grab the individual frames from NO?, resize them and cut them up so they fit within the original page's template. It doesn't line up one to one, but it's virtually identical to the original if you aren't looking at them side by side. Here's my version on e-hentai as well.

PART 2 B: Actually usable scans, but what do we do with these
I haven't been using straight scans for very long, but I did use some for NO:under and the whole of Schoolboy was done with straight scans. Fun fact, most doujinshi does not come out from the scanner looking Clean and Crisp in black and white. This is where Photoshop's Level function comes in.

(This is from Schoolboy, not NO:under because I don't still have the scans for N:u saved, whatever)

Coming out of the scanner it's probably going to look something like this. Very grey colors here - it doesn't look bad by any means but it's not the most ideal for a web release, especially since (and you probably can't see it) the book's texture is very clear on the pages before we've edited them and that can make removing text, etc, a fucking nightmare. Also note, if you can kind of make it out in the image, that the right side of the page is somewhat warped. We'll deal with that later.

Cropping the edges of the page out is easy, I just select one of the internal pages with the rectangle selection tool and gently crop it down with the inbuilt "canvas size" thing in Paint Tool SAI, then rotate it until the panels are straight. (You can check if they're straight or not by using the rectangle selection tool on the edge of a panel, pro tip). Once I've done that for every page relevant, I open them in Photoshop and use the aforementioned Levels function to get rid of most of the greys.

I basically just eyeball it until the black tones look black and the white tones look white. The second two arrows there on the Levels pane are what are of interest moreso than the first one. Dragging them together like that should create a nice contrast you just need to tweak to get right.

Once all of that is done, it's time to remove the text and clean up any issues with the scans.

PART 2 C: Removing text and redrawing

Even on scans you find already posted on the internet, you'll often notice they're heavily warped on the side of the page that binds into the book. This is because it's incredibly hard to flatten a book down like that - it's not the end of the world though and it really isn't that difficult to get rid of...

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. I actually used my friend's scan for this page rather than the one online as it was slightly less blurry on the edge here, but same difference. To get rid of this I start by selecting all the greys by hand and just drawing over them. (SELECT A COLOR FROM THE ACTUAL PAGE USING THE EYEDROPPER TOOL, DON'T JUST USE WHITE FROM YOUR PAINT WHEEL IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT) I do all of my actual cleaning in Paint Tool SAI as it's a lot more user friendly than Photoshop is for this sort of thing.

For particularly blurry parts, I create a new layer and draw over them completely, lower the opacity a little and carefully trace over the lines using SAI's Lineart layer pen tool.

In an actual doujinshi release I would put a bit more effort into it than this sloppy garbage but you get the idea :P I've already done this and I don't want to do it again now lmao.

The shading is the most finicky part of this, and it can be a real pain in the ass to replace because manga/doujinshi use screentones and other specific patterns to shade rather than blocked colours most of the time.

To start, I make a new layer underneath my linework and draw on where I plan on putting the shading (see the grey colour there). Then I make a new layer on top of that and select "Clipping group" from the layers menu, which will make whatever I draw on this layer locked to the opacity of the grey shading layer. Then I copy the same shading texture from a part of the page that's clean using the hand drawn selection tool...for example, Kaworu's neck here has the same pattern as his hair does, and it's a nice big chunk of texture, so it's the best bit to copy. Then I paste it in the clipping group layer a bunch of times and carefully line it up so the texture doesn't have any weird seams in it, until the whole thing is painted in.

Like so.

At this point I might need to make some adjustments so the edit looks like it's actually part of the picture - for example, although it isn't the case here, some doujinshi when they come in fairly low quality scans can look totally wrong when you draw on them clean lineart. I might have to resize the lineart so it's tiny and then resize it back up to how big it needs to be to make it look a bit blurrier and lower quality, etc.

Removing text from speech bubbles can be done the same way, although in most cases I just need to pick the color of the speech bubble with the eyedropper tool and draw over the top of the text.

If you're using good scans, you mightn't even have to worry about warping at all. It's difficult but not impossible to scan books without having this warp in them, but it does depend how its binded. Most normal doujinshi won't be thick enough that you can't flatten them properly but some are actually binded like books rather than magazines and that's a lot more difficult to work with.

Depending on what the project is, this cleaning and typesetting process probably won't take more than 2 or 3 hours in total, but it is very subjective! Schoolboy took about 8 hours to clean from start to finish. And if you hate yourself like I do and want to remove and replace all the fucking sound effects like I was doing for ages - Fushigi's Personal Hell Method - you'll be using manual texture replacement like above quite a lot >.<; God, when I first started doing this the raws site I found slapped a horrible watermark on every page!!! and I just removed them all manually instead of using scans from LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE like a fucking idiot!!!! It was good practice sure but god what the hell was wrong with me

This wasn't so much a tutorial as it was a display of the pain I put myself through to make the porn be in english but whatever! I thought it might interest someone how I go through this and NO:under was an interesting one to talk about given how fucking time consuming the first page was.