Some Thoughts on a Decade as a Scanlator

Let's see if I can go another 10 years before YHWH give me arthritis or some shit.

I wasn't planning on this post, but a 10 year-anniversary literally doesn't come every year, so allow me to ramble a bit today about my thoughts on the past 10 years as a scanlator.

Historie c39, first manga I translated

First rambling point about the the 10 year dating. I began my scanlation hobby with Historie chapter 39, but I have no idea when that exactly was. Mangaupdates says Feb 4, 2009 but that's probably wrong since it was only after several days that I thought it would be a good idea to update my release on that site. Now some of you at this point might be telling me, "Uhh, 2009? Wouldn't that mean you're only 9 years old as a scanlator?" That's intentional, because I wanted to use this as a convenient transition point to talk about something that annoys me but I never felt like devoting an entire post for: East Asian age reckoning.

So for people who don't know what the East Asian age reckoning is, it's basically a system of counting age originating from ancient China where you start by counting at 1. Historically, it was widely used in East Asia, but nowadays, it's only used more on an informal basis while for official government purposes, the Western system is used to conform to an international standard. Now this system doesn't actually bother me at all. What annoys me is how people keep giving bullshit reasons to talk about how this came about. The most common explanation is that those exotic slant-eyes are counting the time that the baby lived as a fetus! Ooh, they're so [insert some Orientalist trope]. Another explanation is that the ancient Chinese didn't have a concept of zero when they came up with this system.

Why don't I find these reasons plausible? Firstly, how many other cultures didn't really have a concept of zero when they came up with systems to count human ages? Every fucking one since the concept of zero is a significant achievement in mathematical thought and came much, much later than the invention of basic numbers. Secondly, I don't think it's clear at all that ancient Chinese people thought that a baby lived inside its mother for a whole year. The time it takes for women to realize they're pregnant is more variable than you might think even today. So just imagine how accurately and quickly a woman living back in ancient China would be able to figure that out without pregnancy tests to verify her suspicions. As a result, rather than the modern knowledge that pregnancy lasts around 9 months, they probably would have started counting from when they were more certain, which could cut the time by anywhere around 4-8 weeks, meaning they probably would have thought it was closer to a little more than half a year rather than a full year.

But there are better reasons to be highly skeptical and this becomes quite obvious when you realize the East Asian age reckoning isn't some quaint or weird idea, but it conforms to a system that all of us are familiar with: cardinality and ordinality. Okay, okay, when I put it like that, it sounds unfamiliar, so just take a look at the image above instead. In the Western age-system, you communicate cardinality. You say you're 10 years old because you have lived 10 years (plus a bit). In the East Asian age-system, you communicate ordinality. You say you're 10 years old because this is the 10th year since your birth. The Japanese terms for these two systems make this pretty evident too. The Western system is known as Man-nenrei (満年齢) while the East Asian system is known as kazoe-doshi (数え年). The kanji for the former refers to how many complete/full years you've lived, while the latter refers to simply counting the years. If you're getting confused, the tl;dr version is that the East Asian age reckoning counts ages the same way we count the year. Jesus wasn't born on 0 AD. He was born on 1AD because that was the first year of our Lord (well, "our" as in those of us that matter and are going to heaven). 2018 doesn't mean a full 2018 years have passed since Jesus was born, but rather that this is the 2018th year of our Lord's birth. This system of counting by ordinality is why in the East Asian system, you go up an age when a new year arrives. You're not counting the length of time you have lived. You're counting the Nth year since your birth. That's why translating "N 歳" as "N years old" is technically wrong because "years old" is not an expression of ordinality. Of course in modern usage, 歳 can mean that because East Asian countries have adopted the Western system. Finally, consider that in classical Chinese, numbers like 一, 二, 三, 四 (1, 2, 3, 4) can refer to ordinal or cardinal numbers (context determines which is being used), meaning that to say a baby was "1" would not mean he was "cardinally 1" as a Western person may be inclined to think. As a side note, I've never actually seen any historian talk about this, so if you're 100% sure that my explanations are wrong, please do tell me.

Okay, with that historical-mathematical rant out of the way... So yeah, this is my 10th year as a manga scanlator and it is sort of strange that I've been keeping it up for so long. Sure, having a decade-long hobby is nowhere near unusual. Plenty of people say they've practised some musical instrument or sport as a hobby for more than 10 years. But in other ways, it's different because it pretty much is a second job of sorts. As much as I like scanlating manga, I'd be lying if I said that the whole 2-3 hours I spend on photoshop per chapter is an enjoyable experience. It's not like playing tennis or video games where you're having fun as you're actually doing the thing. Any sense of accomplishment or pleasure comes after the chapter is done. And many times, it's not even when the chapter is done, but only after a volume or an entire series is done that I get that hit of accomplishment or pleasure. And that can always be ruined by pangs of cringing at bad translation choices, typesetting errors, or other mistakes as I'm looking over a finished product. I can't speak for all manga-scanlators since I'm very isolated within the wider manga scanlation community, but if you look at how many scanlators just drop out from the scene even after a year or so, I think it's safe to assume that a good chunk of the scanlation-process feels like a gruelling job for many. 

Another way that scanlation is different from other hobbies for me is that I keep it entirely secret. It's not some shit like mad violin skillz that you can just bust out at a party and impress people (Violins? At a party? ...yeah, I don't ever go to parties if that wasn't obvious). I've met a few people who've actually read stuff I've translated but I'd never in a million years point that out, mostly because I strictly want to keep "Hox", who has no moral qualms over translating loli-stuff or saying racially offensive shit, as an internet persona and not let it get mixed up with my non-internet life.

I still can't believe pepe became an alt-right symbol.

So why do I keep at this? If I had to be brutally honest, it's probably because I'm not a socially well-adjusted person. Granted, that's basically a given since I've browsed 4chan for over a decade but if I were some married guy with an extremely fulfilling career, I'd either have dropped out long ago, or reduced my scanlation-output by 90%. But there are other, less pathetic reasons why I keep at this hobby, too. One, so many scanlation groups out there are working on stuff I consider pure trash (rest assured, my tastes are 100% objectively sublime according to my ego). So because I desperately want to see some kind of discussion of manga I really enjoy, I slave away hours and hours on photoshop. The catch-22 is that because of all the hours I spend translating, I have less time to search which groups are translating really interesting manga (I've got such a backlog of stuff to read...).

Now It's common knowledge that a lot of scanlators are really just doing it for their e-peen, and while I can't deny that it's somewhat nice to have my e-peen sucked on the internet, for me, what really makes me happy is if I can find somewhere on the internet, people actually discussing the manga that I've translated. This is probably baffling to groups who do really mainstream stuff like Attack on Titan or Boku no Hero Academia (neither of which I'm fond of), but seeing even a positive comment or two on stuff like Noramimi or My Name is Nero makes me giddy. It's also incredibly frustrating to see many of the stuff I translate get NO discussion at all (are my tastes really that unusual?). Oh well, c'est la vie.

The other major reason is that there's something about the act of translation that deludes the translator into thinking that he's the creative mind behind original work. Whenever I look back on a moving scene or a memorable line I translated, it feels very different than when I had first read that scene in Japanese. In my mind, there's an unmistakable notion that I myself am heavily responsible for the emotional impact. It's an incredibly presumptuous and arrogant delusion, but given that translation is more of an art than a science, it's not totally wrong either. I wish I were more the creative-type to come up with amazing manga like Takemitsu Zamurai or Wombs, but I know I'm not so please world, at least let me have this. As such, I really can see this as a hobby I'll continue with until I die. In other words, if I ever go a full year without any updates at all, that probably means I went the way of Grumpy Ojisan (R.I.P.).

Well, that's really all I have to say in my rather self-deprecatory reflection of being a scanlator. Even if it wasn't too interesting to read, I hope you at least learned something about East Asian age reckoning. If you're interested in my history-related posts, let me know which one you want to see first: logistics in pre-modern war, the concept of Empire in East Asia, or my opinion on Varoufakis' political memoir, "Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment." And yeah, yeah, I'll have more manga releases coming in a bit.

P.S. One other series I've translated under another name is One Piece as the translator Nep Ece (from v5 to v38). I did it because I didn't really like the Viz translations for the early volumes and the previously existing fan translations were terribad. Not Duwang-level bad but still pretty bad. I'm confessing now since I plan to make v39 the last one I do, since my original objective has been fulfilled.