Anyone can look at a page and can tell something is off. It’s not exactly hard to look at a page and tell that it needs to be touched up for any number of reasons. The thing about it, though, is that not just anyone can sit down and set things right. That’s when it’s time for editors to get to work.
If it is up to the translator to handle everything that comes in the form of language, then it is up to the editor to face problems presented on each and every page with practical solutions. Described that way, it may sound a little overbearing but trust me when I say editing, depending on the method, is way more time consuming than it is difficult.
Before I get into what goes into being an editor, I want to mention that the editor is the role most influenced by the nature of the group. For example, if it’s a speed group then it’s not rare to find editors that give the scan a once over in the form of adjusting the colors on the page, erasing characters then inserting text, and then saving it as a .jpeg file while, in a group that does shoujo manga, it’s not rare to find editors that do everything from editing out sound effects to replace them to crushing .png files as much as possible to retain quality with minimal file size. There are many different kinds of editors, but, at the end of the day, the key areas focused on are quality and speed. One is typically exchanged for the other, but there are an increasing number of editors that can supply both.
No matter the type of editor, the real work comes when the translation and the raws are in his or her possession. It’s at this point that some groups further divide the work into the cleaner working to fix the page and typesetter using a variety of fonts for speech bubbles and the like, but, most of the time, it’s the responsibility of a single person to do both. When the chapter is done, it’s not actually finished since the first scanlations are drafts that need to be checked. Some groups immediately put releases out without a quality check, but, like always, it depends on the type of group.
I shined a little light on it before, but the most important thing I wanted to get across is that, despite editing not being as hard as people think it is in my opinion, a single page can take way longer than a few minutes to get done. Just making double pages look seamless and editing out stroked text by themselves can be a tough task and there were several times when I found myself blankly staring at a page on screen knowing it wasn’t going to be much fun getting it done.
In hindsight, being an editor was a challenge I liked because it gave me something to do in my free time and provided people with stuff they wouldn’t have had a chance to read otherwise. More than that, because I was an editor, I can honestly say that, if translators are the backbone that keep projects upright, editors are the driving force that keep a project going. Even though editors aren’t as highly valued as a translator because it’s easy to learn how to edit, a good editor can make a world of difference to a project. Used a page from One Piece as an example, and definitely have to credit Binktopia for the work put in on the raw.
Said In Red 
0 Responses to “editorial: ode to editors”