This may come as a shock to you but I am going to leave the scanlation business.
I got into it out of a desire to see Orochi finished and that project was completely stolen from me. I realise that the scanlator is just a grunt who is expected to have no creative input on the text he is placing, and I am not content being a grunt.
For anyone who is wondering, here is the true story of what happened:
After five years without any work being done on Orochi, I started
reading it and decided to finish the final two chapters myself. After
some searching I came across some raws for these chapters and contacted
many people who had been involved in the series before and settled with
Molokidan as a translator. He wanted his friend to help with the
scanlating (Zach Ballbag of Happy 'Bastard' Scans) and so I emailed him asking to what
extent he wanted to be involved. After discussion on how to split up the
pages, he lumped me with all the work on cleaning and
typesetting while he said he wanted to just do quality checking (QC).
With lots of heroic grafting, I revived Orochi.
Over the course of about a month I worked really hard on the chapter
which is about 100 pages and as Molokidan had given no indication that
he wished for me not to change small parts of the text, I made very
little edits that I felt helped the manga feel less clumsy and at the
time thought nothing of it. Sometimes translators, especially those who actually live in Japan and spend most of their time speaking that language,
need their translation to be proofread and this is what I was trying to do, I was improving the text and making it seem less cliche.
The time came when I was finished and Molokidan sent me a message expressing his annoyance that I
had edited parts. I was surprised to hear from him because as I said, I
did not expect any further involvement and we did not discuss
terms of usage for the translation at any point.
After a few days of hefty arguing, during which he condemned
me for changing his script while I argued the changes were small and
most were necessary, he threw his weight around, literally ordering me
to go back through and highlight everything I changed. Then he said (and
this is a direct quotation): "If you insist on stealing and changing
them, then please leave my name off it."
Eventually I couldn't stand the arguing anymore and valiantly announced that I
thought it was best to continue alone. I said that as I had
put so much work into chapter 8 I still wanted to release it but
compliant with his wishes, I would leave his name off.
So I released it and then received an email from Zach
saying: "I've done a
considerable amount of work now on chapter 8 to fix it and will be
releasing it shortly.
You are welcome to find your own translator for 9."
This work he did was on my version of chapter 8 that I initially sent
him to QC (note that I did not use the QC he sent back as it was lazily sent
to me in plain .psd files and not images) which I did not give him permission to do and this release of his is
still mostly my work. He then systematically reported my version for using the
translation without permission, causing it to be removed from BakaUpdates
and replaced on Mangafox.
I was livid.
Of course! Zach had wanted to poach the series from me all along like the thieving bastard that he is.
One thing I have learned from this experience is to never let anyone you don't trust get involved with stuff you're doing, they have a knack of ruining it and taking it for themselves.
Happy Scans will now present Orochi as their endeavour and claim all the credit for breathing life into the series once more. Know now that without me, Orochi would be a dead duck. And who looks at a dead duck? No one.
*** Please note: At the time of posting, I did not intend to do chapter 9, but after a while I started thinking about how Zach from HappyScans had acted towards me, and I was unable to let him win and so I rushed to finish chapter 9 in three days. Do not think that I lied so I could buy time as that is simply untrue.
