What is Lost in Scanlation?
We are a group of students studying Japanese at Monash University with an insatiable appetite for Japanese manga comics. Our aim is to raise public awareness of manga’s diversity and cultural significance through manga translation (scanlation.) However instead of scanlating copyrighted works such as Jump comics we’re focusing on Japanese web-comics, the beauty being that we can approach these artists and get their permission before we begin scanlation.
The next step is to translate the comic, we do this by transcribing the original Japanese text onto our wiki so that the group and visitors can scanlate as an online community. Once a page has been translated we scanlate the original image and stick it up on our manga scanlations page.
We hope the Manga Library and the Lost in Scanlation website will offer participants a chance to work in a collaborative environment exchanging ideas and insights between Japanese and non Japanese readers to explore the deeper linguistic, cultural and aesthetic elements contained within manga.
