On SFX

(This post will be very long. Unless you are curious about practical considerations of the scanlation pipeline, there is no need to read further.)

It's relatively rare nowadays, but every once in a while someone asks why we don't do SFX. It's plain to see that we don't translate them, much less typeset or redraw them, exceptions being few and far between.

The easy answer is that not many readers care about them. We know it for a fact: some time ago Jin ran a poll and only some 15% of respondents said they would "tolerate delays in exchange for SFX being translated and typeset".

Maybe asking you to choose between SFX and timely releases was a little too stringent, and more would speak in favour of SFX if we had asked a more relaxed question, but we had to be realistic: both groups that preceded us scanlating DICE stalled and eventually their operation collapsed because they redrew and typeset SFX.

DICE has a fair claim to the title of the hardest webtoon to edit where typesetting and redrawing the main text is concerned, but curiously enough, its SFX are not the hardest out there. The SFX of Black Haze, for example, are full of effects like Blur and gradients. The ones in DICE are comparatively tame to typeset, but the sheer number of them, and the difficulty of the background art would increase my burden considerably, and that is even truer in Fábio's case.

Actually, when he joined us, Fábio declared he wasn't willing to redraw SFX. Since I didn't particularly care to typeset them either, I happily agreed.

Jin isn't too fond of SFX, either. Of us three, she is the one who would need the least persuasion to do them, but she tells me Korean has much more SFX than English and some of them sound awkward when translated. Again using Black Haze for comparison (because some of its scanlators did do SFX), I once read two SFX that translated as "linger, linger" and "regret, regret".

Of course, this is not really an obstacle and more than once Jin told us she would do SFX if there were demand. It's the one thing in which the LINE official releases are superior to ours: because they get originals from the author, they can typeset SFX without having to redraw anything. Not so in our case.

The bottom line: SFX increase the workload too much for a weekly, hard webtoon like DICE. As we currently are, the three of us are not going to do SFX anytime soon. (For comparison, as many as ten people worked in certain chapters of the Silent Sky DICE operation.) If there were an outcry for SFX, the most we would do would be to add them as panel footnotes.

However, just so you won't say that we didn't even give the idea some thought, once I scared away a person who wanted to join us by proposing them the following plan, which is the only one that would not imperil our release pace. This plan should be read carefully by anyone who is thinking of applying to work with us on DICE, because otherwise we don't really need more full-time members as of now. (Of course, we welcome any offers of help we can resort to when one of us is in a pinch. Back-ups are our life line here!)

Essentially, my plan would be to create a second team, totally independent from the team that works on the main text, and which would consist of a redrawer and a typesetter exclusively for SFX.

We would produce our usual chapter, ignoring SFX, and when we were done we would hand it over to you. If you succeeded at doing the job within our weekly release deadline, your final version would be the one released. If you didn't, no harm done to the schedule, we would release only the version without SFX. The goal here is to insulate the work on the main text from possible delays caused by work on SFX.

The advantage of this is that we would always have the standard version ready on time. Other teams failed because they tried to redraw and typeset SFX along with the main text, so when they failed to meet the weekly deadline, they didn't have anything to release.

The main disadvantage is also obvious: if you cannot finish your part, we release the version without SFX and you lose the window of opportunity for getting your work out. (Well, I suppose we could release the SFX version later if you still cared to work on it to completion.) We will be quite uncompromising about getting the chapter out on time if the basic version is ready by then.

There is another disadvantage: by splitting the teams, the SFX team will have to wait for the main text team to be done before they can start. In terms of our current scanlation pipeline, supposing Jin, Fábio and I suffer no delays, this means you and your partner would have to work between late Monday at the earliest and Friday. More usually, between late Tuesday and Friday (Western time). However, we've had cases in which the work on the main text was only over on Thursday, in which case the SFX team would only have Friday to work.

So I won't mince my words: Dicescans is a small and well-oiled team that works smoothly producing every week an English version of one of the most difficult webtoons for edition out there. We cannot allow a backlog to pile up, not only because it is quite stressful to catch up again, but also because there's always the risk that another group will try to take it from us. Thus, late releases are to be avoided at all costs. You must have seen how we scrambled to get back-up translators during Jin's break and only failed to meet our weekly goal once.

Thanks for reading this far. I hope the SFX matter is laid to rest for good, now.