Another week in the books. Let’s chat about manga in the general discussion thread! Feel free to use this thread for questions, comments, recommendations, etc.
Like normal, please be careful with spoilers. I wrote a guide about spoilers in case you need a refresher on how to handle them (also linked in the sidebar).
I managed to finish Melody: The Crazy Flower Blooms. It went pretty much as expected - very few difficulties, surprisingly quick resolution of a very serious situation etc. The only moment with somewhat believable drama happened when Melody was taken out of the picture for a bit but even then, it’s difficult to be on the edge of your seat when you know what’s going to happen next.
I stay with my previous opinion that the side-arc for Daisy, Melody’s sister, was much more interesting in the end - even (or perhaps because) it was much simpler and down to earth than the main plot. No magical powers, no huge support group of people willing to die for you, just a single woman trying to get away from an abusive family and looking for her own way in life.
All in all, it was an alright story. Decent enough read if need a time waster but not really something I’m going to come back to.
The second manhwa series I’d like to mention today is Can I Cry Now. Poor orphan manages to get into the Academy for Gifted Children filled with nobility and rich kids. There’s bullying, there’s friendship and she catches attention of the emperor - pretty standard stuff honestly but the execution is what really makes it work.
Evie, the protagonist, is super adorable, writing has a good balance of both drama and humour and there are some emotional moments which land HARD for how real they feel. It’s good.
There’s one possible plot point I’m not really looking forward to but it’s not 100% confirmed yet so I’ll just keep hoping it’ll turn out to be a red-herring. It won’t be the end of the world if it happens but it would definitely bring things down a bit.
I really like this one. It’s not some misery porn you could expect from something like this but it also doesn’t pull its punches when necessary. May it stay good until the end.
On a slightly different note, does anyone here read manhwa? I need a secondary opinion because the more I read, the more it feels like some of the groups localising them use machine translation (or non-fluent people). Things like constant misgendering, regular changes to name spelling (for both people and locations), attributing things said in the past to wrong characters and more are pretty much something I expect rather than a surprise at this point. It’s distracting, sloppy and, at times, pretty annoying.
This is something that’s especially prevalent in series brought over by RokariComics and Lua Scans but I’ve seen it from other sources as well. Is the situation with Korean translations so bad or did I simply stumble upon the worst examples for this region?
Yes
Assuming you mean scanlation groups, I absolutely feel the same. I often just don’t read ones like that because of it, because it’s hard to make heads or tails from it. I think it’s a combo of MTL and non-fluent speakers. Stuff like misgendering or wrong attribution is very MTL-like, but a lot of the bad grammar, spelling errors and bad punctuation feel more like things from someone who doesn’t quite have a good grasp on English (can be MTL, but MTL is pretty capable of making well-structured sentences at this point).
Just in general I struggle finding good scanlation groups for manhwa (or sources even). Either they have poor translations, are behind paywalls (surprisingly common. Many even use their own stupid coin systems) or both. I often resort to only reading officially translated manhwa (officially or otherwise).
Yeah, the mix of typical MTL issues and human looking errors is what tripped me up and triggered this question. I’m glad it’s not just me being paranoid but it also kinda sucks, not gonna lie. Time to learn Korean, I guess.
I don’t read much manwha but all of the things you’ve mentioned are common problems you’ll see with machine-translated Japanese. I wouldn’t expect most of these problems to be an issue with human translators who merely lack skill. Definitely machine translation, and low-effort machine translation at that.
Yeah… I’m mostly just trying to cope with that “non-fluent people” line to be honest. I guess I was lucky enough with translations throughout the years I got used to people putting actual effort - even if their work wasn’t perfect it showed they cared enough to try. Seeing groups pump-out trash with no proofreading is disappointing, doubly so when the series turns out engaging otherwise. It makes me sad.