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(all your points are also an obvious argument against MTL! heck knows the robot isn't making those meta-level considerations, within our visual medium)

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take of unknown temperature: lettering jobs are esp. vulnerable to sloptech b/c the masses (and the bosses Japan-side) are woefully unable to recognize technical deficiencies re: kerning, crossbars, justification, font choices, etc. learn the tells of good (vs. robot) lettering. demand human art!

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hotter take: TLs and letterers should be encouraged to cooperate (not be siloed off), since our respective outputs are two intertwined halves of the whole. instead of having to find each other on social media to send sneaky DMs to improve the work. but no, that could lead to labor solidarity! 😮

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Cal C @cdcubed.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

tepid take for letterer appreciation day: if manga translators ever get a 2x raise (hah), letterers deserve 3x. 4x if we're talking full SFX/signage retouch. and more for rush simuls where they have like ~24h to get it done. anything less is unlivable, and an insult to their time and skills

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Sans further clarification from the author, Schrödinger's 十数 is either "about a dozen" or "nearly twenty"

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Emma @ehanashi.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The latest manga/light novel J-to-E loc industry survey is open now! This is an anonymous ten question survey, this time about health insurance and support. Responses will be posted publicly. forms.cloud.microsoft/r/Nnmxw4AiQR

Screenshot of survey intro for manga/light novel industry professionals

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Brandon Bovia @brandonbovia.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

So, How Does The Green Work, Anyway??? Working on the lettering (English text) for The Guy She Was Interested Wasn’t A Guy At All has been an interesting experience. I primarily work in black and white manga, or on rare occasions, full color.

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Coop @riderstrike.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Have you been working in the publishing side of localization (translation, editing, lettering) and want to share (publicly or anonymously) your concerns heard? I'm working on a story about just that. My dms are open and I'm also over on signal (riderstrike.152).

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when MHA (English) reached 1 million books sold, the Viz office got a literal cake, and they didn't even mail me a piece... 😔

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got like 5 different petty follow-ups in my drafts concerning the whole shady business, which I'm not posting for fear of getting ♫yelllled at♫ the tell-all will happen...someday!

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my gf: hooray this friday is my biweekly payday me: mayhaps I'll be paid for the script I just submitted once three full moons have come and gone, and autumn's kindly chill has relieved us of summer's dread embrace

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Anime News Network @animenewsnetwork.com · 21/08/2026

Jan is the hero we need the net60 thing must be mindblowing to anyone with a "normal" job. I often have to chase down invoices that are 3, 6, 10 months late, because some in-house chucklehead forgot to press a button. If you don't have a rainy day $$$ cushion, this line of work is a highwire act.

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Award-Winning Translator, Jan Mitsuko Cash, Calls on American Manga Industry to Double Their Rates!

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Banshee Lover's Rage @annlynzee.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Translator Jan Mitsuko Cash gets standing ovation after winning Best Translation and calling on the manga publishers to double their rates and describes the poor working conditions of translators that create their success.

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Cal C @cdcubed.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Rivendell progress (after a 1-year+ break): 51.85% done (77777/150k stitches, 26/59 colors) after 6k in 10 days, my wrist yearns for death

a patchy confetti WIP cross-stitch project, done cross-country style (finishing each color before starting the next)

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Cal C @cdcubed.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

of their many crimes, one is this construction that is clearly meant to apply "AI[hyphen]" to "localized" as well, while obfuscating the very fact (almost makes it sound like "localized dialogue" is the thing to be ashamed of!)

A sentence from the AI disclosure info from this game, on Steam.

It reads:
"The optional Free Ride mode includes AI-generated passenger missions and localized dialogue."

I have circled "AI-" in red and drawn an arrow reinserting it between "and" and "localized"

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Mitch Dyer @mitchyd.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

this CEO comment is how you know with 1000% certainty Stella is right

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Cal C @cdcubed.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Exciting to hear! Better you than some jerks at the jerk company. I'd pay 20 bucks for sure

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anyway if they want to take my insightful feedback and invent the Manga Flashback Finder and make it free, open source, local, and non-scrapey, by all means

another question, and my pre-jotted answer notes:

q: Are there any areas where you believe AI could provide value in the future? For example, quality assurance, consistency checks, terminology management, translation review support, or other aspects of the localization process. We would love to hear your thoughts on potential future applications.

a: /the only singular possible technology I can imagine that would help me is a program that can "look" at a flashback panel and tell me exactly where that spot occurred, in a past volume. That's a part of my job that inevitably takes a lot of labor. Find me a robot that can do that, and that's all I need. Absolutely nothing else though. No robot should be doing QA, consistency checks, terminology management. Those are all aspects of my job, that have to be done by a human.

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as an avowed luddite I was iffy about giving a robot the time of day, but ultimately, I worry that self-selection on both sides will lead pro-sloppers to dominate these conversations. the consultants and their schmucky clients ought to hear from in-the-trenches creatives, lest we have no voice

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some consulting firm found me on linkedin and paid me $$$ to rant on video for an hour about how shoving AI into the manga loc industry to sloppify the process is stupid and evil cons: -linkedin lunatics -had to talk to a robot pros: -got to tell them where to shove it -minor wealth redistribution

an interview question, provided in advance, and my notes on my answer, jotted down in advance of the interview
(my answer was not limited to what I wrote here; these were just jumping-off points):

q: What do you see as the primary challenges associated with the use of AI in manga translation? We would be interested in your perspective both from a technical standpoint, such as translation quality and accuracy, and from ethical or rights-related perspectives, such as copyright, creativity, and authorship.

a: /It can only harm the process and slow it down. Especially with manga, AI is horribly inaccurate (because of the aforementioned challenges with manga translation specifically) and doing a post-LLM edit of a manga script would take more time than doing it from scratch. There's no point. If someone isn't a qualified translator, then they're not qualified to judge the LLM's output, and if someone *is* a qualified translator, then they should just do the job from scratch.
/of course it's unethical from the ground up. the models were trained on stolen material. and an LLM can never be an "author". to that point, why should a consumer pay for such material? they could just run the machine translation themselves! a publisher and a translator have to offer the consumer something of actual value.
/it goes against the very notion of art and creativity, which is inherently human. everyone understands this except the businesspeople who think they can profit from AI. skilled creatives are not on board.
/in terms of copyright, it seems like a terrible idea to feed manga scripts/art to AI models, which are going to then scrape the material. and this is often confidential material that hasn't been released to the public yet, re: simulpubs. I think a manga author ought to be able to demand that publishers do not use AI on their work in any form, and they would demand that, if they were savvy and informed.

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Japan assiduously demanded an up-to-date ENG style guide for the series, right up to the end chunk of the anime, to be sure of how I localized names/terms in the final few chapters of the manga. I guess the give-a-damn-edness ends somewhere between that point and the merch manufacturers?

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