All About Hatsukoi-Scans
on Oct 2, 2009 17:04
Introduction
It seems that after the many weeks since I'd started hosting my releases in Mangahelpers, I had yet to introduce myself. Note that this is only a brief overview of what Hatsukoi-Scans is all about.
History
Even though, Hatsukoi-Scans had only existed for 2 months, in fact, my concept for "Hatsukoi" had existed long before I became a scanlator.
My idea for hatsukoi came to light from a series of short stories that I'd been writing on the internet during my first year in college. They were stories that described my sweet and sour experiences of first real encounters during my late high school years and also my naive thoughts about how some women were cold and insincere, unlike how they were portrayed in a fictional context.
My stories had received high praise from friends and the surrounding community, so I was inspired to create a website where I can dedicate all my stories to and had planned on naming it with beginning with the word "Hatsukoi".
However, there was still the fact that in the degree that I was undertaking in college at the time, I'd also needed some practical experience in translations and interpretations. As I was generally not an outgoing person, I'd tried looking for several alternatives where I could do it in front of my home computer. Sometime around my second year in college, I started becoming interested in anime and online manga, so I'd decided to join a scanlation group (it's better that I don't tell you which group) as a translator.
It was initially fun to work with everyone in the group, but the problem was that I'd received very little feedback from the work that I did, and because of that, I became increasingly discouraged over time.
Around that time, I was very interested in a particular series "Kimikiss ~Various Heroines~" which was started by PlumCity. I had also seen the anime and played the game several times to get all the endings. However as time progressed, the frequency of releases had dropped dramatically, even after been taken by Scx. Until the moment when further releases seemed unlikely, I'd decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided not to join another group a second time as I had the experience of not getting the feedback which, could fuel my persistence. So soon after, Hatsukoi-Scans was born.
About Me
As I had provided an introduction in the forums about my background, I'll just briefly outline what was there and provide other details that I haven't mentioned.
As you all know, my name is Minase, which is what they all call me in Japan. But I actually reside in Australia.
I speak 4 language fluently, excluding the dialects; english, chinese, japanese and korean.
I am currently undertaking my Bachelor's degree in Arts with a major in Interpretation and Translations and a minor in Linguistics.
When I first started Hatsukoi-Scans, all I knew how to do was translate stuff. Which was okay, since a friend of mine told me that my translation skills are on par with people from tokyopop, and all I had t do other than that was rub out the japanese text and replace with english text; which was precisely what I did initially, except I did it all in "Times New Roman", which was a bad idea.
Progression for me was more like learning how to use photoshop and a scanner for every new release I had to do and the only thing that kept me going was ppl telling me what a good job I'd been doing. Without that, I think I would just crumble and give up like how I did with my first group.
Regarding as to how long I'm going to keep this up for; I wouldn't really know what would happen in the future, but as long as I have the support, I guess I would still have a long long way to go.
minase
Founder of Hatsukoi-Scans
