#geobreeders

[gazumirei]

cats

[saint-miroir]

Geobreeders 2 video advertisement (with Excel Saga at the bottom)-- Dengeki Animation Magazine (07/2000)

[jack-in-the-dark]

"I have no idea why it's called 'Geobreeders,' it's about shapeshifting electromagnetic ghost cat terrorists." - actual thing I have said in real life to someone

[datadegroove]

fucking a this might be one of his best scores

[centrally-unplanned]

I blogged before about this company, Orange, that is an AI-powered manga translation company. Essentially, their pitch is that most manga is still (officially) untranslated, a ton of manga gets made after all but few become mainstream enough to get ported overseas. They posit the barrier to that is the cost of translation; if they could automate that process, then they can make viable for release what previously was not. That concept rests on two questions - does the tech pan out, and does the economics add up?

Recently they went live, under the name Emaqi, so we can better explore those questions. What I notice on first glance is the pitch seems to have shifted a little bit in post:

You are not the translators of Vinland Saga, Witch Hat Atelier, or Magic Knight Rayearth, very obviously so. They have Sailor Moon in here lol. These are just the official translations being cross-listed into their "manga platform", where you buy it there and it lives, DRM-locked, in their app. Which is fair enough as a model, that is just Kindle, it works. Though Kindle and a dozen others already exist, so their value-add has to be the AI translation stuff right? That is why I would choose this over another app.

Which they do have, though it is kind of buried:

"Only on emaqi" - there is no mention of the translation approach, poor guys! Can't fault the branding decision I guess given the state of the discourse. When it comes to the products themselves, I went through ~6 or so of the sample chapters of different manga, did a few spot checks with the original Japanese, and read the reviews of some others who looked into it. They seem fine! I am cautiously impressed, I think there proofers did a good job smoothing out some edges, it has a "manga tone", and while small issues like the hyphenation the reviewer above mentioned do exist and are legit noticeable, they aren't common and not a huge deal. It has flow issues? Some dialogue should link together in how it is written, but doesn't. But it isn't crazy off or anything. You will not be wowed by these, but certainly if you are someone who reads bootleg scanlations you are gonna have no problems. A lot of manga uses pretty simple vocab and isn't breaking new ground on plot, I can see how a purpose-built tool could handle it well enough.

The economics though...here is where I don't think this case was ever going to pencil out and isn't now. Because I am pretty sure no one here has heard of any of the manga listed above as exclusives. (I saw 90's manga Geobreeders in there, but that was already partially translated in the 2000's, not sure if they did a new one? Setting it aside) Which, of course you haven't, if you had it probably would have been translated! Books are a 90:10 market, most books never get read and some books get read a ton. Anything big enough can justify a professional translation, and the other can't really sell to begin with.

On top of that, their model is mass translation; which means these obscure manga are presented to you with no context, no hype, no build-up. Wtf is The Blood Blooms In the Barrens?? See, if you were like a boutique publisher, selecting "the best of the best" in untranslated manga, you would promote your specific product. Interviews, social media, the value of the brand-itself as a quality seal. Publishing less is more, actually, your value as a publisher is as a quality selector. Or you could be say the porn market, where you max quantity so people can search "foot fetish breeding kink oshi no ko" and get results; they know what they want. But they aren't doing either! And to be blunt a lot of these are not gonna sell on their art alone:

I'm not mocking The Delayed Highschool Life of a Laborer here, that is better than I could do; but if you want to me spend money on a whim the bar is high and these don't reach it. Which of course they don't, they would be professionally translated if they did.

And finally, the price - $5 dollars, for volume 1's, like a 100-200 pages. The cross-listed manga typically sells for ~$10? That isn't much cheaper! If "translation" was this big cost barrier, and all you got is cutting the price of ebooks in half, I don't know if the analysis was so solid. This is a new product, I doubt they are overcharging to make a quick buck right now - this is the "sell at cost to scale" era.

In all of their lead up press they would say things like this:

Orange's process uses AI to read the manga through image analysis and character recognition, then to translate the words into English, Chinese and other languages. The technology is specialized for manga, meaning it is able to handle wordplay and other difficult-to-translate phrases. A human translator then makes corrections and adjustments. The process can deliver a manga translation in as little as two days. Orange will work with multiple Japanese publishers. The company looks initially to complete 500 translations monthly.

But this is missing a lot of context. For one, these manga are simple high school or battle manga that are ~200 pages long, many of those pages have only a few lines of dialogue, etc. Imagine you are a professional translator, and you are given that manga to translate, all the set-up done for you, all you gotta do is write. How long do you think that would take? Not that long! It could probably take like a week if it's actually all you did (calc'd from a 10k word count manga volume, 2k is a typical "good translator" per day count - many manga are shorter than that). And note how they said "as little as two days" - not median two days! Just, you know, aspirationally.

Translation is just not a big bottleneck. You gotta do layouts, lettering, proofs, etc, these can all take just as much time - and are being done by people, they still need wage workers doing all this. But that is small fry in comparison to publishing contracts, author approvals, distribution, all of that. And most importantly, product acquisition - you have to get authors to sign with you! That can be months of work. I am sure they are trying to get bulk agreements with publishers and such, but authors will push back on that, this is not an easy endeavor.

Which is why, in above, they say they hope to have "500 translations monthly". And after a year+ of work, on launch, they have...

...18. As best I can tell at least, their site deliberately obfuscates what they actually translated versus are just hosting for resale after all.

So yeah, as mentioned I don't think the economics pencil out. These aren't worth $5 dollars, they can't actually generate volume that makes "massive economies of scale" actually valuable, and their approach is currently antithetical to the idea of generating traction for any of their individual works. Niche publishing just doesn't work this way.

But it is early days, and hey I respect the experiment! I do think the tech is pretty good, and it is nice to see a company showcase it. It isn't quite good enough yet for prime time, but it could get there. I do want more manga to get exposure and audience; I will give a fair shake to any who try.

[lattewithatwistoflemon]

I wasn't sure if Ulrich reading shoujo manga was a false memory, but here we are! Canon proof! I'm working on distinguishing the titles of all of his manga. So far I have: Pi (the manhwa he's currently reading), Please Save My Earth, City Hunter, Fruits Basket (which I'm super happy about, because I imagined him liking Fruits Basket), Geobreeders, High School Debut, and Sign of Love. If you recognize any more, please let me know! I'm really curious about the bottom right one (Volume 10 of something), because the art looks really familiar. He seems to share my penchant for buying whatever random volumes we can find in the store. I wonder if Yumi helps him read the Japanese ones. Oh, allll the way to the right, we have XS Hybrid.

[littleeyesofpallas]

GEOBREEDERS[ジオブリーダーズ]

[koholint]

some disappointing recent dreams:

i was living in a house with several other people and it was like real life sims like we each had separate rooms with a computer where you could do stuff like change the wallpaper/carpet and it'd change irl so we were designing our rooms but then a car crashed through the wall of the main area and exploded and destroyed my anime figure shelf that was out there for some reason. they weren't all completely destroyed but somehow all got their knees melted specifically?

i was out somewhere where other things happened that i don't remember and there was a vending machine that had the cherry limeade flavor of reign energy drink which is like the best one and stores often don't have it so i bought some for the road but when i woke up and checked the fridge there weren't any there :(

i couldn't remember the name of that anime ova about like hunting cat people or something so i asked my brother and he said getbackers but i looked it up after i woke up and it was actually geobreeders #fail

[evemoedesu]

EVE Online shipgirls July 2022 pack

Porpoise, Harpy, Eagle and Miasmos Quafe Ultramarine Edition

[animecatoftheday]

Today’s anime cat of the day is:

Phantom Cat from Geobreeders!

[schwarzfee]

[chibiranmaruchan]

7 of my favourite anime moments for this week (21st September-27th September 2020)

Monday 21st September: Ellcia (1992-1993)- Eira and her crew escape Princess Crystel's capture, unintentionally releasing Guku and awakening Arusu's ship, the Ellcia.

Tuesday 22nd September: Tattoon master (1996)- Bala and Lisa have a duel over Eric.

Wednesday 23rd September: Geobreeders: (File X) Get back the kitty (1998)- Kagura board the Sakhalin to rescue Maya.

Thursday 24th September: Sotsugyou: Graduation (1995)- Mami and the old stationmaster talk about the inevitability of seperations.

Friday 25th September: Animation runner Kuromi (2001)- Kuromi decides to quit her job after struggling to manage the animators.

Saturday 26th September: Photon: The idiot adventures (1997-1999)- Photon and Keyne disguise themselves to help Papacha move his ship in the desert.

Sunday 27th September: Suikoden: Demon century (1993)- Takateru and the other stars of Suikoden, all meet at the church and fight off the Mizushima brothers.

[squeleth-or]

[jack-in-the-dark]

"I have no idea why it's called 'Geobreeders,' it's about shapeshifting electromagnetic ghost cat terrorists." - actual thing I said today

[angelsbestrace]

I should watch Geobreeders again.