Questions?

[Yadis]

Hi, I sent my letterer test on may 2 and now is june 13 it has been 6 weeks and I haven't received my results, I asume that I will recibe the result this week? or I have to wait another 4 weeks?

[Ben Applegate]

Hi Yadis,

We are a little behind on grading the manga localizer tests. I can't promise exactly when it will be, but yours will be graded in the next batch.

[Yadis]

Ok, thank you so much, I will keep watching my dashboard

[Dramatic_Prince]

I'm along the same vein in questioning.
I sent my translator test in on early March, crayon touched base on it in the middle of March,
but its been 3 months now since I've submitted it.

I hope it's just the backlog that's delaying the result.

[mortaine]

Still nothing. No answer to my previous emails. It's been 10 weeks. I've emailed them again.

I'm getting discouraged.

[Russesa]

I have a question for the DMG production team - what do you normally do with omake pages that appear at the beginning and/or end of the books? Specifically, I'm talking about the pages that sometimes serve as the front and back covers underneath the dust jacket, so in the filenaming, the earlier one probably appears as something like mangatitle_000a.tif, while the latter has a regular number in sequence, such as mangatitle_188.tif.

Does DMG production have a standard policy on what they do with these pages? I ask because a few of the previous books I've worked on were handled differently. On the books where the front/back covers were just a monochromatic reiteration of the dust cover artwork, those pages were left out, and that's fine, I understand that. But in I'm the Big Brother, I found out that both bonus pages (which served as an epilogue to one of the stories) were left out. In Ultras, I found that the bonus page at the end of the book was there, but the one at the beginning was not.

It was a little disappointing to find that part of what we worked on didn't make it into the finished product. In our current book in progress, the cover pages contain postscript commentary from the author and are very content heavy, requiring lots of translation and editing finesse. If those pages aren't going to be included, I think we'd rather know that ahead of time before sweating over them. (In a similar vein, once I realized that DMG does their own TOC pages, I stopped editing the TOC in the tifs.)

So, I'm wondering if there might be some obstacle that makes including (at least some of) these pages difficult for production. Does including the earlier pages (those of the mangatitle_000a.tif variety) somehow screw up the page numbering in the rest of the book? Could pages like that be moved to the end of the book instead? If there's a way for readers of our English editions to get the most for their money, and a product as close as possible to the original, I'd like to know what I can do to help. Or if they aren't to be included, I'd like to have a clearer idea of what's expected of us localizers.

[Cavechan]

Hi! I have a couple of questions. I PM'd Crayon and he didn't respond, so trying here now.

I heard that there will be a 6 month gap between the release of our first assignment and the beginning of our second assignment. Is this correct?

Also, I am wondering about the sales of our books. Where can we go to see the sales or who do we ask about this?

Thank you very much.

[hanged_man]

I can say from experience that's way off. I think maybe whoever told you that meant that there would be a gap between when you finish assignments? If you turn in a title and got another assignment right away, since due dates seem to typically be staggered ~3 months, ~1 month, ~1 month (assuming you get three titles in a bundle), then yeah, there's a ~5 month gap between finishing bundles.
The lag time between finishing a bundle and getting a new one, however, is wildly inconsistent. I've gotten a new one in as little as two weeks, but I've also had it take three months (never six, though). I would like to think that the three month incident just a matter of DMG being busy and our group managing to slip between the cracks somehow, and not representative of the norm.

As far as sales reports go, according to the last webcast, we should be able to see monthly-updated versions of them on the dashboard in the next couple of weeks. Technical updates are usually slow in coming, but I think this one's been in the works for a while so hopefully at least by the end of August. Otherwise, sales reports go out when paychecks do.

Hope that helps.

[Cavechan]

Thank you for the info, hanged. sigh. That makes me sad that my group has only had one bundle assignment thus far that we completed back in February or March. :/

[Dramatic_Prince]

I just recently cleared up the result of my translator test, and I am dying to start working.
I hope the newest newsletter gets released soon.