About Chinese "raws" and Japanese "scans"

DarthAsthma

So I've seen this time and time again people being seriously confused about Chinese scans and Japanese raws.
Sometimes I make fun of that or even of the people that get riled up about it, personally I've gotten so used to it that I automatically expect Chinese scans whenever people say raw to skip over that 1 second of "shitty misinformation, waste of time…" moment.
But maybe it's time to improve the situation and help people learn something new.

So I'm going to try teaching people the easy difference between the two and it doesn't even matter if you don't know a lick of Chinese/Japanese.
First of all there are 3 visual key difference between the two.

We'll be using these 2 pictures as examples:
Raw

! Chinese Scan
! 1. Chinese scans are generally cleaned while raws aren't:
Notice the difference in "cleanness", one has white dots all over it while the other doesn't.
2. Stroke count/complexity of characters:
Ok I may be biased as someone that studied a bit of Japanese but I feel like this is something that you can still estimate at a glance.
The Chinese text has a way more compact look to it than the raw, since Chinese doesn't use hiragana in between the kanji. While the Japanese looks a bit more cluttered(because of furigana) I still think the Chinese looks more visually complex.
3. And this is probably the most important for all the major series people tend to discuss here, "furigana":
You guys see the small additional characters beside the bigger ones in the first picture? Those are furigana(reading aid for younger people).
These are a Japanese thing so if you see those you can be fairly certain that it's a raw.

The reason I listed 3 things while the furigana point might be sufficient most of the time is because all those rules have exceptions.
Like there are Japanese online manga that are cleaned and qualify as raw(like Onepunchman). Or like the the speech bubble beside Leorio where there's no major difference in characters to the untrained eye. And there are many manga out there that don't use any furigana at all.
But you check all those 3 things and you should be pretty successful in determining what a raw and a Chinese scan is.

If I have time I'll try to search for links and add a quiz later so you guys can test yourself.

JarmenKell

I am sick of hearing "Chinese raws"…

It's easy to tell which language it's in if you can recognise a few very common characters from Japanese or Chinese.

DarthAsthma

@JarmenKell:

I am sick of hearing "Chinese raws"…

It's easy to tell which language it's in if you can recognise a few very common characters from Japanese or Chinese.

:P just in case because you mention it I hope it's pretty obvious that the title is a jab at the whole thing.

Also guys feel free and be annoying whenever you see someone misuse the terms and link them to this thread.

LocomotiveB

As a Chinese, I am amused by this post.

phoenix_fire

To sound like an asshole: Seriously, who cares? Its still a manga page (and thus a mediaform strongly or almost exclusively associated with asia and japan particularly) full of these strange asian characters instead of something understandable (like italian or polish or whatever, where even if you dont speak the language, you could theoretically still translate it with a dictionary).
And at least in your picture, the cleanness is not that noticable, when many scanlations are in even worse quality.
So yes, there is a difference, and yes people should not confuse the original raw and a scan translated into a different language, but I can guarantee you that for 95%+ of all people there is neither a practical difference nor even any noticable one if you are looking just at one version (and dont have both to compare).

To not sound like an asshole: Can you explain furigana? What is that? Is there anything comparable in any western language, because it really seems like a strange concept.
And why are there these (what I guess is western and not native chinese/japanese) numbers and the punctuation at the end of their sentence? (I mean the "!?" and the "No.343")

DarthAsthma

@phoenix_fire:

To sound like an asshole: Seriously, who cares? Its still a manga page (and thus a mediaform strongly or almost exclusively associated with asia and japan particularly) full of these strange asian characters instead of something understandable (like italian or polish or whatever, where even if you dont speak the language, you could theoretically still translate it with a dictionary).
And at least in your picture, the cleanness is not that noticable, when many scanlations are in even worse quality.
So yes, there is a difference, and yes people should not confuse the original raw and a scan translated into a different language, but I can guarantee you that for 95%+ of all people there is neither a practical difference nor even any noticable one if you are looking just at one version (and dont have both to compare).

To not sound like an asshole: Can you explain furigana? What is that? Is there anything comparable in any western language, because it really seems like a strange concept.
And why are there these (what I guess is western and not native chinese/japanese) numbers and the punctuation at the end of their sentence? (I mean the "!?" and the "No.343")

Don't know about asshole but that stance you have, it's a characteristic I found very common within people that don't make for particular intelligent conversation.

It boils down to I don't care about this, I'm content to spread/display misinformation because it has no influence on me(well beyond giving of an impression to others but srsly generally people don't give a fuck about that). And you know while I don't personally condone such attitude I also see that it's not particular important when it comes to this particular issue. I just hope if people are prone to this they are very selective about what topics they extend this philosophy to.

Cause there's just way too much dumb stuff going out there because this is applied to more important issues.

As for your point about bad scanlations, I haven't seen a truly awful Chinese scan in quite a while(concerning the cleanness). Most of the time they are just plastered with additional watermarks/text. And like I said anyway these are 3 pointers that one should consider together, I'd be pretty shocked if this doesn't help to narrow things down by a lot.

As for your question. Like I mentioned furigana are a reading aide.
When you grow up as a native Japanese you already know most words(since you're a native speaker) but you still have to learn to read kanji. Furigana employs the basic phonetic alphabet hiragana/katakana which consists of 46/48 characters. You know these you know how every kanji sounds which helps you recognizing the meaning of a kanji even if you don't know the kanji itself.

In principle it's not that different than writing you out how a kanji sounds in latin letters, like 知識(reads: chishiki).

As for punctuation and the other thing I think it's something they adapted once western works got translated and more spread out in Japan. It's just a normal "language changes over time" thing.

Aaronrules380

@phoenix_fire:

To sound like an asshole: Seriously, who cares? Its still a manga page (and thus a mediaform strongly or almost exclusively associated with asia and japan particularly) full of these strange asian characters instead of something understandable (like italian or polish or whatever, where even if you dont speak the language, you could theoretically still translate it with a dictionary).
And at least in your picture, the cleanness is not that noticable, when many scanlations are in even worse quality.
So yes, there is a difference, and yes people should not confuse the original raw and a scan translated into a different language, but I can guarantee you that for 95%+ of all people there is neither a practical difference nor even any noticable one if you are looking just at one version (and dont have both to compare).

To not sound like an asshole: Can you explain furigana? What is that? Is there anything comparable in any western language, because it really seems like a strange concept.
And why are there these (what I guess is western and not native chinese/japanese) numbers and the punctuation at the end of their sentence? (I mean the "!?" and the "No.343")

I think part of the issue is there are people here who can read one or the other, and to those people being misinformed can be annoying. It doesn't matter to most of us here who can't read either, but that doesn't mean nobody is affected

Somewhere

Yea, the dead giveaway is presence/lack of kana, due to the differences in grammatical structure between Japanese and the Chinese languages.

I do mind the distinction, since there is a major practicality difference for me. I can read kana from having taken some Japanese classes before, but can't read hanzi for my life since I stopped attending Chinese schooling when I was a kid. And with shounen-level stuff having furigana, it's the difference between 'yea, I can read this in a somewhat viable period of time if I wanted to, given enough (simple) dictionary searching' and 'FML, this is multiple days of hitting up Chinese dictionaries'

Purple Hermit

@Aaronrules380:

I think part of the issue is there are people here who can read one or the other, and to those people being misinformed can be annoying. It doesn't matter to most of us here who can't read either, but that doesn't mean nobody is affected

This, basically. It may not make a difference to YOU yourself, nor does it make any difference to me. But when the theme of the forum, especially this specific subforum being anime and manga, there are readers who not only can read in Japanese but prefer to read in the original Japanese rather than a translation because you don't have anything lost in translation at that point.

phoenix_fire

@DarthAsthma:

It boils down to I don't care about this, I'm content to spread/display misinformation because it has no influence on me(well beyond giving of an impression to others but srsly generally people don't give a fuck about that). And you know while I don't personally condone such attitude I also see that it's not particular important when it comes to this particular issue. I just hope if people are prone to this they are very selective about what topics they extend this philosophy to.

Cause there's just way too much dumb stuff going out there because this is applied to more important issues.

Yes, but that is how it is: If you see something written in cyrillic, you will also assume that its russian (especially written on something associated with russia, like vodka to go the stereotypical way) and not old-bulgarian or something like that. Or there are definitive differences between phoenician and greek letters, though both look very much the same and everyone will still associate it only with greek. Same with the arab language.

Everyone waiting for a japanese medium being translated into a western language and seeing one of the two pics in your OP will think "great i can see what happens in the pictures, but I dont understand it and its still just the "raw", because it obviously has still the asian signs there". It may be offending for a speaker of one of the two languages, but I guess the majority of the population in the west dont even know that there is any difference between japanese and chinese signs, and certainly not the rather …. younger fans among this forum, to formulate it carefully.

Of course, if you plan to travel there or open up business relations with an associate from east asia, you better inform yourself a bit about these differences, but for some manga? Yeah, probably not vital enough at all.

@DarthAsthma:

In principle it's not that different than writing you out how a kanji sounds in latin letters, like 知識(reads: chishiki).

Then why not just write it like that and just use the furigana and omit the complicated original characters at all?

@DarthAsthma:

As for punctuation and the other thing I think it's something they adapted once western works got translated and more spread out in Japan. It's just a normal "language changes over time" thing.

So, there were no punctuation in the original language? And how about the numbers? There surely was a sign in japanese or chinese for the number 3 or 4.

@Aaronrules380:

I think part of the issue is there are people here who can read one or the other, and to those people being misinformed can be annoying. It doesn't matter to most of us here who can't read either, but that doesn't mean nobody is affected

Yes, I can understand that. It would be the same if someone said that german/swiss/dutch are all the same, because they sound alike; though I dont think that making a thread about it will change anything.

CCC

@phoenix_fire:

Then why not just write it like that and just use the furigana and omit the complicated original characters at all?

That would kind of look the equivalent of baby talk. Kind of.

Everything would be a lot longer (kanji stand for anywhere from 1 to like… 6 different kana phonemes), and it would be incredibly hard to read, because Japanese has so many homophones and no spaces between characters. Using kanji in Japanese is a shortcut to comprehension, actually. After studying/knowing enough kanji, one barely has to sound out every syllable in one's head because you can just glance at a sentence and in an instant see the general gist from the different pictographs. A purely kana sentence would be an unbearable slog, trying to parse out words and figure which definitions of homophones were being used.

Somewhere

Kanji's kept in to deal with homophone issues.

Original punctuation included a small circle that is functionally the same as using the period to end a sentence. I'm not sure if commas and quotation brackets were original or absorbed from elsewhere.
There is hanzi/kanji for numbers. Using Arabic numerals is a style thing, I guess?

Kdom

I agree with phoenix_fire on that part. I never understood why people were so picky about the term difference when the fact that Raw should be exclusively Japanese is just a language shortcut. From my understanding Raw means the material used for the scan and even if for English and Chinese scans the majority is in Japanese it is not always the case. I have started Karakuri Circus and the Raw used for the initial scan are the French volumes…
And even if I agree that it is not difficult to make the difference, it is neither difficult for people who can read Japanese to know where and when to find their sources. A bit of tolerance toward other people ignorance is not that hard either.

DarthAsthma

@Kdom:

I agree with phoenix_fire on that part. I never understood why people were so picky about the term difference when the fact that Raw should be exclusively Japanese is just a language shortcut. From my understanding Raw means the material used for the scan and even if for English and Chinese scans the majority is in Japanese it is not always the case. I have started Karakuri Circus and the Raw used for the initial scan are the French volumes…
And even if I agree that it is not difficult to make the difference, it is neither difficult for people who can read Japanese to know where and when to find their sources. A bit of tolerance toward other people ignorance is not that hard either.

Not really it just happens that manga raws are generally Japanese. Raw is just the untouched material nothing more nothing less.

Purple Hermit

Raw is exactly what is implicit about the word. It's the unadulterated, unaltered, original scan. If we're talking Manhwa, then we're talking about Korean raws, and Manhua would be Chinese scans. Stuff like jojohot are already scanlations created for Chinese audiences to enjoy, and that's fine and dandy, but that does not make it an actual raw that someone who can actually read Japanese would be able to take away from.

And while the RAWs may eventually show up, it is misleading to believe that someone who reads the comic in Japanese has anything to contribute to a discussion when everyone else finds the Chinese scans to be adequate. In the same vein as people avoiding spoilers like the plague, it makes little sense to post a Chinese scanlation as a RAW for those who read in Japanese because of the same sense of it being a spoiler.

Silverblade

Raw is the original untouched scan of manga page. After the page is cleaned and traslated, it becomes a scanlation. And that's all there is to it.

In terms of scanlation aggregator websites, raw means anything in a language they can't understand uploaded online to gather the pageviews of the impatient as a placeholder until they find a readable scanlation to upload and to illegally profit from the majority.

DarthAsthma

@phoenix_fire:

Stuff.

Most things have been answered already. So I'm going to address the rest. Japanese numbers have their own kanji, I think that answers it.
As for your argument. Don't really know for what it's arguing for, excuse me if I'm blunt and I don't mean to be malicious when saying this but it just seems like a huge defense for ignorance.

I mean I'm not damning people that don't know the difference, I mean I understand that to someone that doesn't know anything about the differences it's easy to make the mistake, that's why I gave these 3 pointers so that even novices could make the distinction easily.
It's not hard to check for cleanness, furigana and take a comparative guess about character complexity. All those things can be checked without studying anything just by being aware of it.

What you're doing with that knowledge is up to you but you know harping on the point that these two are oh so similar(which no one denied) and just talking the attempt down of people trying to educate about it, well that doesn't leave much room for any intelligent input.
This really reminds me of the time where someone was talking about South Korea living in a dictatorship and when we corrected the guy he just blew it of with "who cares it's still Korea isn't it?". Suffice to say that guy didn't have much going for him conversation wise.

Luxor

I can see why some can be picky about it and some can be lax, but I personally can tell at a glance what language it is from the kana. It's really simple and I sometimes can't tell if people are srs or trolling.

If it's in Portuguese/Italian/whatever other similar language i might have to guess what language it is, even with a background in Spanish from school. The good part is they're very nearly the same so I can read parts of it.

Average

I remember one time I referred to a Chinese scan as a raw in a spoiler thread and aohige got real pissed at me. I think that alone is reason enough to learn the difference. You don't want any of those well respected members coming after you :ninja:

But it is really is a simple distinction and I don't understand the arguments of people who seemingly want to stay ignorant, for whatever reason.

Aohige_AP

I said something along the lines of eating your children or ripping your lungs out and pouring tabasco in the wounds, but it was in humor.

Although I really would. :ninja:

I also want to gut people who refer to commercially published professional adult manga as "doujin".

Purple Hermit

To sum up this thread:

It really isn't that hard to tell the difference between a Chinese Scanlation and a Japanese RAW
RAWs are the untouched, untranslated scanned picture of the comic
Be respectful and aware of the difference, otherwise Aohige will tear you a new one

rubia_ryu

@Aohige_AP:

I said something along the lines of eating your children or ripping your lungs out and pouring tabasco in the wounds, but it was in humor.

Although I really would. :ninja:

I also want to gut people who refer to commercially published professional adult manga as "doujin".

Well, I hope you don't mind if I read it as "tong'ren manhua". Force of habit sometimes. :3

JarmenKell

I think this topic only gets heated because for most people the typical response to this is "oh it's one of those Asian languages, who cares" rather than "accept correction and move on". It's really grating on those who know the difference.

DarthAsthma

I'm just surprised that people's reaction to this isn't "oh okay interesting, guess I learned something new".
Does the topic come off as too arrogant? I seriously just intented this to be as informational and non judgey as possible.

Is the title jab perceived as malicious?

JarmenKell

well the fact that the languages/countries are about as far as removed from english as you could get doesn't help for empathy. they'd care if it was obvious, like languages based off the latin alphabet

they just want their fast spoilers and mangoes