Scanlations In The Days Of Old?

[Gyt Kaliba]

For some reason I was thinking about the days of old for the DBZ fandom earlier - as in the days that easily pre-date my being a fan - and this thought occurred to me. You always hear talk about the fansub trade, and going to old stores to buy the tapes from someone, or trading them with people, and all of that...but that all has to do with the anime. Were there any scanlations (or translated scans) of the manga floating around back in the day as well, or did that kind of thing not really kick in as much until the internet was even bigger? And if there were scanlations floating around back then, what kind of quality were they, comparatively, to the kind of scanlations that happen to series' now and/or the official releases, both picture quality and translation wise?

[VegettoEX]

Yes. They were terrible.

There was one major person/site that tried to make its way through the series, and I believe they were translations of another existing translation (Spanish perhaps?), and were thus flipped and, as previously mentioned, terrible. Oftentimes entire text bubbles were either left untranslated or just empty. The levels were blown out to the point that it was a giant mess of black pixels on a white background; this recent (locked) thread provides an example image.

Grandmaster Viz came to save us in 1998.

[Ajay]

Those same 90's scans are still what most people read and they're truly awful:

Spoiler:

EDIT: Well, VegettoEX beat me to it by 1 minute!

[KentalSSJ6]

Yeah those are the scans on Mangapanda and Mangareader. Terrible stuff.

[Chuquita]

I could be wrong, but I'm almost positive those horribly high contrast scans you still see floating around--and I recall Planet Namek hosting in zip files--pre-date Viz's initial printings.

There were also volume summaries typed up.

Edit: also beaten.

[Gyt Kaliba]

Thanks for the reply VegettoEX and others. I never went into that thread before, so I had no idea the subject had come up so recently heh. I just knew that I always heard talk about fansubs, but never anything about early scanlations.

As far as the examples given go, yeesh...that quality level is pretty atrocious. From what I can tell the translations are fairly on-par, but...then again, those examples are from fairly straight forward dialogue moments too. I probably don't even want to imagine what some of the wordier exposition pages became.

I could be wrong, but I'm almost positive those horribly high contrast scans you still see floating around--and I recall Planet Namek hosting in zip files--pre-date Viz's initial printings.

Wha? Planet Namek used to host them? How in the heck did I miss that back when I used to frequent that site. All I ever noticed were the volume descriptions and the anime movie descriptions, I think.

[kei17]

In the early 2000a, I remember reading a scanlation in which SSJ is called "Great Saiyan."

[Chuquita]

Re: Gyt Kaliba

I can't recall which page on Planet Namek it was, but I do know the zip files were split into thirds and abbreviated a b and c. Like you'd have 42a for the first third of volume 42.