Quality Control

Quality control, often abbreviated to QC, is the process of reading through a fully-typeset manga (ideally, alongside the raws) to point out mistakes and areas of improvement. It is also known as proofreading (PR), but this term may also refer to reading over the script prior to cleaning and typesetting.

Quality control should a collaborative process between the typesetter and QCer; there are often many rounds of back-and-forth before the best approach is decided upon.

This page collects a number of common issues that QCers will raise, and where appropriate gives examples.

Typesetting issues

Issue	Examples
Vertical ellipses
Typos (commonly, incorrectly-doubled letters in words like “embarrassed”)
Inconsistent line spacing
Line spacing too small or too large
Uncentered text
Bad shaping
Incorrect crossbar I
Missing crossbar I (assuming that the font has it)
Not using different fonts for different JA fonts (incl. thoughts)
Next-line ellipses or exclamation mark
Hyphen at the start of the line
Wrong hyphenation points
Four-dot ellipses
Missing punctuation at end of sentence
Non-comic font used or “chopsticks” font used (e.g. Manga Temple)
Cliché font used (e.g. Comic Sans, Wild Words)
Using different fonts for different characters
Text not centre-aligned (this isn’t always bad; just follow the shape of the bubble)
Stray space
No space after ellipses or space before ellipses
Capitalization at the start of bubbles, when it continues a sentence
No capitalization at the start of bubbles, when it doesn’t continue a sentence
Not enough white border around SFX
Font aspect ratio is messed with
Bad perspective transform
Text too close to edge of bubble
Text is off-black
Bubbles too thin (should have redrawn bubble)
Text rotated 90°
Empty bubble
Missing SFX
Inconsist capitalization and punctuation of side text
Obscured text missing a half-covered letter
“Penrose stairs” layering
Mismatched repetion
Mismatched flashback text
Abrupt cutoffs use dashes, not ellipses

Translation issues

Issue	Examples
Untranslated SFX: “Doki”, “Go”, etc
Nonsensical SFX
Bad/unnatural wording
Incorrectly added hyphenated phrase
Incorrectly not added hyphenated phrase (e.g. “first year” → “first-year”)
Apostophes and “s”s: “Girl’s school”, “Parent’s evening”
Missing comma: “It’s not like I’m mad at you Akizuki-san.”
Extra comma: “I think, […]”
Contraction not used in speech, e.g. “you are”
Phrase that is close to, but not exactly, an English idiom
Inconsistent spelling dialect
Inconsistently-spaced words, e.g. “photoshoot” vs “photo shoot”
Missing space in words that are sometimes compound: “She walked onstage”, “Good to have you onboard”
Wrong extended letter (e.g. “grabbbbeeeeed” instead of “graaaaabbed”)
En dashes should be used to hyphenate phrases that have spaces: “red bean paste–filled bun”, “Cold War–era”
Capitalization of words that are both normal and proper nouns: “to Dad” but “to my dad”.
Inconsistent tense
Inconsistent 3rd person vs 2nd person
Stock phrases: “that person”, “pinch”, “even if you tell me that”, “say unnecessary things”, “killing intent”; see also this spreadsheet of stock phrases
Overuse of Japanese sounds like “Kya” or “Eehh”
Overuse of Japanese punctuation like tildes or “…!”
Overuse of ◯◯ or XX or similar, instead of rewording
Inline TL notes; prefer folding them into the text, or adding notes at the end
Questions (including rhetorical) without question marks

Redrawing issues

Issue	Examples
Lines connected incorrectly
Screentone wrong shade
Screentone misaligned
Screentone too blurry or sharp
Missed cleaning speck
Lines connected that were intentionally split in the raw
Missing redraw
Lines too blurry or sharp
No levelling: Black is off-black, white is off-white