Open Mouth. Insert Foot Get a bunch of creative people together for a gripe session, and sometimes magic happens! That’s what happened on Twitter recently as several manga creators through out their own two cents (yen) about not just illegal uploading, but the people doing it. When someone posted on twitter of having uploaded Rei Hiroe’s entire manga Black Lagoon, the mangaka, in jest, wished pancreatic cancer on the uploader. Fellow mangakas Kazuki Kotobuki and Kouta Hirano joined in, coming up with more imaginative forms of death on the uploader. Bet that guy is sorry he tweeted that. I still don’t get all this disrespect people want to show the creators of the books they claim to love. While I don’t think they need to be worshipped, how about just some common decency? Or is that to outmoded for the 21st century? Not As Easy As It Looks People are always complaining about the translations in manga, that it’s not literal enough, or that it’s too “Americanized”. At SDCC, several translators in the industry got together for the panel Manga: Lost In Translation panel. It features many well known translastors and was moderated by William Flanagan, who is about as…
More On Translation Shannon Garrity over at The Comics Journal weighs in on the translation issue. She brings to focus the whole issue of literal vs literary, which is really a fan vs professional debate. Fans take a more literal approach, which can be claimed to be more authenitic, though it could also be that they don’t have the writing sense to make the translations smoother. Good writing isn’t something that comes naturally, as the internet has shown. But, then again, sometimes trying to make a title more “friendly” to western audiences can backfire. Whether too much or not enough, it’s still a no-win situation for publishers and professional translators who want to please both the current otaku fanbase and try to attract new readers. But here’s my concern. How will manga ever reach more general audiences if it continues to keep clunky translations? Who’s going to take it serious or for being more than a niche genre if it keeps catering to the niche fanbase? You’ve got to cut the cord someday. I’ll take a good read over a literal read any day. Just don’t westernize the names.
Yu* Must Go The January 2010 issue of Shonen Jump USA marks another change in the magazine. Yu Yu Hakusho, one of the first 5 titles to debut with the magazine ends in this issue. This makes it the only other title from the debut line up to complete it’s full run. Sandland, a single volume title by Akira Toriyama was the other. Yu-Gi-Oh GX “graduates” from SJ this month as well, going graphic novel only now. So much for “there’ll always be a Yu-Gi-Oh title in Shonen Jump.” And of course, the long awaited One Piece jump starts in this issue. I haven’t cared for some of the changes to SJ in the past, but a natural end like Yu Yu Hakusho is the way it should be.
A short conversation came up on Twitter about whether Japanese names should be translated. I found some of the point that were made interesting, and it got me thinking. When you hear someone’s name, do you think about it’s meaning? Pick up a baby book of names, and you’ll see that every name, even our English names have another meaning. But because it’s a name, we don’t consider the meaning important. Why should translators do the same to Japanese names? Yes, many of the Japanese names have mundane meanings, such as Sakura, meaning Cherry Blossom, or Yuki, meaning snow. But are you going to call someone named Mirai, Future? Just because that is the literal translation, that doesn’t make it the best interpretation. My name, Lori, means “laurel tree symbolic of honor and victory”. That doesn’t mean I want to be called “Laurel tree”. If you were introduced to someone named Sakura, you wouldn’t go around calling them Cherry Blossom, would you? That’s not their given name. When a word becomes a name, it transcends it’s original meaning, and becomes something more than that. Translators that change a person’s name to it’s literal meaning are really missing the point. When…