There are all sorts of moods in manga, and while the vast majority of the tone is set by the artwork, it's also necessary to set the tone (or support the tone, if you will) in the dialog and captions.

This is brought to mind since I am presently working on a volume of a new manga that Del Rey recently announced, Mushishi. The story follows a somewhat modern-looking expert of an odd, primitive life-form called mushi as he wanders through the backroads of Meiji- or Taishô-era Japan helping people with the problems created where the world of the mushi meets the real world. The tone of the dialog is low and understated, like a quiet conversation late at night. This comes off of the shouting, over-the-top tone of School Rumble I worked on just prior to this assignment, so the difference in tone hit me especially hard this time.

There was a time when I (as an editor) received a translation of an art book that I basically had to rewrite since the tone was wrong. It was an art book for a romantic shôjo manga, and the translation (while very accurate) was far too matter-of-fact. The gorgeous, romantic artwork screamed out (to me, at least) for a more poetic tone in the captions. Instead of words such as, "like," or even, "love," this book was calling out for words such as, "passionate," "adoration," or, "obsession." So I pulled out the Thesaurus and rewrote it to match the images. I use this to illustrate that even captions need to have an appropriate voice as much as dialog does.

As I mentioned in a previous post on humor, comedy can call for different tones. When an artist is setting up a joke, they are usually playing on story-telling stereotypes to lure the reader into a certain expectation, then in the pay-off panel, they turn the expectation on its ear. So the translator should translate the buildup panels as if they were a part of that stereotypical type of manga.

Steam Detectives was playing on the techniques of superhero-style manga where a villain is as evil as evil gets. The tone for that kind of manga means that subtlety is inappropriate. This is where a translator has to pull out the best Eeeeevil dialog he or she has ever read in comics or in campy TV programs. I miss working on that manga. (Although School Rumble sometimes allows me to use some of that dialog.)

The tone of xxxHolic seems like it should be pensive and philosophical, but when you consider Watanuki's fencing with Dômeki, that requires some pretty over-the-top dialog, and Yûko's taunting of Watanuki, while not over-the-top, is pretty high-spirited.

One of the advantages of trying to translate tone is that most of it is carried in the images, so even when a translation doesn't live up to it, most readers will get the feel for it anyway. I once saw an official subtitled version of Omoide Poro-Poro (Only Yesterday) where the subtitles were awful at capturing the tone of the movie. At the end of the crowded screening, one man who had obviously seen a better translation stood up and pleaded with the audience to not allow the awful titles to turn them against the film. But listening to the audience talk among themselves as they walked out, most of them were saying that they loved the movie and didn't think the titles were that bad. As a translator, it was disappointing that the audience (a very sophisticated audience at that) couldn't tell a good translation from a bad one, but it did pound into my head just how powerful a good story can be.

That doesn't mean you get to fudge on the tone of your own translations! Read it carefully, and make sure your dialog and captions are appropriate!