From 1987 through 2002, there was a model for publishing profit-making manga. It was derived from a fusion between the Magazine-to-graphic novel formula of Japan and the American publishing model of pamphlet comic that, for important stories, is reprinted in graphic-novel format.

The standard model was to first publish the manga in pamphlet comics that were 32 or 48 pages long (priced between 2 and 4 dollars), then collect them into approximately 180-page graphic novels that sell for about 16 dollars. There were several advantages to this publishing model. First, even if one did not make back all of production costs in the pamphlet comics, as long as it made back more than the printing costs, it worked to the publisher's advantage by making back at least some of the production costs. Then, over the course of the long-life of the graphic novel, the manga could eventually start showing a profit. This was an effective publishing strategy for its time because the number of pamphlet comics far outsold the graphic novels, and usually the pamphlet comics more than made up for production costs. That way, the graphic novels could enter the not-very-welcoming bookstore market only risking minor production costs (the time the designer and editor took to do the additional work needed for the graphic novel alone), printing and shipping costs.

The big variation on the above strategy was where the Japanese model of magazine-to-graphic-novel was used. Viz always had several magazines going, and publishers such as TokyoPop (then called Mixx) and Gutsoon started out with the magazine-to-graphic-novel model. Although TokyoPop moved to the pamphlet-to-graphic-novel model for some of their titles pretty quickly. (Magazines have never been very good for profits. Returns are high, so one usually has to sell in the hundreds of thousands before a profit can be seen.)

There were plenty of experiments done on format. Mini comics, 100-page low-priced graphic novels, colorized manga, weekly releases, colored paper, different kinds and weights of paper, different sizes, etc. TokyoPop in the late 1990s wouldn't go more than a year or 18 months without making some drastic change to their name or format or policies. (Remember the 2-manga-pages-per-page experiment?) Viz usually experimented with individual series. Something quickly forgotten among the fan community is that Viz was the first company to push shôjo manga and the first to publish right-to-left manga, although neither took off in popularity at the time.

In fact, since TokyoPop had experimented so much, the announcement in the 2001/2002 winter season that they would switch their entire line from right-to-left, not translate sound effects, and drop their prices to under $10 was greeted with a healthy load of skepticism. Viz had Evangelion as both left-to-right and right-to-left versions, and the left-to-right version sold at least twice as well as the unflipped version.

But TokyoPop launched their titles very well with display stands in the bookstores and some very strong titles such as Chobits. The fact that they did very well in June wasn't such a surprise, but by August, it was obvious that TokyoPop had found the secret formula for success.

Viz started to scramble. It wasn't completely for sure that it was the unflipping or the under $10 price tag. Viz was pretty sure it wasn't the lack of translation of the sound effects, although the cost-saving aspect of that wasn't lost on Viz's finance people. The main problem was that to change the price or change to unflipped required a renegotiation of every contract. I honestly still don't know how TokyoPop managed to change their entire line in the course of a few months. Viz pretty much caught on to the new reality in August, and it wasn't until March of the next year at the earliest that the first of Viz's low-priced manga could come out.

From and editorial standpoint, it was a difficult change. Producing pamphlet manga meant that each graphic novel was coming out once every 6 months. A switch to quarterly graphic novels meant that production was doubled. By 2002, the Pokémon bubble had long-since burst and Viz wasn't a very cash-rich company, so it was impossible to increase the editorial department. And finding enough freelancers to double production quickly wasn't easy either. But it had to be done. The sales on the pamphlet manga had been declining for years, so it was something of a relief to get rid of them, but the entire editorial department worked late pretty much everyday between the years of 2002 and 2004.

The change has been a great thing for manga as a whole, but there has been a downside to it. Since manga no longer has the cushion of pamphlets to eat up production costs, it becomes more difficult to experiment anymore. Format experiments have all-but disappeared, and content experiments such as were found in the pages of PULP magazine are pretty hard to find these days. Second, since a book has to make up its costs in the book-store market only, the wages for freelancers went down pretty drastically in some companies. (Other companies were low to begin with.)

Still, because of the changes that 2002 brought about, manga is one of the few healthy book markets in the United States today. There are several publishers devoted to Yaoi manga (which I thought would never happen), there are other specialty publishers, and bookstore distribution is wide-spread and knowledgeable. Today is a good day for manga. (I wonder how well it'll do tomorrow.)

Posted by dojosensei at 10:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sensei's very first Japanese sensei had a saying, "No translation is no translation." Basically what it meant is that it is the translator's job to put the Japanese concept into English, and if the translator leaves words in Japanese, the translator is not doing what he or she is being paid to do.

That's one extreme of the positions on this idea, but there is a valid point behind it. Human language is made up of concepts that all humans share. There may be points that are relatively more important to one culture than to another (like the Inuit's number of words for snow that everyone has heard of), but there is no concept that one person can think of in one language that a different person can't think of in a different language. Actually, that's the basis for all translation -- that the human mind created language, and if something can be said in one language, it can be said in another.

There is, of course, the opposite extreme. That what is said in a language comes along with nuance and cultural baggage such that no translation can ever be wholly accurate. This is also a valid point. If I said that a couple of celebrities were, "acting like the second coming of Bennifer," then I have just referenced in your mind a few years worth of celebrity gossip that everyone in North America was exposed to. A culture that didn't follow American celebrities would just say, "Huh?" And it doesn't have to be so obvious. Words like, "Y'all" carry a certain cultural baggage that would be very difficult to translate, and even non-dialectical phrases like "Military Institute for Boys" carry certain cultural meanings that the words themselves don't carry. Taking this to a further degree, one could argue that since the culture helps along in the background when understanding a language, no language can hope to be translated and give the same feeling to a reader in another language.

Obviously I don't subscribe to this second extreme, because if I did, I'd hang up my dictionaries in the closet and leave the profession. No, what we translators are working with is somewhere much closer to the first extreme than the second, but there are elements of the second in our translations too.

The fact is most anime and manga fans want a little Japanese in their translation. Although people who buy into the first extreme (and I was one of them for a while) feel that anything that can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another -- it might just take a few extra words to do it -- the truth is we are ultimately paid by our readers forking over their cash to pick up our translations.

I'll tell you where I became a convert to the having-some-Japanese-in-my-translation-isn't-such-a-bad-thing camp. I was editing Fushigi Yûgi for Viz, and someone wrote in about the character Chichiri who ends every sentence with the Japanese sentence-ending particle "no da." (To be technical, "no" is the particle, and "da" is the copula.) It was running in the magazine Animerica Extra which has a letters page, so I ran the letter, and as a response, I said, "I don't know what we're going to do. What do you think?" (Actually, at the time, I was still a convert to the must-translate-everything school, and I was leaning toward leaving the "no da" out.)

It was there that I learned one cardinal rule for working on a letters page. Don't ask a question you don't want to know the answer to. I meant the, "What do you think," as a prompt for people to send in letters to the magazine, but many fans took it as a poll. They put up on websites that I would allow the fans to decide whether Chichiri leaves his "no da" as is or not, and I suddenly got flooded with mail. More than a hundred e-mails a day. Most of them were just writing in without even knowing what they were writing in about. The majority wrote in saying variations of, "you better put no da in teh anima or i never watch!!!!!!!" In other words, people who simply clicked on the link and wrote what they thought the website owner wanted them to say. There were many others who did read the book that used threats such as organizing a boycott of the magazine or coming up with a petition. None of this did anything to change my mind. (It's very easy to become stubborn when confronted by threats.)

Then one fan wrote in saying that she would be made very happy by leaving in the "no da," and it brought me up short. Really. Suddenly I was confronted with a point that I couldn't argue. Making the fans happy is a good way to increase sales. I still feel that if a line of dialog can be translated, it should, but that doesn't mean that a little bit of easy Japanese thrown into the mix is a bad thing. The Japanese do it when there are English-speaking characters in the manga. The foreigner will usually say "Hello," in English, then go on to speak the rest of the dialog line in Japanese. (Although in real life, the only Japanese most foreigners know are the greetings, so the dialog would be the other way around. "Konnichi ha" in Japanese and the rest of the sentence in English.)

Of course the company I do translations for (Del Rey, may their manga ever boom) requires a certain amount of Japanese (honorifics, etc.), so the decision is made for me, but after the incident with Chichiri's "no da," any objections I once had have been quelled.

Posted by dojosensei at 10:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have certain sayings that I like to repeat when the subject comes up. "There's no such thing as a famous translator," is one of them. If you've ever been to the Lost in Translation panel at the San Diego Comic Con, you've probably heard my, "Three things, any two of which will allow you to survive in the manga industry," speech (which wasn't even mine! I stole it from a panel of comic-book editors I attended during the World Con in '84). But one of my favorites has to do with a truth behind translation.

The best translation is always your own translation.

A dirty little secret that the world naturally keeps hidden is that when we read something in English, a novel for example, even though we've read the same book, we didn't have the same experience. We all bring our own assumptions, experiences and prejudices to any novel we read, and what we imagine as we read that novel can be vastly different from person to person. The same is true for manga.

What you read when you get a translation is manga filtered through a mind. If you read manga that I translated, you are getting my interpretation of what the characters are saying and who they are. If you were able to read the manga for yourself in Japanese, it's possible (even likely) that you would get a different interpretation and have that character say the dialog differently in English.

It's one reason why no two translations of the same material are exactly alike.

So if you know Japanese (to any extent) and have read a work before in the original language, then if you read a translation of it, odds are you will have anything from quibbles with the other person's translation to a pull-out-the-pitchforks-and-torches-and-lynch-the-translator attitude. In fact, a while back, a poster on the Anime on DVD forums made it clear that he still hadn't "forgiven" me for an interpretation of Video Girl Ai dialog that I was responsible for in 1998. That's a better part of a decade that someone's been holding a grudge over an interpretation choice.

So here's a piece of advice. If you really want to enjoy a translated work, don't read the original. If you really want to enjoy the original, then avoid the translated version and translate the original for yourself. Your mind works differently than the translator's, and the translation will just make you frustrated.

On the other hand, if you're mining someone else's translation for interesting word choices, that can be a different story -- and I'll get into that in a future column.

Posted by dojosensei at 08:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When manga first started to be published, all of my friends who loved manga but didn't know Japanese wanted to be rewriters. It was a way to be a part of it without having to take the years necessary to learn Japanese.

Nowadays I'm not quite sure if they'd be so enthusiastic. Very few people can see what a rewriter does for a manga, and if any of the dialog isn't quite how the reader imagined it, the rewriter is one of the first to be blamed. In other words, the rewriter is the last to be praised for a job well done, and the first to be criticized. Not the best position in the world.

The most vital domain of the rewriter is characterization. If the characters sound like the characters, then the rewriter is doing a good job. If all the characters sound the same, then there's a problem. Apart from the one-or-two-word lines of dialog, English provides a wealth of ways to differentiate a one character's voice from another. Let's take an example and put it into a variety of different voices.

Let's take the line:
I'm going out with friends. Do you want to come along?

Tough Guy:
Me and the guys are goin' out. Comin'?

Child:
I gonna meet up with some friends! You coming too?

Young man:
Some of the guys and I are hitting the bars. You coming with?

Young woman:
A few of us are getting together. Do you think you can come along?

Elderly:
Several of us are going to paint the town. Do you feel like joining in?

Polite:
A few of us had plans to go out. I do hope you can accompany us.

Affected:
Plans are afoot for a group outing. Your presence is requested.

Evil
I am leading my minions out to fulfill my plan! Join us...or die!

Okay, the last one wasn't exactly true to the spirit of the original line, but you get the idea. All of the above sentences mean pretty much the same thing, and the only thing that distinguishes them is vocabulary, and that's the tool of the rewriter/adaptor. It's possible for a manga to use the first, neutral sentence in the translation, but the experience wouldn't be as rich as is could be, and worse, wouldn't be as rich as it was for Japanese readers when they read the original book.

Since rewriters/adaptors are usually the professional writers of the team, they also have to keep their eyes open for foreshadowing, dramatic repetition of words or phrases, comedic repetition, and other tricks of writing so that the book does what the original author wanted it to do.

There are some translators who do both translation and rewrite, and I count myself as one of those. The problem there is that these are two distinct jobs that need two very different skill sets. I was submitting short stories to magazines before I ever tried to learn Japanese, so I had some background in writing that I could bring to translation. Other translators I know learned how to do adaptation while on the job of doing literal translation. But basically a translator/adaptor is one person doing two jobs. Because I can translate and adapt at the same time, it doesn't take me quite as much time as it would take two people, but it takes me longer to do the full job than it does to do a literal.

And there are many rewriters that I respect greatly. I was fortunate enough to edit several manga scripts rewritten by Gerard Jones, and those scripts were just about perfect. Although he didn't know Japanese, Gerard's knack of capturing the voice while keeping the information exactly the same always amazed me. And Fred Burke was a go-to guy when I was at Viz for scripts that involved mysticism. He knew how to capture that tone like few others in the business. I'd list more, but I don't want this to sound like an acknowledgements section.

Although the number of translators who can also be adaptors is growing, it isn't anywhere near enough to cover all of the manga that is being produced, so splitting the duties into the two skill sets makes sense. The rewriters are an extremely valuable asset to translated manga and anime, even though very few people can distinguish what they do.

Posted by dojosensei at 07:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

or Why Translators Like Kanji

"I want to buy a manga to help me learn my kana. What do you suggest?"

My very first attempt at translating a manga was before I had taken any courses or even picked up any of those Learn Japanese in 10 Minutes a Day books. I had a friend's first-year Japanese textbook, another friend's ancient version of the Green Goddess Dictionary, a photocopied kana chart and a copy of the Japanese cine-manga for Orguss. In the first thirty pages of text, I managed to translate one word balloon! It was useful in that it told me just how much there was to learn before I could actually translate Japanese at any level.

And it taught me my first lesson in the difficulties of Japanese: We don't know where one word ends and the next one begins.

Aside from some early-reader books (for children from about 4 to 7 or 8 years old), all of Japanese runs continuously with one word bumped up to the next. There are no breaks between words such as there are in English and other Western languages.

So if, at an early stage, you start to try to translate Japanese, you start with the first syllable and look it up in the dictionary. If nothing seems to make sense with respect to the pictures, you add on the second syllable and look up the two syllable combination. Then you add on the third syllable, and so on. But you're a novice, so you may find two or three words that actually do make sense, and you don't have enough experience with Japanese to judge yet which one is right.

Yes, it is an awful thing to be an early novice and want to translate Japanese.

Sure every 1st year Japanese student has pondered that it would be so nice if they didn't have to learn all of those kanji -- or even better, if Japan could adopt our alphabet! Wouldn't that be great?

No.

There are so many homophones in Japanese that putting a word like "kankou" (my Green Goddess lists 16 different meanings) in romaji means that we translators would have a very hard time figuring out which meaning it is! But all of those 16 meanings have different kanji when in modern-day written Japanese, so the kanji lead you directly to the correct meaning. Also kanji break up the words in a sentence. Whenever you see a kanji, it signals the start of a new word. (There are exceptions such as the honorific "o" that comes at the start of some words can be in kana with kanji following it, but generally the kanji will start a new word.)

So kanji both work to break up a sentence and pin down the meaning. By your second or third year of Japanese, they'll be a godsend to your understanding of the language. Oh, you'll still hate them -- you have to learn nearly 2000 of them after all -- but you won't wish they didn't exist anymore.

In answer to the top question, you might as well get yourself a children's book where they actually put spaces between the words. It won't help you much since you'll still have a very hard time figuring out what's being said, but it'll help more than a manga will.

Posted by dojosensei at 08:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)