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 Allow Me to Introduce Ourselves
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
Hello, and welcome to our column! Technically this column is supposed to be manga-related, but this time I'm going to write about us, because I'm a stickler for introductions. But also technically, we're manga-related, too, as I will explain.
We're Alethea and Athena Nibley, and we translate manga. Tadah! See? Manga-related. But anyway, as you may have guessed from the alliterative names, we're twins (not that alliterative names are limited only to twins). We only have one computer, and it's a lot easier to just use it at the same time, so I (Alethea) do most of the typing, while Athena sits beside me to correct my typos, as well as add the occasional witty comment. So when I talk in the first-person plural (we), then you know I'm referring to my sister and me.
As I said, we translate manga for a living. We've been at it for almost five years now, and our resume includes such popular titles as Fruits Basket and Saiyuki. We've done a lot more than those, but I feel like not a whole lot of people have heard of the rest (except for maybe DN Angel and Ai Yori Aoshi). Of course, that might be because our friends are a little too focused on their fandoms to branch out much. Still, we're sure many of you readers are here because you're big manga fans, so maybe you have heard of them! Anyone out there know of Million Tears?
We first got into manga when we were in high school. Sailor Moon was our gateway anime, and pretty much became the main focus of our lives through middle school, so we were always looking for new things involving it. Our search was obviously not very efficient, because even though we lived in the Los Angeles area, we didn't really find Little Tokyo until we got into high school. But find it we did, and with it, the manga that was the original story of Sailor Moon. And that opened up a whole new world of possibilities, because when a penpal introduced us to Fushigi Yuugi, we thought, “Hey! Why don't we get the manga of that?” And from there, we started sampling other manga, and it just took off.
Unfortunately, this was before translated manga had started getting really popular. But fortunately for us, untranslated manga is a lot less expensive. We just had to get over that minor little language barrier thing. And since a Japanese grammar book and pocket dictionary were a lot cheaper than buying subtitled anime videos (this was before DVDs-- wow, ancient times), we decided to go that route. Also, learning another language is awesome. And I should add that we had a friend in high school who started learning Japanese before we did, so I guess we were sort of jumping on the bandwagon, small though that bandwagon was.
When we got to college, we started learning the language formally. After proving to our mother that we pretty much had run out of aptitude for anything but Japanese, she finally let us major in it. The Japanese major at Brigham Young University is pretty awesome if you take it seriously, and I think it really helped a lot in our understanding of Japanese culture and history as well as the language. In fact, thinking about it now, I'm a little sad we didn't take the class on modern Japanese literature in translation, because even though we had to read the books anyway, we would have gotten a lot more background if we'd taken the class. Maybe if we find ourselves in Utah again we'll see if they'll let us sit in. But we learned a lot about the Heian era, which is pretty awesome because we're currently really into Haruka (naru Toki no Nakade, aka Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time), which takes place in “a parallel world like Heian Japan.” We were so sad when Viz got the rights to that manga, because so far we don’t work for Viz, and we really would have loved to translate it.
Also at college, we made some friends who were fellow anime geeks, but not so much fellow linguistic geeks. So we were reading manga, and we wanted them to read the manga too, but they wouldn't understand it as well! (They did take some Japanese classes, but not enough to read manga fluently.) So we started translating it for them. To make a long story short, that led to us doing an internship for TokyoPop in the summer of 2003, which in turn led to us translating manga professionally. Now we're translating for TokyoPop, Del Rey, and CMX, and we've also done some work for Yen Press, and will hopefully be allowed to do more.
Through TokyoPop, we were able to translate Atelier Marie & Elie: Zarlburg Alchemist, and through that, we met Barb Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, and that brings us to now, with us being allowed to write a column for this website. We hope you all enjoy it!
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1 July 2009
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What I'm Keepin' Track Of: June 23rd, 2009What Ysabet's Reading: June 23, 2009 17 June 2009
Words of Truth and Wisdom: Spelling 10 June 2009
What I’m Keepin’ Track Of: Yen Press, June 10th, 2009
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