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 Sudden Movement!
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
Back in the old days when Athena and I started working in manga, it was the hot new thing to stop flipping the artwork. For all you youngsters who don't know what I'm talking about, allow me to explain. Ten or so years ago, when Japanese manga was new in the United States, it was a common belief (and probably not too inaccurate) that most Americans don't want to read their comic books backwards. And so, since Japanese books, which read right-to-left, are backwards by American standards, most manga publishers (I think there were three at the time) would flip everything around so we could all read things left to right, like sane people. (Disclaimer: We are against flipping manga.)
Once manga got to be more popular and fans grew to be more loyal, they started complaining that flipping the book around compromised the artwork. There were other problems it brought about, the first example of which that comes to mind being something in Inuyasha being hidden in the eye of a skull. The accurate text translation said it was one eye--we'll say the left--but because the art was flipped it ended up being in the right eye. The fans decided that that was more confusing than having to read backwards, which really isn't all that hard once you get used to it, and so demanded that the companies stop flipping. And thus was born 100% Authentic Manga from TokyoPop.
But then there was a problem. 100% Authentic Manga was meant to preserve the artwork in its entirety (or as close to its entirety as possible). Any manga reader knows that sound effects are drawn in by the manga artist, often in such a way that makes it part of the artwork, and not just another bit of text. And so sound effects went untranslated.
Well, not entirely untranslated, and that's what I want to talk about. I don't know who exactly decides whether a sound effect will be translated in the final edition, but as translators, it's our job to translate everything that's legible, no matter how tiny or insignificant it may seem. And that is the source of our woes.
When we read manga before, we would usually skip over the sound effects. This sometimes made things a little confusing, especially in cases like one scene in Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, where the sound was of the character suddenly stopping. We turn the page and we're like, “What just happened? Weren't they doing that thing?” And then we turned the page back and saw the sound for a sudden stop, and were like, “Oh. I guess they stopped.” But for the most part it didn't make too much difference. Now that we've been translating for so long, though, we can see how sound effects really enhance the story.
But the problem with sound effects is that they're not listed in dictionaries. This is probably because the Japanese have sounds for lots of things that we don't have sounds for. My favorite example is “suh.” It's also my least favorite example because it's almost impossible to translate to any kind of English onomatopoeia and looks ugly when written in Roman letters. Athena says that if it were written in French (for those of you who may know French pronunciation), it would be spelled “seu,” which does look a lot better. Anyway, it's the sound of a quiet movement, like one hand clapping, for example. But since you don't find a whole lot of manga characters clapping one hand, it's more commonly used to represent things like offering someone a business card, two people passing by each other, reaching out a hand to touch someone softly, etc.
We thought that our inability to translate sound effects came from ignorance, so, in an attempt to educate ourselves, we borrowed a bunch of American comic books from a friend and began our research. And you know what we learned? If it's not a fight scene, American comics have almost no sound effects! Or maybe we were reading the wrong comics. Athena was reading a Superman comic, and a door slammed open without a sound. That would never happen in a manga. It's almost enough to make us wonder why the fans are so desperate to know what sound was made, but I guess that's why some people prefer Japanese manga to American comics.
I had a system, actually. For the sounds that you do see in American comics--your kabooms, thuds, slams, crashes, etc.--I'd translate them as a sound. For the sounds that are usually considered to be silent--pita (stop), kira (sparkle), niko (grin), etc.--I'd translate them as a verb. And for sounds that aren't usually expressed in English but are mimicked perfectly in Japanese, I'd transliterate them. My pet one was “gacha,” the sound a door makes when opened. I also prefer to keep “doki,” the sound of a heart beat, because it sounds so much better than all the American equivalents I know about.
But lately, we've been asked to cut it out with the transliterations by just about all our editors--they want “English” sound effects, dang it! (“Dang it” added for dramatic effect; I'm not into swearing so much, so I use the fake swear words.) As you can imagine, this caused us a bit of frustration. I mean, if a cape sounds so much like “basa” when you flourish it in Japan, why would the molecules move in a way that they'd make a different sound if that same cape was flourished in an English-speaking country? And really, how much more sense does “fwoosh” make than “basa”? Not to mention the fact that, as I said before, these sound effects aren't listed in dictionaries. If we have to figure out what the sound is by looking at the picture, why can't the readers?
Still, we like to do our job right, so we persevered. It's actually kind of fun, sometimes. I'm especially proud of remembering the word “skitter,” which we used in volume one of minima!. And so, to paraphrase Eduardo, the purple imaginary friend on Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, "We just go where they tell us to."
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22 July 2008
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