An Interesting Article I Found

Rainbow · Post by **Rainbow** » Tue Nov 11, 2003 4:42 pm

As the topic title says, I found an interesting article about how a manga is translated and edited for American audiences.

http://www.animefringe.com/magazine/01. ... index.php3

Starscream · Post by **Starscream** » Tue Nov 11, 2003 7:51 pm

Wow, this is old...but first, to deal with some quotes:

changing a TV reference from a Japanese sitcom to Friends so that American readers will get the joke

It's pretty simple to make a footer that can explain the reference (if a footer is enough, of course). Otherwise, I guess this is ok.

Overall, I feel a little more sympathy for the editing process, but the author seems to come off very high-minded of himself, making it seem like the changes he does make are for the good of the comic reading community. I understand that editing is a multistage process, and that in that process your own little idiosyncracies will sneak in there, but don't go making changes just for the sake of doing so in the belief that you will "make it clearer". A lot of my other complaints, though, have to do with the date of this article...since it's publication, there is a rating system for GNs/anthologies, and DB has successfully put out uncensored versions of the books to appease the purists.

Post by **Tiff** » Tue Nov 11, 2003 8:28 pm

Starscream wrote:
Overall, I feel a little more sympathy for the editing process, but the author seems to come off very high-minded of himself, making it seem like the changes he does make are for the good of the comic reading community. I understand that editing is a multistage process, and that in that process your own little idiosyncracies will sneak in there, but don't go making changes just for the sake of doing so in the belief that you will "make it clearer".

I completely agree. There's no reason to put "Christina Aguilara" in place of a japanese pop artists simply to make it "easier to understand". They can simply put an asterick ont he name of the artist, and have "so and so is a famous Japanese pop artist!" on the side or on the bottom. Ayashi No Ceres mixed the two ideas. They edited out Japanese references such as pop artists and TV shows, but they footenoted the ACTUAL names. For example, they put something like: "Aya is acutally talking about *insert japanese name here*" At least that way, both readers are pleased.