Translation of Japanese Manga in Turkey
Introduction
Starting with the 90s, Japanese popular culture began to expand throughout
the world through one of the most powerful literary devices of the country:
manga. Literally meaning “an irresponsible text”, Manga has captured millions
of people around the globe – and the Turkish youth is not an exception. Nevertheless,
since most of the mangas are written in a very conventional form and typography
of Japanese that involves visual arts, multimodal texts, and even a hybridized
language; studying the scanlation and translation of them initiates several
topics of discussion for a scholar studying in translation. The following parts
discuss the diverse translation techniques used in manga’s by scanlation & translation
activities and examine the obscurities and challenges
surrounding the translation of manga’s into Turkish (such as the difference
in reading directions or arrangement of pages) while it might be applicable for
the translation processes into other languages as well.
Japanese Manga Translation in Turkey
While Japanese Manga has started to gain recognition in the early 90s in
the USA and Europe, Turkey has been introduced to it only in the concluding
years of the decade in which the first manga was published in September 1999 by
İthaki Yayınları. Currently, there are more than ten publishers that distribute
and advertise manga in Turkey such as Arunus, Tudem, Everest,
İthaki, Gerekli Şeyler, Marmara Çizgi and Akılçelen
(Okyayuz, 2017) . Even though the total
of the publishers is minor, the huge dissimilarity in translations and
scanlations of the distributers is undeniably present. Brienza defines this process
of standardizing the Japanese manga as “heating in the microwave for a few seconds, just long
enough to soften the glue binding the pages
together” (Brienza, 2009) .
Challenges Surrounding the Translation &
Scanlation of Manga
The first noticeable and common challenge can be found in the scanlation
process of manga. Manga is, culturally, written from top to bottom and read from
left to right. Nevertheless, this format is reasonably unusual for Western
languages. That is why when manga became trendy in the 90s, the USA
translations from Japanese standardized the manga to the Western fashion and
this version was used by European translators as well. After the beginning the
21st century; however, the translators happened to leave this laborious
approach of them and started to scanlate manga’s in the original format. When
it comes to Turkish side, as it is mentioned above; since manga has arrived
Turkey in the early two-thousands, there were no standardized-to-Western-fashion
manga scanlations ever published in Turkey.
Secondly, in the translations of manga into Turkish, the words must be hyphenated several times to be fitted in the speech balloons that is most of the time thin and long because of the unique way of writing in Japanese. Not only the over-hyphenated words may irritate the target reader (see Figure 1) but also the space in the speech balloons that too scanty to put the translated texts may result in involuntary elimination and avoidance of some parts of the source text. Even though there are some scanlators tend to standardize the speech balloons, it is arduous and timewasting; let alone the limited technologies at the hands of the scanlators.
The third challenge is the abundant presence of the symbols (such as kanji from Chinese writing or mimetic
words & onomatopoeia[1] in katakana that might seem peculiar and “cause the utmost
difficulty for non-native translators” (Inose, 2007) . Thus, it is not unexpected that a
complete avoidance or leaving some parts untranslated in manga translations is a
choice, in that case. Moreover, it ought to be accredited that not only in Turkey but also all around the world Manga has a deep-seated audience,
who is familiar with those sort of non-translated elements thanks to the online
forums, fan-subs, magazines or books related to Japanese manga.
Conclusion
That is to say, it is widely known that manga involves a myriad of mythology
and cultural elements not only in typography but also in content, ranging from
demons and monsters to samurai and ninjas. The diffucultuies surrounding manga
translations not only in finding strategies dealing with the language or
culture but also in graphics, pictures, typography or even the use of fonts. Thus;
at the end of the day, the translator’s work may never be enough. Even though
the most of the challenges are unmentioned in this article due to the lack of
space, it is quite easy for a translation scholar informed about Japanese (manga)
culture to guess the challenges; for example the translator ought to know the surname
comes before the name in Japan and make their decision on using the original
format or standardizing it to the Western fashion. After all, currently it
seems keeping the cultural elements in manga thorough translation and
scanlation process is favored by distributers, which is, in my opinion; the
true path. Moreover, in our world that is the most internationlaized and out of
cultural barriers; it is much easier for the readers to learn and accept the language
of manga that is not be translated but accepted as it is.
[1]
Onomatopoeia is defined as “words that describe visual, tactile, and other
non-auditory sensitive impressions” (Inose, 2007) .
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