I’m going to talk a little bit about translation, but I refuse to use the phrase “lost in translation,” no matter how well it applies here. It’s become such a cliche…

If you read our manga, you know that we’re sticklers for translation. We don’t always get it right (and that time I got it wrong on Air Gear, I got it spectacularly wrong), but it’s important to our readers, so it’s important to us. And I like to think we get it right more often than not.

The skills we’ve learned working on manga are helping us with the novels we’ve started publishing, but we’re coming up against some interestingly tricky bits now that we’re working with more than just dialogue. I don’t want to give away any spoilers for the Psycho Busters novels, so I’m not going to give you the context, but we encountered one of those tricky bits the other day. Well, Tricia did, and I’m not above stealing from her experiences to find things to blog about.

See, in the second volume a character experiences the exact same event multiple times, and the author expresses this by having the exact same text appear in the book several times over, one after the other. Tricia, quick as ever, realized that this would be likely to confuse American readers, who might think the repeated text is a printing error, and so she worked closely with Kodansha to find a solution. Again, I’m not going to spoil it for you here.

What I found most fascinating about all of this was not the solution, but the fact that this wasn’t a problem in the original Japanese. Apparently this “replay” technique happens often enough for Japanese readers of manga and light novels to immediately pick up on the situation. At first, I thought that this didn’t have a counterpart in American comics or novels, but I thought of a couple places where it happens.

I was reading Green Lantern: The Sinestro War the other day, and I noticed that in almost every chapter, the main character reintroduced himself as if we’d never seen him before. Most American readers are used to this, because they know on some level that the “chapters” in this story were originally presented as monthly comic books, and they accept this as part of the style of the genre. But to someone not familiar with this style, this repetition might seem a little confusing.

It all comes down to what you know and expect, I suppose. I find it fascinating, but I really am just a big comics geek in the end.

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