The Task of Manga Translation: Akira in the West

THE COMICS GRID Journal of comics scholarship Martin de la Iglesia, ‘The Task of Manga Translation: Akira in the West’ (2016) 6(1) The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 1, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/cg.59 RESEARCH The Task of Manga Translation: Akira in the West Martin de la Iglesia1 1 Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany Translated editions of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira played an important role in the popularisation of manga in the Western world. Published in Japan between 1982 and 1990, editions in European languages followed as soon as the late 1980s. In the first US edition (Epic 1988–1995) the originally black and white manga was printed in colour and published in 38 issues, which were designed not unlike typical American comic books. The first German edition (Carlsen 1991–1996) marked the beginning of Carlsen’s manga publishing efforts. It was based on the English-language edition and also printed in colour, and combined two American issues in one. This article analyses the materiality of these two translated editions with a focus on three main issues – the mirroring (or ‘flipping’) which changes the reading direction from right-to-left into left-to-right, the colouring of the originally black and white artwork, and the translation of different kinds of script (sound effects, speech bubble text, and inscriptions or labels) – before concluding with a brief examination of their critical reception. Keywords: colouring; flipping; manga; reception; translation In his seminal essay on ‘the task of the translator’ (1923), Walter Benjamin distinguished between sense (‘Sinn’) and form (‘Form’) of the source text. Benjamin suggests that translators should primarily be concerned with transferring the latter into the target language. However, Benjamin argues that “true translation is translucent, it doesn’t conceal the original”, and that translators need to “extend the confines” of the target language (my translation). Benjamin did not have comics in mind when he wrote this, but if we want to apply his translation theory to comics, we need to think about how the non-scriptorial elements of comics might fit into it. Similar to the sense of written texts, there are 2 de la Iglesia: The Task of Manga Translation elements in comics that can (or should) not be easily altered much in the translation process: the line drawings in the panels as a whole and their sequence which combines them into a narrative. Other elements in comics are more feasibly and readily altered in the translation process and thus might be regarded as corresponding to the form of written texts: as we will see, these include the physical form of the printed comic, the colouring and the orientation of the images, as well as parts of the line drawings themselves such as inscriptions. In fact, Benjamin demands of translators to carefully re-create (‘Umdichtung’) the form of the source, in order to convey its mode of meaning (‘Art des Meinens’) rather than to focus on the meaning itself. Comic translators are always faced with the decision between foreignising and naturalising translation (Howell 2001). Naturalising means creating a result that reads as if it was an original, whereas foreignisation emphasises the fact that the result is a translation. Benjamin, with his call for ‘translucent’ translations, seems to favour foreignisation. On the other hand, Casey Brienza attributes part of the success of manga in 21st-century USA to hybridised editions that had been all but stripped of their ‘Japaneseness’ (2009). American manga publishers, Brienza says, have started using the term ‘manga’ only to disassociate their product from the traditional notion of comics in the US, so that manga could ‘migrate into the book field’ instead, which was key to the American manga boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It would now be of interest to see if these notions of translation quality played any role at all in the success of particular manga translation instances. In this article the first English-language edition and the first German edition of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira are compared to each other and to the Japanese original. English was the first European language into which this manga was translated, which justifies the relevance of this edition. The first German edition, on the other hand, was published later and in the same year (1991) as the first French, Italian, and Spanish editions (according to the online catalogues of the corresponding national libraries at <http://catalogue.bnf.fr/>, <http://opac.sbn.it>, and <http://catalogo. bne.es>, respectively). Thus, the German edition of Akira was selected as an object de la Iglesia: The Task of Manga Translation 3 of comparison in this article for rather arbitrary or practical reasons. The translated editions of Akira in general are worthwhile objects of study in the context of Western (meaning here primarily Northern American and European) manga reception, as it was Akira which arguably paved the way for the breakthrough of manga in the West in the 1990s. However, the verification of this claim is not within the scope of this article (see, for example, de la Iglesia 2014). Before turning to the translated editions, some words about the publication history of Akira in Japan might be in order. Akira was first published in serialised chapters of approximately 20 pages length in the fortnightly manga periodical Young Magazine (ヤングマガジン) by well-known manga publisher Kōdansha (Ōtomo 2007). The first episode appeared in 1982, but the final episode wasn’t published until eight years later, in 1990. The reason for the length of this run was a hiatus in 1987 and 1988, due to author Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s being occupied with the adaptation of his comic into an animated film, in which he was involved as director, screenwriter, and storyboard artist. In 1984, the first volume of a six-volume collected edition appeared in Japan. This collected edition, rather than the magazine serialisation, is the one used for comparisons between translations and the ‘Japanese original’ in this article. In total, Akira amounts to almost 2200 pages. Due to its length and complexity, a description of this comic in general and a summary of its plot are not offered here. It would take up too much space to situate each example in this article within the narrative; furthermore, plot-related aspects are not relevant in the context of this article. In 1988, the first Akira volume by US publisher Epic – which was in fact an imprint of Marvel Comics, not an independent publishing house – appeared. This book is 16.8 centimetres wide and 25.6 centimetres high. Thus its width and height come close to the dimensions of the Japanese collected edition (which are slightly wider), but even closer to those of a standard US comic book. Compared to such a regular American comic book, the Epic Akira issues are almost three times longer, at approximately 60 pages. Therefore, (...truncated)