How to Rewrite/Adapt/Edit Manga
I've been adapting manga for Tokyopop for something like 4 years now; I started with all those Digimon series, and then moved onto Esca, B't X, Saiyuki, Hands Off!, Kamichama Karin, Rave, Fruits Basket, and the upcoming Tactics. Over those thousands of pages of trying to think of a better word for "Argh!" I compiled a giant list of do's and don't's for anyone trying to adapt a manga script. Now, by no means am I the authority on adapting manga (there are people out there way better than I), and these are just my personal opinions, but I figured I should type them out just so I'd have them down somewhere. Since this livejournal is becoming a catch-all of my geek/job stuff, it seems an appropriate enough place for a random essay that has to do with my profession.
Anyway, unless any of you have a burning desire to adapt or edit manga someday, you can safely ignore this.
1.) Manga is 98% talking; make it sound like talking. With the exception of the occasional bit of narration from an omnipotent narrator (or those "Story Thus Far" segments that suck to write), the words in manga are entirely external or internal dialogue. As anyone with half a brain knows, people don't speak like they're reading out of books, so in a medium that's supposed to mimic the way people speak, make it sound like people speaking. It's not, "I do not want to go," it's "I don't wanna go!" (slang) or "I don't want/I'd rather not go" (formal).
2.) Keep exclamation points, ellipses, and bold to a minimum. Exclamation points are a problem in shounen, ellipses in shoujo, and bold in American comics (and hence some rewriters/editors try to add bold to both shounen and shoujo). All of these things tend to break the flow of reading and thus make reading comics harder and more time-consuming. Plus, it makes the characters over-using the techniques in question sound like absolute dingbats. There will always be a place for exclamation points, ellipses, and bold text--but use them sparingly, please.
3.) Every other line should not be a question. Manga loves this crap. Be it from exclaiming disbelief of something someone just said ("The robot's coming." "The robot you say?!") or just a general observation ("So he was at my apartment earlier, and left this jacket?"), a direct translation often sounds like some sort of cheap, poorly-written soap opera. Non-question lines are stronger and less melodramatic, so cut out unnecessary questions when you can. ("The robot's coming." "You've gotta be kidding me!")
4.) Manga has its fair share of dialogue cliche's and repeats--break those. Just because some character uses the word "baka" 18 times a volume doesn't mean you should translate it as "idiot" every single time. Saiyuki has forced me to come up with every synonym for "idiot" on the face of the earth: moron, peabrain, genius, dumba*s, dipsh*t, dingbat, dimwit, sh*t-for-brains, murder-worthy primate.
5.) Some lines are bad when you translate them; that's why it's an adaptation, not a translation. It's the translator's job to say that the bubble reads, "You're 100 years too early to defeat me." Your job is to turn it into, "Keep practicing, jerkoff."
6.) Speech patterns are important. Set them from the beginning of a series and stick to them. This was one of my biggest problem's with VIZ's adaptation of Nana--a tiny-brained princess and a lovelorn punk rocker are not going to talk the same. Distinct and colorful speech patterns are extremely common in manga, so people who refuse to take that into consideration when adapting a manga for an English market drive me just a little crazy. Teenage boys swear casually and use slang, educated people use proper grammar, little kids oversimplify their lines. Look at the original Japanese dialogue, think if/how you'll be translating that into an English speech pattern, then stay with it. As is usually also the case in the original Japanese, if there's a bubble without a character next to it, you should be able to tell who's talking by the content or the speech pattern.
7.) Make things easy to read, even if they weren't in the original. If a single line is broken up into 5 pieces across a 2-page spread, see if you can't turn that into more sentences instead of one dragging one (this ties into the above rule on ellipses). The line "Is this...really...what I wanted...after all?" could easily be "I don't know. Is this really...what I wanted? Is it?"
All right, that's enough for now. I don't want to descend into angry ranting on this topic.
Also: this made me laugh, especially at the end. It appropriately reflects how much time I've wasted today.
Anyway, unless any of you have a burning desire to adapt or edit manga someday, you can safely ignore this.
1.) Manga is 98% talking; make it sound like talking. With the exception of the occasional bit of narration from an omnipotent narrator (or those "Story Thus Far" segments that suck to write), the words in manga are entirely external or internal dialogue. As anyone with half a brain knows, people don't speak like they're reading out of books, so in a medium that's supposed to mimic the way people speak, make it sound like people speaking. It's not, "I do not want to go," it's "I don't wanna go!" (slang) or "I don't want/I'd rather not go" (formal).
2.) Keep exclamation points, ellipses, and bold to a minimum. Exclamation points are a problem in shounen, ellipses in shoujo, and bold in American comics (and hence some rewriters/editors try to add bold to both shounen and shoujo). All of these things tend to break the flow of reading and thus make reading comics harder and more time-consuming. Plus, it makes the characters over-using the techniques in question sound like absolute dingbats. There will always be a place for exclamation points, ellipses, and bold text--but use them sparingly, please.
3.) Every other line should not be a question. Manga loves this crap. Be it from exclaiming disbelief of something someone just said ("The robot's coming." "The robot you say?!") or just a general observation ("So he was at my apartment earlier, and left this jacket?"), a direct translation often sounds like some sort of cheap, poorly-written soap opera. Non-question lines are stronger and less melodramatic, so cut out unnecessary questions when you can. ("The robot's coming." "You've gotta be kidding me!")
4.) Manga has its fair share of dialogue cliche's and repeats--break those. Just because some character uses the word "baka" 18 times a volume doesn't mean you should translate it as "idiot" every single time. Saiyuki has forced me to come up with every synonym for "idiot" on the face of the earth: moron, peabrain, genius, dumba*s, dipsh*t, dingbat, dimwit, sh*t-for-brains, murder-worthy primate.
5.) Some lines are bad when you translate them; that's why it's an adaptation, not a translation. It's the translator's job to say that the bubble reads, "You're 100 years too early to defeat me." Your job is to turn it into, "Keep practicing, jerkoff."
6.) Speech patterns are important. Set them from the beginning of a series and stick to them. This was one of my biggest problem's with VIZ's adaptation of Nana--a tiny-brained princess and a lovelorn punk rocker are not going to talk the same. Distinct and colorful speech patterns are extremely common in manga, so people who refuse to take that into consideration when adapting a manga for an English market drive me just a little crazy. Teenage boys swear casually and use slang, educated people use proper grammar, little kids oversimplify their lines. Look at the original Japanese dialogue, think if/how you'll be translating that into an English speech pattern, then stay with it. As is usually also the case in the original Japanese, if there's a bubble without a character next to it, you should be able to tell who's talking by the content or the speech pattern.
7.) Make things easy to read, even if they weren't in the original. If a single line is broken up into 5 pieces across a 2-page spread, see if you can't turn that into more sentences instead of one dragging one (this ties into the above rule on ellipses). The line "Is this...really...what I wanted...after all?" could easily be "I don't know. Is this really...what I wanted? Is it?"
All right, that's enough for now. I don't want to descend into angry ranting on this topic.
Also: this made me laugh, especially at the end. It appropriately reflects how much time I've wasted today.