Sunday, June 29th, 2008...10:34 am
Not Lost in Translation: Tanoshimi Manga
At the moment I’m reviewing the manga titles Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE and xxxHolic, both created by CLAMP, and both published here in the UK by Tanoshimi. I can’t help but be impressed by the great job Tanoshimi have done in the presentation and translation of these (and other) titles. I’ve mentioned the excellent presentation in my reviews, but I want to expand on it here.
Firstly I think the covers are great. The ones that I have seen from Tsubasa and xxxHolic use the whole area of the cover to show an attractive, full-colour drawing. There’s no borders, there’s no space wasted. So the covers are really colourful, attractive, and eye-catching. In the case of xxxHolic, the back also features a full-colour illustration. OK, you shouldn’t “judge a book by its cover”, but I really appreciate the effort that goes into making these books aesthetically pleasing on their exterior.
Next when you open the book, you’re greeting with 2 pages explaining Japanese honorifics, their use, and why Tanoshimi have decided to keep them intact. I think it is a great decision to keep them intact. Especially in stories like Tsubasa, which often uses Japanese historical settings, the use of honorifics helps maintain the authors’ intentions and gives a more genuine and accurate flavour and context to every scene. Probably the majority of anime and manga fans are already familiar with their use, but they can just skip these pages. It’s good that Tanoshimi doesn’t assume that all their readers know about honorifcs. There are going to be more casual or new fans who aren’t au fait with honorifics yet, and for them, the guide at the front is interesting and invaluable.
But perhaps my favourite thing about Tanoshimi manga 
is the Translation Notes at the back of the book. These notes serve to explain various things that some readers would otherwise not understand. For example, sometimes they help explain Japanese cultural references. Part of xxxHolic #4 is set around Valentine’s Day, and the translation notes explain how this day works in Japan, and White Day, which is linked to it and follows a month later. The notes also explain Japanese folklore and legend, for example, in the same volume, there are explanations on zashiki-warashi, and karasu tengu. Without the notes, these would mean nothing to me. Of course, the alternative would be to translate them into some English equivalent, such as poltergeists and goblins. But this would definitely not be as effective as keeping the Japanese original. The notes come into their own, however, in Tsubasa, for example, Volume #5. Towards the latter part of the volume the intrepid travellers end up in a land called Ōto. As explained by the notes at the back, this land is based around Japan in the Taishō era. Apparently, this era is often overlooked in history. I would have had no idea about this, but the notes explained the setting and encouraged me to read up a little about this era. I actually caught my sister with one of my copies of Tsubasa; she wasn’t reading the story, she was just reading the translation notes, because she found them so interesting.
And finally, some volumes end with a small preview of the next volume, usually a few pages, and sometimes in Japanese. I don’t find these particularly interesting, but, other people might do, and it is nice of them to make an effort to give the reader something a little extra after the volume is over.
So overall I really like the Tanoshimi style of presenting manga and I hope they keep it up.
4 Comments
June 29th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
[...] is Del Rey’s British sister company, and blogger Alex of Nakama Brittanica has an appreciation of their books that will seem quite familiar to American fans of Del [...]
July 8th, 2008 at 2:14 am
What are you talking about?! Del Rey/Tanoshimi have probably the best translations but the WORST visual presentation (TOKOPOP being their polar opposite among the mainstream publishers in having the best presentation and worst translation). The thing I perhaps like best about CLAMP, above all, is that they have a strong, and not to mention unusual sense of graphic and book design – something that individual mangaka tend to lack – which transforms their tankobon into art pieces in themselves, with the cover, contents page, endpaper and others all custom designed to frame the manga in an individual style appropriate to it. Del Rey have no respect for this. They rip out all the design work, everything but the manga itself, and shove what’s left into their one, generic format.
You mention the lack of borders on the covers, but the ×××HOLiC covers are supposed to have borders, coloured and, like all the other borders on the title pages, individual and custom-made to go with that image. It’s part of the design. As is the shape which holds the volume number, which on the Japanese tankobon is a different shape with each new volume, while the English releases all use the shape from the first Japanese volume. All this not a case of wasting space, but of cutting off design which CLAMP put effort and creativity into but which Del Rel have cast aside with a Men in Grey-ish attitude of time-saving. One good idea they had was colouring the title, as this makes it easier to read and could be changed each time to go with the colour scheme of the cover – but then, they got lazy with even this, settling for one generic scheme which goes with none of covers and only serves to make the whole treatment inconsistent. And have you not noticed those curved black bars covering up part of the image on either side?
However, as I said, I love Del Rey’s translations – and specifically, their consistent use of accents to indicate long vowels – as much as I resent their visual presentation, and it’s a shame that this combines to make them just average. But… Average is better than bad, and it’s the manga itself which one is looking at most of time when reading it. Plus, I don’t know of any other publisher, manga or anime or anything else, that uses macrons or circumflexes in even anywhere near half, let alone all that they publish. And using them is a very good thing, in my opinion, as, along with writing “wo” particles as “o,” it’s the best way of actually showing how a word is pronounced in the work itself, rather than having to rely on the reader looking it up on the World Wide Web to check.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Thanks for your comment Jordan S., I wasn’t aware of a lot of the things you mentioned. I still think that the full-size cover illustrations are great though. And most of my article was actually about translation, which we both agree is excellent.
July 20th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I actually liked the presentation of older CPM titles such as The Record of Loddoss war, in large Graphic Novel size. I also loved the presentation Marvel gave to Akira the first time, when they even coloured the manga. It gave the title a lot of life.
A publisher back home used to present us with good cover art and a mini poster inside with the full art cover in an A4 format. This same publisher also had a very good translations and the cultural notes you mention. Lone wolf and cub had 3 even 4 pages of cultural notes in it. I also used to love the quality of the old dark horse books, their TPB covers and paper were really good.
In my opinion presentation is going downhill lately, but on the other hand you never had such an offering of manga and it was never so cheap to buy it before. I guess that’s just the trade off companies had to accept to make some profits.
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