The Untranslated Onomatopoeia
in Chinese Versions of Manga
As one of the biggest industries in Japan, animation-comic-game industry is famous all over the world. Manga, the Japanese term of comics, has become globally popular that thousands of manga are translated into other languages to expand the market worldwide. China, the densely populated neighbor country of Japan, of course is an important market for Japanese manga. Among those Chinese translations of manga, there is an interesting phenomenon that many translations leave the Japanese onomatopoeia untranslated, even though the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana, unlike the right-to-left reading direction, are not so familiar to general Chinese. This results in a barrier to manga reading. Therefore, some people would like to blame the Chinese publishers because they seems like simply omit the translations of onomatopoeia to reduce the cost，sacrificing the comic fans’ reading experience to save a lot of time and labor. Maybe that is one of the reasons. Nevertheless, in my perspective, the translation of Japanese onomatopoeia expressions is unnecessary indeed. In this research paper, I will clarify my view in terms of linguistic knowledge background, graphic expression strategy and manga reading experience.
The first reason for my argument is that there are too many difficulties in onomatopoeia translating, which, even if done, may result in unsatisfactory effects. The onomatopoeia is an essential part of Japanese language because of its vividness on description and frequent usage in daily life. In Japanese manga, a great amount of onomatopoeic expressions are integrated. Each of them refers to a “specific, precise and fixed” situation or action. (Wood-hung Lee & Yomei Shaw, ...
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In the short story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” there are many onomatopoeias. An onomatopoeia is a word that is spelt like it is sound. An example from the story is, “Scratch, scratch.” (80). This is important to the story because it's shows that Rikki-Tikki feels the presence of Nag and Nagaina.
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Although wildly different in subject matter and style, Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness and Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World both show how Japan has been internationalized as well as how it has remained traditional. Kawabata’s novel is traditional and acceptable, much like the haiku poetry he imitates, but has a thread of rebelliousness and modernity running through the web that binds the characters together. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is devastatingly modern, and yet has a similar but opposite undertone of old Japan, or at least a nostalgia for old Japan. In both novels a more international culture has taken root in Japan, and it seems that the characters both embrace and run from the implications of a globalized, hybridized culture.
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The prose of the Ise Monogatari was used to describe an amalgam of situations such as the glimpsing of love in two beautiful sisters while passing a hole in a hedge. Others include the affairs of married men and women, secret courters of the night, loss of love and despair, as well as the environment.(Keene 67-75) The prose then is used to adequately detail ...
This paper will explore what it is about anime that makes it so appealing to even a Western audience, creating an international fan base. Although manga can be traced to American origins, the comics that the Americans brought over have been intensely modified to create essentially a new form of media. Manga and anime have become a significant component of Japanese culture, and often times they integrate Japanese culture and society. Yet, regardless of its Japanese origin, anime is still viewed on the other side of the planet. The question then becomes what is it that makes it so appealing to a foreign audience? This paper will rely heavily on Susan Napier’s book, From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the
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Cahir claims that a traditional translation “maintains the overall traits of the book” (16) which include “its plot, settings, and stylistic conventions but revamps particular ways
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