Crappy Translation
Being the kind, thoughtful, otaku that I am, I always think that it’s better to go ahead and buy manga rather than just reading the scanslations online. The problem with this is that some of the manga companies, Tokyopop being the worst offender, don’t do a good job. While there are a lot of examples of this, the most recent one to irk me was Your & My Secret (also known as My Barbaric Girlfriend if you want to read the better version online.) Here’s the setup of the story: a wussy guy and a girl who is beautiful yet brash end up swapping bodies through an experiment gone wrong. So the guy you see in the picture is actually a girl and the girl in the picture is her best friend who she has started to like since turning into a guy. In the scanslation she says that they are going to be late for “Anpanma Empire’s Counter Attack” which is obviously some form of martial arts / military / action flick. Which is interesting because you have the girl inside of a guy’s body picking a very guy movie to see. In the Tokyopop version she says that they are going to be late to see The Hannah Montana movie, which doesn’t fit in with her personality at all. So why did Tokyopop decide to put in Hannah Montana rather than the original movie title? If you think it’s because American audiences wouldn’t get what Anpanma Empire ‘s Counter Attack was, you’d be wrong as that movie doesn’t exist in Japan, either. If you think it’s because Tokyopop just doesn’t care and is bad at their job, you’d be right. One thing that Tokyopop habitually does is try to change the translations in manga so that it rings a bell with American audiences, but I don’t think they have any clue who their audience is. Invoking the sacred tween name of Hannah Montana won’t cause tons of 12 year old girls to buy your manga, but it will cause the people who like and enjoy manga to cringe at something so obviously out of place.
Good Translation
You might think I’m being unfairly harsh about this, but this is just an example of something that Tokyopop and the others do all the time. They try to make manga cool and edgy and trendy with the kids by putting in their own interpretations rather than translations. In one scene at the beginning of the manga, the main character says “let’s go” and Tokyopop translates it to “let’s bounce.” In the Tokyopop version of Boys Be, they have two of the characters checking a girl out and one says that she has a “badunkadunk butt.” Boys Be is not a new manga at all; what are the odds that two Japanese guys 10 years ago were talking about someone’s badunkadunk butt?
So here’s what I want from you manga publishers: I want you to translate the manga. I don’t care what you think tweenage girls might think it cool. I don’t care what you think the characters might say if they were American. I don’t care what you think they would say if they were on an MTV reality show. I want to know what they said; I’d like to stress that I want to know WHAT THEY SAID, not what you think they might have said if they were this or that…just what they said.