Nothing that you study in school really prepares you to handle these translations. For every page there are Foley effects, from the rapping of soldiers on parade (“tap tap tap”) to combat boots on the run (“tmp tmp tmp.”) Readers needed to know if the Queen Emeraldas was passing by (“wirrrrr”) or the mighty Arcadia (“thrrooomm.”) And those are the big, dramatic sounds. What is the sound of an eyeball that slips out of a putrefying corpse? (“schlorp.”) Then for Satoshi Kon’s Opus, I needed the sound of reality itself being rent (“kraaakkk.”) When I translated Leiji Matsumoto’s epic space operas, each classic ship required its own signature sound. My follow-up to Showa, Shigeru Mizuki’s folklore yokai comic Kitaro, brought other challenges. Some were easy: for instance, machine guns go “budda budda budda.” Some were more complicated, like battleship cannon fire: “don don don.” Fighter guns went “ba ba ba ba.” Each gun needed to be a signature, as there were many times that only the specific sound effect indicated what type of shelling was going on.
I had to come up with a catalog of sounds to accentuate the text, so I assigned each type of weapon a specific sound effect. My first job as a manga translator was the first volume of Shigeru Mizuki’s epic Showa: A History of Japan, a nonfiction memoir of the artist’s experiences in WWII. An English reader is simply not going to react to “ gaji gaji” the same way he or she would react to “nom nom” or “crunch crunch.” To me, directly transcribing them from Japanese is the lazy way out-and as a translator, I always refuse to do that. Some choose to replicate the original Japanese, which means you have bombs going “ do-kan” instead of “ka-boom.” I’m not personally a fan of this approach, as I feel sound effects have as much emotive impact as the text. Translators-and companies-handle these in different ways.
And then there are spaceships… and gravity sabers… and Godzilla roars… A superhero can get a light smack (“ dogo”) or an explosive punch (“ dokan.”) None of these terms have English equivalents. Rain does not just fall it pours (“ zaaaa”) or lightly trickles (“ shito shito.”). As a language, Japanese abounds in onomatopoeia. It is untranslatable.Īnd while the sound of silence may be your greatest challenge, every single page of a comic book presents an equal challenge. When a Japanese comedian tells a joke and it falls flat, the comedian is confronted with the horrifying sound of “ sheen”-the sound of silence. When a Japanese character walks into a room and is encountered with “ sheeeen,” readers know the room is deadly silent. When it comes to silence, Japanese has a specific sound effect for it. The greatest challenge you will face as a manga translator is the sound of silence. May GLLI Blog Series: Japan in Translation, No.
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