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MDN presents 'Manglish - Manga in English'

Posted by ryuzaki0 on

Mainichi Daily News writes "Japan's leading English news site revolutionizes manga -- Manga lovers rejoice! A never-seen-before approach to manga made its debut on the Mainichi Daily News on Monday, July 3, 2006. Manglish takes some of Japan's hottest young manga talents -- showcased in the Mainichi's MangaTown site -- and places their creations on the MDN in their original Japanese format. However, cool thing is that while it appears on the site in the original Japanese, but if you run your mouse over it you get the translation in English.

13 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. What's the point? by Bill+Wong · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Uh... There are only two pages so far?
    Kinda pointless to release something like this with so little content...

    1. Re:What's the point? by InsaneLampshade · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Umm... i thought it was kinda obvious, but i guess not.

      It's news because they're launching a *daily* webcomic type thing. It gets updated daily with the next page.

      Of course they're not gonna have volumes and volumes of stuff available, since it's only launched.

  2. Now it's in English I can understand the plot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Suddenly, the tentacle monsters and giant robots fighting mutant schoolgirls become so profound. Roll over Shakespeare.

  3. Manga and real literature by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I figure I should take this opportunity to ask any of you who have travelled to Japan recently: has manga entirely overtaken traditional literature? I'm a big fan of such figures as Kawabata and Mishima (whose Sea of Fertility tetralogy is possibly the best thing I've ever read), but no Japanese young person I've ever met abroad has ever read them, even though they are seen internationally as the cream of the crop of Japanese literature. I've only seen young people read manga for pleasure. Is real literature totally dead in Japan?

    1. Re:Manga and real literature by Robaato · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, no it hasn't. The typical bookstore around here (Tottori Prefecture) is about 2/3 regular books, 1/3 manga. Admittedly, Tottori is pretty countryside; I couldn't tell you about the bigger cities.

      As for young people, whenever I see them reading, it's usually manga, but I do see a fair number of kids reading stuff like Harry Potter or Earthsea.

      This is just what I'm seeing, though -- ask someone in Tokyo or Osaka, and you might get a different answer.

      Now that I think about it, one could say that Japanese literature, such as the authors you mention, or classics such as the works of Natsume Soseki, don't appeal to a young audience in Japan. I must ponder this...

    2. Re:Manga and real literature by JanneM · · Score: 4, Informative

      The question is perhaps a bit ill posed. Manga doesn't have the negative, childish connotations here that comics do in the west. At least some of it is considered literature to the same extent as books without images.

      That said, at least here in Osaka, on a typical commuter train I normally see perhaps 1/3 manga to 2/3 "normal" books - of course there's plenty of trashy, cheap novels sold as commuter fodder out there worse in quality than good manga, so it reflects only on the choice of medium, not quality.

      I'd also say that for everyone reading something on paper you have two or three people doing email, playing games or listening to music on their mobile phones. If you want to know what seems to overtake books as casual entertainment, there's your answer.

      --
      Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
  4. no from the...dept? by Mini-Geek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This article has no from the ... dept. thing. Why? Put one in.

    --
    do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
    until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
  5. Right to left... by so1omon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Um.... That's not backwards. I think you meant "Start on the right and move to the left."
    Just an FYI.

    --
    i'm the jedidiahmarkfoster your parents warned you about
    1. Re:Right to left... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think this is an older writing system where the text was arranged in columns top to bottom, right to left.

      Correct, japanese is traditionally read top to bottom and right to left, however thanks to westerners writing software that was unable to comprehend this arrangement, it began to fall out of practice in favor of left-to-right top-to-bottom which was easier to produce on a computer. These days it seems that perhaps 1/10th of the books published even abandon the "backwards" page turning, and just go all out on the left-to-right system. Manga is still regularly written in top to bottom format though, since it's not as affected by computers due to the manual lettering.

  6. It's been tried before... by Robaato · · Score: 4, Informative

    Kodansha has been doing this on their English website since 2000. There's a wide selection of various manga that Kodansha publishes that you can look at, including titles such as Akira and Love Hina. However, they haven't updated it in a couple of years, and I can't seem to get the translation thingy to work. (The MDN site works fine for me, though.)

  7. Manglish is taken by Hoplite3 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Manglish is man-speak. It's the language of man. They need another term, one that's less masculine.

    --
    Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
    1. Re:Manglish is taken by DarkIye · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's also the Malaysian dialect of English. I thought that was pretty widely known as the first meaning of the word, actually. Apparently not.

      --
      To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
  8. Re:Obligatory Engrish Joke by 3.14159265 · · Score: 3, Funny

    "She cares about it being tall"

    Well, if it's hentai then it's a perfectly reasonable translation to me!...