MDN presents 'Manglish - Manga in English'

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.

Comments

Now it's in English I can understand the plot

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Manga and real literature

[CRCulver]

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?

Re:Manga and real literature

[JanneM]

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.

Right to left...

[so1omon]

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

It's been tried before...

[Robaato]

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.)

Re:Manglish is taken

[DarkIye]

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.

Re:What's the point?

[InsaneLampshade]

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.