MDN presents 'Manglish - Manga in English' 101
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.
What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Kinda pointless to release something like this with so little content...
Re:What's the point? (Score:1)
Re:What's the point? (Score:1)
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's the point? (Score:2)
Re:What's the point? (Score:2)
Re:What's the point? (Score:2)
You managed to mangle something magical into something maniacal.
Read it backwards (Score:2, Informative)
Right to left... (Score:5, Informative)
Just an FYI.
Re:Right to left... (Score:2)
Re:Right to left... (Score:3, Informative)
And if you see anime you'll notice people reading text vertically - their eyes move up and down instead of left and right. I think this is an older writing system where the text was arranged in columns top to bottom, right to left.
Re:Right to left... (Score:3, Informative)
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 al
Re:Right to left... (Score:2)
Yes. Also often, but not always, in Chinese. You start reading at what seems to us to to be the back of the book. Translated versions sometimes mirror the images so they follow the western convention. But manga geeks sneer at such conversions.
Re:Right to left... (Score:2)
Re:Right to left... (Score:2)
Re:Right to left... (Score:1)
Now it's in English I can understand the plot (Score:4, Funny)
Surprisingly! (Score:2)
And Blue Seed.
The rest of it is pretty much crap when it comes to anything involving tentacles and/or demons.
Re:Surprisingly! (Score:2)
Tentacles as thick as buses help.
Obligatory Engrish Joke (Score:2, Funny)
From the cover: "She cares about it being tall"
I assume that we'll see many fun times happen, for long time.
Re:Obligatory Engrish Joke (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory Engrish Joke (Score:1)
Re:Obligatory Engrish Joke (Score:3, Funny)
Well, if it's hentai then it's a perfectly reasonable translation to me!...
Re:Obligatory Engrish Joke (Score:1)
I think this comment alone made everyone on
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:3, Informative)
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 Japan
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, the last remaining member of the sole Japanese Literary Club left in Japan was assimilated by Haruhi Suzumiya [animenfo.com] anyway...
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:1)
Besides, the last remaining member of the sole Japanese Literary Club left in Japan was assimilated by Haruhi Suzumiya anyway...
Yeah, and she wasn't even from Japan :-)
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, you look at the book top lists in any country and you'll find the same thing. "real" literature is not normally popular - and it has never been. That is usually a fairly small insider group writing to each other. And to at least some of the practicioners and followers, the lack of popular appeal is part of the draw; it's another way to be a member of a club, something we humans seem irresistable drawn to in whatever
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:1)
Further, an intelligent reader will end up reading deep themes into whatever they happen to be reading at the moment, and those manga that are good provide a rich environment for this sort of reading.
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:2, Interesting)
Hey! Me too! I wanna post! I'm in Tokyo, and while lots of people say something like the above about Japan, I feel that manga does often have negative, childish connotations.
How about the advert on TV for the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (the financial newspaper), which showed a guy in a suit sitting on a bench reading one of the thick weekly comics (manga) aimed at children and teenagers, with a voiceover saying "I saw my e
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:3, Interesting)
AFAIK, manga's taken a big bite of out of non-manga reading, but that seems to have been going on for a long time. It's just an offhand judgement, but in general I think Japan's (non-manga) book scene seems a lot healthier than that in the U.S -- though I guess that says more about the U.S. than Japan...
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:1)
I've recently been in Japan and my impression from seeing people read on the subway is that there's a good amount of just-words books as well.
However, like other posters have already said, manga isn't seen as the childish medium it's still viewed as in the west. It's more viewed as what it really is — a form of art. There's little of the sad, narrow-minded and conservative cultural elitism you see in the west. The ratio of good manga to bad manga is likely very close to the ratio of good literature t
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Manga and real literature (Score:1)
Nice (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Nice (Score:1)
Screw that, if you want to cater to
no from the...dept? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:no from the...dept? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:no from the...dept? (Score:1)
But probably we shouldn't bring it up for discussion.
Re:no from the...dept? (Score:1)
Re:no from the...dept? (Score:2)
It's been tried before... (Score:4, Informative)
Already done before (Score:2)
Re:Already done before (Score:1)
Re:Already done before (Score:2)
Re:Already done before (Score:2)
Re:Already done before (Score:2)
Manglish is taken (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Manglish is taken (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Manglish is taken (Score:2)
Don't worry lah, that's the only meaning for the word I was aware of.
Re:Manglish is taken (Score:2)
see: Arnoldese
Re:Manglish is taken (Score:1)
But I agree that they could've chosen a better term.
dont like it. (Score:2)
Re:dont like it. (Score:1)
More Power? (Score:1)
Hmmmm (Score:1)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:1)
Do they speak Manglish in What? (Score:2, Funny)
/Samuel L. Jackson!
MDN - "Message Disposition Notification" presents? (Score:2)
Popjisho (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Popjisho (Score:2)
I'm impressed with how well it works for Chinese-English, but I should note that it only works as an aid for someone who reads Chinese fairly well to begin with--it doesn't consistently recognize compound words (words consisting of more than one character). For example, it does recognize moshige as "Mexico" but doesn't recognize zongtong as "president." So it's spotty. One the other hand, it eliminates a lot of basic dictionary look-up. This is a va
Re:Popjisho (Score:2)
I guess manglish stands for unprofessionalism (Score:1)
Re:I guess manglish stands for unprofessionalism (Score:1)
Re:I guess manglish stands for unprofessionalism (Score:1)
just manga? (Score:2)
Great for Learning Japanese (Score:1)
Horrendous presentation (Score:2)
The least the site could do would be to overlay english text inside the damned speech bubbles, without a rank yellow background and in a more suitable font; I think this is the first time i've ever said it of Teh Sans, b
confused me (Score:1)
Define Manglish (Score:2, Informative)