Thread: Newb Question

I realize that maybe being a newb and all that everyone else knows the answer to my question, however I have not been able to find it in the forums.

Why are the tittles to these not translated as well as the text?

I speak no Japanese but have been able to find the tittle meanings to many with simple Google searches.

Examples:

Mekakushi no Kuni = Land of the Blindfolded

Go Baajinaru Hanayuki = Go! Virginal Prostitute Story

Inukami! = Dog Gods!

Does this make sense to anybody other than me?

Additionally, I have noted that many translations are done with what was said in mind rather than culturally equivalent rewriting. As an author of many stories myself I have some experience with re-writing translations into comprehensible stories. If I get someone to do the literal translation I can get the gist of what the original author was shooting for and it can then be converted into the story it should have been.

Sometimes you have to go with the concept, situation, and general continuity of the plot, rather than what the original writer's words stated in his culture/language. I have done this for German and French speakers in the recent past.

Something else I noticed is that the comics must be read right to left, top to bottom as they were formatted for Japanese, but hasn't anyone figured out that if you flip the image, when you cut the Japanese out of the picture and re-enter the English you have a comic that reads left to right, top to bottom in English.

(Yes you must edit some of the images with Bam, whack, boom, slurp, and zoom in Japanese and replace them with the English as well, but I have seen some where the translator has added the English side by side with the Japanese.)

Of course this is all just the "newbs" two cents.

Oh, and yes I did notice some of the story tittles are translated,

Thanks for reading this.

It all depends on the scanlators. Often if there's nothing official to go by, they'll leave them untranslated, and only later a series will be better known by the licensed title. Which may or may not be a translation of the original title (see, for example, "Kimi wa Pet," lit. "You're My Pet" but licensed as "Tramps Like Us").

Many people prefer accuracy to the original than making it seem like a regular English comic. Why should editors do the extra work of flipping an image when none of us mind reading right-to-left anyway? That one in particular would be a silly thing to do. I've seen flipped comics, and they actually look quite stupid (Inuyasha, anyone? ...Yeah, because the heart is on the right side of the body in demons?). What most readers want is the original comic translated into English so they can understand what's being said in the original, not an entirely new comic with different jokes that has roughly the same meaning but is for a Western audience. Translators often aren't ashamed to put notes on the side with the meaning of the joke if it isn't obvious to readers. That's why you see so many things that might be confusing to you, but that have never been brought up before. The majority of readers are perfectly happy with the way things are done.

I like keeping the name the same as the original title, if they did translate the title then it would make it harder to search for manga online because there'd be a chance of varying translations of the titles.

If you have a problem figuring out what a mangas about...then either use mangaupdates for a description, or look through the many request threads in this section for what other people have recomended.

edit: i didnt even notice the last part of your question, why would you flip images? If the author meant an image to look a certain way i want it to look that way...