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How Manga Conquered the World | |
admin | |
2018-01-24 | |
发布年 | 2018 |
语种 | 英语 |
国家 | 法国 |
领域 | 地球科学 |
正文(英文) |
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The Manga aisle, at the Angoulême International Comics Festival 2016.
Prior to the Angoulême International Comics Festival 2018, held at the end of January in France, we asked Cécile Sakai, director of the French Research Institute on Japan, to provide an overview from Tokyo of the international influence of manga.
For the first time, the Angoulême International Comics Festival will offer a manga translation prize (launched by a Japanese patron, the Konishi Foundation). Is this an indication of the growing importance of this Japanese art in France and worldwide? When does the museum trace back the manga to? And whom to, Tezuka or Hokusai? One of the characteristics of manga is that dialogue is punctuated by a system of onomatopoeia that is not just auditory, but also visual, gestural, and psychological.
Through his great fictional narratives marked by humanism and his criticism of the contemporary world, Tezuka broke away from the influence of US comics, by developing types of characters represented according to a certain Western model, with large eyes and a small nose and mouth. He freely divided the panels and action, performed many graphic explorations and his appropriation of space was considered more daring than in comics. ![]() I should point out that Japanese is an ideogrammatic and phonogrammatic language, with two different syllabaries, which are supplemented by 2,000 ideograms (sinograms from Chinese). It is therefore a composite written language, broadly explored by authors of manga, especially through the use of onomatopoeia. One of the characteristics of manga is that dialogue is punctuated by a system of onomatopoeia that is not just auditory, but also visual, gestural, and psychological. This is achieved through formal and linguistic creations, many of which by mangakas, with some having become a part of standard vocabulary. Are manga sales as robust today? ![]() In Japan, these pre-publication sales are declining, dropping from 6-7 million weekly during the 1990s to less than 2 million today. This is most likely the end of a cycle that began in the mid-1960s. There is now a preference for the book format, which is easier to preserve. The choice is also more diverse, for instance with the so-called "visual novels," graphic novels with recurring characters that feature in paper, video, or interactive formats, and take up entire aisles in gigantic bookstores. This is what appeals the most to Japanese youth today. What about the distribution of manga in France? Since the 2010s, the Japanese language has ranked second in statistics regarding the translation of foreign language titles into French. In 2016, English represented approximately 60% of translated titles, and Japanese scored 12.5%, far ahead of German, Italian, and Spanish.
In terms of market evolution, after these television cartoons came the first systematic translations in the 1990s by France's primary publishers, comprising Glénat, Kana, and Pika. They chose the most important authors and translated them on a massive scale, as each title often involves 80-90 volumes. It takes up space! The simultaneous success of new animated films, especially those produced by the Ghibli studio (Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.), also strengthened this trend. In the 2000s, the market reached fast cruising speed. Since the 2010s, the Japanese language has ranked second in statistics regarding the translation of foreign language titles into French. In 2016, English represented approximately 60% of translated titles, and Japanese scored 12.5% (according to Livres Hebdo), far ahead of German, Italian, and Spanish. These considerable figures are due to manga. In the early 1990s, when most translated work was literary, translations from Japanese represented 1.5-2% of the total (still in number of titles), which raised the question of whether manga and literary production could be lumped together in statistics... These are "paper" statistics, and among the many factors for the transformation of today's market, one must take into account the increasing role of e-books. Today there is an "official" digital product range that complements the catalog of some publishers, along with "unofficial" titles, which more or less amounts to pirating, as some individuals—who incidentally are enthusiasts—appropriate certain titles, translate them, and pre-publish them in digital format, doing so without authorization. It is a global movement of free, personal, and virtual translation.
And you are also a translator? How do you translate a visual onomatopoeia? Can comic books from Western artists, for example those by French authors, be called "manga"? Are they read in Japan? Other lesser-known authors, whether French, Chinese, Thai, or Korean, work in the manga style. For instance, Korean comics books, called manhwas, are translated into English and French. In France, they could be called manfra... But France is the second largest market for Japanese manga, after Japan but ahead of the US and the rest of Asia. These figures are for print runs. The immediate risk is saturation. Today most significant manga has already been translated, and even retranslated! Some also feel that there are fewer remarkable authors today, even in Japan. The sector needs to reinvent itself...
A declining creative activity, that's fairly rare... Footnotes
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URL | 查看原文 |
来源平台 | Centre national de la recherche scientifique |
文献类型 | 新闻 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/129655 |
专题 | 地球科学 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | admin. How Manga Conquered the World. 2018. |
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