Japanese Onomatopoeia

This has been on my mind for several years, but just now as I was re-reading volume 29 and Casca ate Farnese's apple did the totality of it all hit me.

The Japanese really have this shit down to a science. I don't think I've ever come across an English text or that has so effectively conveyed the actual sounds of every day activities in such a convincing manner using written text alone. It's remarkable. I'm sure this is helped by the fact that written Japanese is completely phonetic with very few exceptions, but it still astounds me to this day.

Wikipedia has a bibliography of texts dealing with the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_sound_symbolism

In any case, I thought it warrented acknowledgement.

Yes, I can't help but agree. Although Frank Miller's depiction of sound effects is really convincing in his comic stories, it never really has the same impact as the japanese mangas'.

Yeah, it's remarkable indeed, and actually very hard if not impossible to properly translate to western languages. It's especially important in manga like Berserk where sound effects can have a crucial significance for the reader, I find it fascinating. It isn't unique to Japanese though, Korean is the same, and it's a characteristic of Asian languages in general.

I can't remember the guy's name (he later worked on BotI), but in the English collections of Nausicaa, he admitted that since they were translating just about every inch of Japanese text, they had to "invent" completely new sound effects.

Slightly Green said:

I can't remember the guy's name (he later worked on BotI), but in the English collections of Nausicaa, he admitted that since they were translating just about every inch of Japanese text, they had to "invent" completely new sound effects.

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Haha yeah, puella and I do the same for her work (professional translating). I had to invent sound effects for "opening your eyes", "touching your glasses" or "being arrogant" (and many many more)... It's by far the most annoying part of the work because it's not based on anything concrete.

in French, I assume.
I'd be very interested in finding how exactly you tackled these problems and what the ultimate conclusions were.

Slightly Green said:

in French, I assume.

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Yeah.

Slightly Green said:

I'd be very interested in finding how exactly you tackled these problems and what the ultimate conclusions were.

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Well... I made up sounds. My own opinion on the subject though is that it's impossible to translate them correctly, especially by only using sound effects. So people would be better off leaving them like they originally are since they're often part of the art, and give text descriptions for each aside from the rest IMHO. There's really no easy solution and since publishers often impose to translate everything directly, well you do what they want even if it's not what you judge is the best.

Aazealh said:

Yeah.

Well... I made up sounds. My own opinion on the subject though is that it's impossible to translate them correctly, especially by only using sound effects. So people would be better off leaving them like they originally are since they're often part of the art, and give text descriptions for each aside from the rest IMHO.

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I agree. Especially given the characters are pictographic in nature, right?

While I can't read any Japanese, I'd like to add that the sound effects are also much more aesthetically pleasing in an asian language, especially when Miura does it. The characters are much more dynamic than their longer and more cumbersom english counterparts.

CnC said:

Especially given the characters are pictographic in nature, right?

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Well actually no, they're not. The Korean hangul alphabet is phonemic in nature (I take it you meant Korean in regard to my own experience?), and in Japanese the sound effects are written using syllabaries (kana) which aren't ideograms (as opposed to kanji). I think that's what you meant by pictographic, right?

Aazealh said:

Well actually no, they're not. The Korean hangul alphabet is phonemic in nature (I take it you meant Korean in regard to my own experience?), and in Japanese the sound effects are written using syllabaries (kana) which aren't ideograms (as opposed to kanji). I think that's what you meant by pictographic, right?

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Right, I knew kanji was. I didn't know the origins of katakana, tho. So I wasn't sure.
But I tend to glaze over the sfx in manga since they're so integrated into the artwork. The roman alphabet doesn't work the same way, and is unnecessarily distracting..

CnC said:

Right, I knew kanji was. I didn't know the origins of katakana, tho. So I wasn't sure.

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Well, kana (both katakana and hiragana) were originally derived from kanji, but nowadays they don't have much in common with Chinese characters anymore (and are syllabic writing scripts).

CnC said:

I tend to glaze over the sfx in manga since they're so integrated into the artwork. The roman alphabet doesn't work the same way, and is unnecessarily distracting..

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Indeed, our alphabet isn't nearly as well integrated in artwork, especially when it's adapted to fit foreign practices in comic books.