Description
Eastern popular media in the West: Scanlating manga into Greek
“Manga”, the so-called Japanese comics, have progressively become an immensely popular entertainment source all over the world. The study presents their unique characteristics, their reception and popular appeal, a historical overview of the genre and its categories, and examples of manga storylines. Then, the study examines the role of the manga translator as a cultural mediator, the practical matters that arise during this procedure and the most popular fan-translation process in manga: “scanlation”. There seems to be a considerable gap concer-ning the appearance of Greek translated manga, either from official publishing houses or fans. The study transfers five English scanlated manga into Greek and categorizes the most prevalent translation challenges in broad thematic groups, suggesting translation decisions to overcome them. A questionnaire given out to Greek readers checked appreciation/dismissal of these methods, as well as the reasoning behind the choices. Finally, findings were discussed and compared to those of other academics involved in manga translation. An overarching goal of the study was to show whether the creation of decent Greek manga translations was enough to stir up the interest and excitement of a wide variety of readers and at the same time, provide incentive and motivation for them to further explore and discover this expansive, fascinating entertainment source. Keywords: manga, comics, translation, scanlation, Japanese, English, Greek.
