Preston Johnson-Chonkar
from The United States
New York, New York
Stephen Kohler
from The United States
HACHI MILES ~ A dog's pilgrimage to Ise Jingu ~
Cyrus Kwong
from Malaysia
Deaimon
There are some considerations within manga translation that are unique to fairly unique to manga due to manga's methods of story telling and readership. This article introduces a few areas that a manga translator should be aware of during the translation.
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This year’s Manga Translation Battle offered a special set of challenges for Japanese-to-English translators: regional dialects and slang.
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Entries closed!
The Manga Translation Battle is the world's only official Japanese manga translation contest presented by the Digital Comic Association and Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs.
First place winners for each work will be selected some time between January and early February 2018. In addition to the following prizes, winning translators may receive job offers to translate the entire work and debut as professional translators!
A single Grand Prize winner from the First Prize winners will also be selected, and will receive an invitation to attend the award ceremony in Tokyo—with a free plane ticket!
Application Period
2017/9/14 00:00 (PST) - 2017/11/12 23:59 (PST)
Date: February 14th, 2018
Time: 18:00 - 20:30 (JST)
Venue: Akihabara UDX Theater 4F Tokyo, Japan [Access]
Admission: Free
Seating capacity: 100
In the case that an award recipient already owns the corresponding prize as listed above, they may request that their prize be changed to a digital device or piece of software of equivalent value. (When a winner is a group that consists of multiple persons, and when either one individual or one group receives both the Grand Prize and the First Prize, only one prize will be given.) The prizes are subject to change due to availability.
Choose from one of
Choose from one of
© Toshiko Endo/SHUSUISHA Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Hachi, Kyuukichi’s faithful dog, leaves Edo and heads for Ise Jingu Shrine to obtain a shrine talisman in place of his injured master. People called such dogs “sanguu dogs” and took good care of them.
In the Edo period, ordinary people dreamed of visiting Ise Shrine at least once in their lifetimes. Because it was difficult for them to actually make that pilgrimage, people sent their dogs in their place. Hachi is helped by all sorts of people on his journey, but he can’t reach Ise. He doesn’t know what Ise smells like, so he can’t sniff his way there...
This is the delightful story of Hachi’s journey, where Hachi must count on people’s goodwill to reach his destination!
| Brian Gray | Kevin Yuan | Stephen Kohler |
© Rin Asano 2016
Nagomu Irino returns to his Kyoto home for the first time in ten years when his father is hospitalized. Nagomu is eager to take over Ryokushou, the family’s Japanese sweet shop, but he’s instead asked to be a father figure to Itsuka Yukihira, the girl everyone calls the successor.
| David Teng | Cyrus Kwong | Margaret Ngo |
© MARIMO RAGAWA ／HAKUSENSHA, INC., Tokyo
Kain is a closeted New York Police officer who goes to Manhattan every night to land one-night stands. But then he meets his soulmate Mel...
An ambitious work that portrays true love and humanism!
| Gad Onyeneho | Alyssa Orton | Preston Johnson-Chonkar |
For instructions on how to format the translation, please click here.
Select one of the three featured manga to translate. Translate the manga from Japanese to English, and submit your entry. There's no fee for entry.
All entries will be reviewed by professional translators and the finalists will be chosen.
The judging committee will review the finalists and choose the winning entries. The finalists' translations will also be posted on the Manga Translation Battle website.
First Prize winners for each work will be selected some time between January and early February 2018. All winning translators may receive job offers to translate the manga series from their entries, plus the opportunity to debut as a professional translator, and various other wonderful prizes! A single Grand Prize winner will be selected to receive all of the above, plus an invitation to attend the award ceremony in Tokyo, with a free plane ticket! When the winner is a group that consists of multiple persons, only one ticket will be given.
A difficult and sometimes controversial aspect of a manga translator's work is deciding how to interpret accents and regional dialects from Japanese to English. Professional manga translators and editors from North America chime in on their challenges and best practices.
Manga are full of illustrations. They're fun and exciting to read. This leads to a common misconception that manga translation must be easier than other types of translation. But those who underestimate the medium's unique challenges do so at their own peril.
Basic tips on how to handle translation issues that arise due to differences in Japanese and English, such as spoken lines ending right before where the verb should be, and furigana that are different from the standard kanji pronunciations.
Many English-language manga publishers send a prospective translator a sample chapter as a test. Here are some points editors use to evaluate them. Do a good job on these, and you'll stand a much better chance of getting hired!
Debora Aoki
Debora Aoki has been writing about manga professionally since 2006, but is also a lifelong manga reader who has many happy memories reading Nakayoshi when she was in grade school. From 2006-2013, she was the Manga Editor for About.com. She is currently the editor of MangaComicsManga.com, a site devoted to manga and comics from around the world. She is also a contributing writer for Publishers Weekly. Debora lives in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area and regularly writes about comics events throughout North America, and occasionally Japan.Matt Alt
A native of Washington, D.C., Matt has been working as a professional translator since the early 1990s. Together with Hiroko Yoda he is the co-founder of AltJapan Co., Ltd., a dedicated entertainment localization company that has produced the English versions of many top video games, toys, and manga, including the Gundam series and the Doraemon series. He is the co-author of numerous books about Japan, including "Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide."
Tomo Kimura
Tomo Kimura started translating manga in 2004 after a career in software engineering. Starting with Full Moon O Sagashite (Arina Tanemura), representative manga translations include Skip Beat! (Yoshiki Nakamura), Kamisama Kiss (Julietta Suzuki), Black Butler (Yana Toboso) and Pandora Hearts (Jun Mochizuki). She currently teaches a manga translation course at Fellow Academy, a translation school in Tokyo. The course teaches the basic rules of manga translation, with emphasis on translation issues for Japanese students whose native language is not English. Born in Kobe, Tomo lives in Tokyo.William Flanagan
William (Bill) Flanagan started translating manga professionally in 1991 with Raika (Kaumi Fujiwara & Yu Terashima) and has been translating and editing manga ever since. He rose to be Director of Editorial of Viz Media in the early 2000s and from then on, has had his hand in top-selling manga. He also translates anime, games, TV, movies and novels. Representative manga translations include Alice in Murderland (Kaori Yuki), Fairy Tail (Hiro Mashima), and A Bride's Story (Kaoru Mori). He lives with his wife and son in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture, Japan.
All entries for the Manga Translation Battle ("Contest") shall be governed by the following rules.
We recommend you attempt the application process on your desktop.
Please read the Frequently Asked Questions before contacting us.
If you are unable to submit your entry successfully, please contact us above.
