The Art of Rewriting

Becoming a rewriter is a strange thing. Like becoming an editor, there is no documented and quantifiable path to it; you become one by trying it to see if you can actually do it.

Of course, it helps to have certain skills and preferences. An easy facility for the English language and a good grasp of grammar (including knowing when to let rules slide, or even to break rules when it’s appropriate) are the best skills to have. An innate sense of correct spelling also helps.

If you are an English adaptation writer of manga and anime-related novels, it helps if you enjoy Japanese culture and its various oddities and conventions. And if your preferences run to stories about samurais, ninjas, shinigamis, giant mecha battles, and especially schoolboys or schoolgirls who discover that they have super powers – this too is good. ;)

What is unusual about rewriting is that it is literally a combination of editing and writing. You begin with a manuscript that has been translated from Japanese into English. Aside from correcting obvious grammar and spelling errors as you go along (editing), you are responsible for discerning the flavor and essence of what the original Japanese author intended to convey in every sentence, and for changing part or all of the sentence to reflect that intent where necessary (writing). When you are done rewriting, you go over it again (usually many times) and edit the new construct that you’ve created so that it ultimately reads like a cohesive whole, a story that is completely accessible for the English-language reader, yet retains its Japanese feel where appropriate and non-distracting.

Japanese can be an opaque language, rife with ambiguities, and poetic just when you need it to be clear and not capable of multiple interpretations. The translator thus labors under the disability of trying to make sure he or she has got the right interpretation, while the rewriter after that must present the text in a manner that reads well and in as close to the original style as possible.

The rewriter then, ideally, is the invisible medium between the translator and the reader. It is a situation where one’s creativity is used in service of quality control of another’s work, and not for one’s own recognition.

It is also quite enjoyable work, in its own way.

Next week: some thoughts on Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.

The State of Manga Publishing: June 2009

As an English adaptation writer for manga and for anime-related novels, I try to keep an eye on the state of the industry here in the U.S.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, “English adaptation writer,” or “rewriter,” what this means is that I am the writer who takes the Japanese-to-English translation of a manga or light novel and renders it into a final English language version that maintains the style and sensibility of the original. (And who also—hopefully—turns the raw translation into a “good read” for English language readers.)

I am a latecomer to the anime/manga party in North America, having only become a fan around 2006 and a rewriter and freelance editor in the industry in 2008. Nonetheless, I have observed this industry first as a fan and then as a professional. As such – I do have a few observations to note.

In 2008, I worked as a freelancer for Broccoli International, Aurora Publishing, Tokyopop and Digital Manga Publishing/Juné. Of these, Broccoli International has gone out of business (although its parent company in Japan remains in business), and Tokyopop and DMP/Juné have both experienced layoffs of staff. I worked indirectly for Bandai Entertainment (as a subcontractor to the translator of the first three Code Geass novelizations); Bandai experienced layoffs this year, as did Viz Media, the largest manga publisher in North America.

Some of this reflects the economy at large: as a rising tide lifts all boats, the same corollary in the opposite sense takes place when the tide goes out.

As for the rest, I haven’t been in the industry long enough to be able to compare what the industry is like now with what it was like in its build-up phase. I have heard that anime and manga “peaked” around 2006 in America, in terms of popularity. If that’s true, then I caught a falling wave by getting into the industry just after it peaked. But I don’t think this is the case. With their tremendous appeal and potential drawing power, I think that the greatest success in North America for both anime and manga can only be still ahead.

For those of us (and I was one of you only four years ago) who think of Speed Racer and Gigantor from the 1960s when someone says “Japanese animation” (itself an outdated term for what everyone now calls “anime”), what has been coming from Japan in recent decades is not anything like that. Sometime around the end of 2005, beginning of 2006, I started watching Street Fighter II and Vandread on the Starz channel. These series were different from any previous idea I’d had about “cartoons” or “animation,” and I got hooked on watching the episodes night after night. Then Starz began showing Mirage of Blaze, an anime series about a samurai warlord and his vassal who have been exorcising spirits for four hundred years—while carrying on a sexual obsession with each other—and basically from that point on… well, there was no turning back for this fan. As a reader of “slash” fan fiction (male/male romance fiction) from way back, the last place I expected to see this kind of relationship openly depicted was in animated entertainment from Japan. It happens to be known as “yaoi”; and unlike here in North America, it is accepted by the general populace in Japan as being quite a legitimate interest of many fans.

I’ll post more in future about what attracts me to anime and manga: the fascinating stories and deep characterization; the thrilling action sequences; the moments of raw emotion; the different cultural perspective it offers that has been embraced by American youth; and how I believe Hollywood is missing the boat by not understanding the appeal of this genre and these stories—because it really is.