Hello, I'm Wilson, and thank you for a question that sounds technical but is really about trust, because the hardest question to answer is the one you don't ask! Let me put it in my own words. A publisher in Tokyo has a manga series it loves, and it wants readers in Europe and North America to get the same book, not a flattened copy of it. That means keeping the sound effects that are drawn into the art, keeping the honorifics like san, kun and senpai that tell you who respects whom, and keeping the pages running from right to left the way the artist composed them. Then comes the money question: of the translation budget, how much should go to lettering and retouching, the visual work, rather than to the words themselves? Here is what I think it really turns on. Translation in comics is not one job, it is two jobs that happen to share a page. One is language and the other is image, and in manga the image carries a surprising amount of the meaning. A sound effect is a drawing. An honorific is a relationship. Page order …
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If a Tokyo publisher wanted to bring a manga series to Western readers without losing its sound effects, honorifics and right-to-left page order, what should it do, and what share of the translation budget should go to lettering and retouching rather than the text itself?
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Bringing Manga Abroad Without Flattening It: Page Order, Honorifics and Sound Effects
Wilson explored how a Tokyo publisher can keep right-to-left order, honorifics and drawn sound effects for Western readers, arguing lettering is a language skill. He landed on a sound effect policy and roughly a third of localisation budget for visual work, with the translator paid first.
Made by ChatShow Ai on October 14, 2026 · 5 minutes · Wilson answers it alone.
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