MDN presents 'Manglish - Manga in English'

Mainichi Daily News writes "Japan's leading English news site revolutionizes manga -- Manga lovers rejoice! A never-seen-before approach to manga made its debut on the Mainichi Daily News on Monday, July 3, 2006. Manglish takes some of Japan's hottest young manga talents -- showcased in the Mainichi's MangaTown site -- and places their creations on the MDN in their original Japanese format. However, cool thing is that while it appears on the site in the original Japanese, but if you run your mouse over it you get the translation in English.

What's the point?

Uh... There are only two pages so far?
Kinda pointless to release something like this with so little content...

Re:What's the point?

Umm... i thought it was kinda obvious, but i guess not.

It's news because they're launching a *daily* webcomic type thing. It gets updated daily with the next page.

Of course they're not gonna have volumes and volumes of stuff available, since it's only launched.

Read it backwards

Start on the left and move to the right... Just an FYI.

Right to left...

Um.... That's not backwards. I think you meant "Start on the right and move to the left."
Just an FYI.

Now it's in English I can understand the plot

Suddenly, the tentacle monsters and giant robots fighting mutant schoolgirls become so profound. Roll over Shakespeare.

Obligatory Engrish Joke

An awesome idea, and the page has definitely been bookmarked... but I should have figured "Manglish" also translated to "Engrish"

From the cover: "She cares about it being tall"

I assume that we'll see many fun times happen, for long time.

Manga and real literature

I figure I should take this opportunity to ask any of you who have travelled to Japan recently: has manga entirely overtaken traditional literature? I'm a big fan of such figures as Kawabata and Mishima (whose Sea of Fertility [amazon.com] tetralogy is possibly the best thing I've ever read), but no Japanese young person I've ever met abroad has ever read them, even though they are seen internationally as the cream of the crop of Japanese literature. I've only seen young people read manga for pleasure. Is real literature totally dead in Japan?

Re:Manga and real literature

The question is perhaps a bit ill posed. Manga doesn't have the negative, childish connotations here that comics do in the west. At least some of it is considered literature to the same extent as books without images.

That said, at least here in Osaka, on a typical commuter train I normally see perhaps 1/3 manga to 2/3 "normal" books - of course there's plenty of trashy, cheap novels sold as commuter fodder out there worse in quality than good manga, so it reflects only on the choice of medium, not quality.

I'd also say that for everyone reading something on paper you have two or three people doing email, playing games or listening to music on their mobile phones. If you want to know what seems to overtake books as casual entertainment, there's your answer.

Nice

Nice site! I like the translation in English... But may I ask them to include Ukrainian translation as well?

no from the...dept?

This article has no from the ... dept. thing. Why? Put one in.

It's been tried before...

Kodansha has been doing this on their English website [kodanclub.com] since 2000. There's a wide selection of various manga that Kodansha publishes that you can look at, including titles such as Akira and Love Hina. However, they haven't updated it in a couple of years, and I can't seem to get the translation thingy to work. (The MDN site works fine for me, though.)

Already done before

A certain scanlation group has already done something similar with Vulgar Ghost Daydream and Tenjou Tengen, so it is not a not idea. Their release included html pages with javascript that allowed one to view the english translation.

Manglish is taken

Manglish is man-speak. It's the language of man. They need another term, one that's less masculine.

Re:Manglish is taken

It's also the Malaysian dialect of English [wikipedia.org]. I thought that was pretty widely known as the first meaning of the word, actually. Apparently not.

dont like it.

It seems to be just another genre manga TBH, nothing remotely special. What makes manga and anime so special is that it covers more or less every genre on mass. If you can't find something you like you're either not looking hard enough or you refuse to look past the styles if you don't like it.

More Power?

Man-glish... Isn't that what Tim Allen speaks?

Hmmmm

Is that supposed to stand for Mangled English ?

Do they speak Manglish in What?

Manglish motherfarker do you speak it?!

/Samuel L. Jackson!

MDN - "Message Disposition Notification" presents?

MDN - "Message Disposition Notification" presents? In my experience, an "MDN" is the RESPONSE to a post, not the original message... ;)

Popjisho

Has noone heard of popjisho [popjisyo.com]?

I guess manglish stands for unprofessionalism

The Javascript doesn't work properly at all on Safari - looks like a teen made it. Really unprofessional.

just manga?

wake me up when they've processed some hentai manga

Great for Learning Japanese

If the Japanese text was just a little bigger, this form of reading manga would really help those learning the language. You have the side by side Japanese text with the furigana (kanji pronounciations) and English translation as well as visual context!

Horrendous presentation

I, for one do not welcome our new Manglish overlords, and it's not because I don't like manga ( I love it ), it's because I think this excellent idea has been presented in a horrible fashion, especially considering the care that was taken by the artist in the preparation of the drawings.

The least the site could do would be to overlay english text inside the damned speech bubbles, without a rank yellow background and in a more suitable font; I think this is the first time i've ever said it of Teh Sans, but even the normally awful Comic Sans might have been better than whatever they're using (I think it's a Microsoft font, how unusual) This site feels more like viewing a powerpoint presentation or a microsoft help file than flicking through a graphic novel. I hope they've built themselves a proper XML/database based system for presenting this stuff so they can change the style for all comics on the fly = |

confused me

At first, I thought you might be making a reference to Spanglish [wikipedia.org], and then I thought you might be making a reference to Engrish [engrish.com]. Shows how much I know.

Define Manglish

Manglish [wikipedia.org] has long been known to us Malaysians as the default derivative of english spoken here. It generally is a combination of all the major languages spoken here; Malay, Tamil, Chinese and of course.. English. Or sometimes it is English words with non-english grammar. Engrish is not the same because we are perfectly capable of saying "Roll the Red Rose" (as opposed to the engrish version - "LOL the Lhed Lhose")