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How Japanese Manga is sopposta read?




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DaTreehunter



Joined: 20 Aug 2005
Posts: 15
PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 4:43 pm Reply with quote
I am talking about the word bubbles. How do you know when a sentance is done? In american translations there is ussaly more than one sentance in one bubble. I have noticed that some columns of characters are longer than the one next to it, does that have some thing to do with it?
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HitokiriShadow



Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 6251
PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 6:00 pm Reply with quote
There's no rule, for American comics or Japanese comics or anyother comics, that says a word bubble can only contain one sentence. It ends when there is nothing else in the word bubble. Sometimes the bubble sizes are weird because the original Japanese text used a different amount of space than the English text.
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IchigoK90



Joined: 13 Aug 2005
Posts: 1634
Location: Scarborough, Ontario
PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 6:38 pm Reply with quote
Well if you look at original non translated mangas its a lot different. The japanese write up and down from right to left. So of course the speach bubbles are gonna be weird and such. As for your quesion when do you know its done.......why don't you try reading until the last word at the bottome of the bubble?

"Believe it!"

- IchigoK90
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ShadrachAnki



Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 180
Location: New England
PostPosted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 1:19 am Reply with quote
DaTreehunter wrote:
I am talking about the word bubbles. How do you know when a sentance is done?

I would say that 90% of the time you will find that each word bubble in untranslated manga will contain a complete thought or Japanese sentence. Of course, there are times when multiple sentences will be contained within a single word bubble, or when a single thought/sentence will spread over multiple bubbles.

In cases where a sentence poses a question or is emphatically stated, you will find a variety of recognizable punctuation. There are also cases when elements like hearts or musical notes will be used to add a sort of punctuation to a thought. However, normal sentences seem to only rarely be punctuated. Instead, you need to have a knowledge of the structure of the Japanese language.

Sentences tend to end with some sort of particle (よ, わ, ね, か, etc), some verb, or the copula です / だ. Of course, you also have one word sentences and other such things, but I think all languages are going to have something like that.

The length of the columns should not be used to determine sentence breaks; as with any other form of writing it just means that a given word was too long to fit on one line and was thus moved to the following line. You can see this phenomenon in the posts found in this thread.

Hope this helps. ^_^

~Shadrach Anki
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