Yotsuba&! & Yotsuba&!

This post isn’t going to be about how great Yotsuba&! is. For that, you can go here, or here, or here, or here, or even read my own gushing about it back when Yen Press announced they were rescuing the title here. Instead, this post is going to be a brief, quasi-scholarly comparison, with scans for your own perusal, of the treatment that ADV and Yen Press have given the same material; namely, the first volume of Yotsuba&!. Keep reading on for the goods.

In case you don’t know the story, here it is in a nutshell; Yotsuba&! is a wonderful Japanese comic series which was previously licensed by ADV (which, by the way, is now, finally, officially dead… sort of). ADV released four volumes, then took their sweet time releasing the fifth, and then… stopped releasing them, for whatever reason - I suspect Yotsuba&!, for all its critical acclaim, was not one of their higher-grossing titles. But earlier this year, Yen Press announced that they had plucked the license from ADV’s slowly rotten corpse and would be releasing the sixth volume, and, somewhat surprisingly (to me at least), they were going to re-release volumes one through five with Yen Press’s original translations and treatments. Being something of a language nerd, I was interested to see how Yen Press’s approach to the material would differ from ADV’s; being a fan of the little hyperactive titular green-haired tyke’s comic adventures made it all the more fun.

So let’s start with the front cover.

Oh.

Oh dear.

ADV loses points for the cruft at the top about the creator of Azumanga Daioh, though I can hardly blame them trying to build the success of a new property on the success of a previous one. But Yen Press’s treatment of the exclamation point logo thingie… Wow, it looks so amateurish compared to ADV’s dynamic treatment. The letters are in a straight line instead of bouncing about, and the typeface is ugly. In fact, if you look closely, it looks like the ampersand is from a different font - I’m guessing that “wacky” typeface didn’t have an ampersand, so they just dropped one in from another font. Clearly the designer of ADV’s cover was more experienced, knowing you can’t rely on the font to convey the mood; doing something far more dynamic with a rather plain sans-serif by giving each character its own angled treatment and love and using outlines judiciously. To be fair, I can’t claim to be a graphic design expert - as the design of this site evidences - but I know what I like, and Yen Press’s cover isn’t it. And that same travesty is splashed across the other five covers too… Ugh.

Another difference that can’t be seen here is that the ADV cover has a nice flat matte finish, whereas the Yen Press one has a shiny glossy finish. Given the choice, I’ve never been a fan of shiny finishes like this. I’ve heard that companies make their stuff glossy because it catches eyes under the bright lights in stores, but once you’ve got it home I just don’t think it looks good. Though I guess it doesn’t matter much once you’ve opened the book and are reading it. If only stupid glossy computer monitors worked the same way… Argh, it’s like trying to work by staring into a mirror all day…

Well, anyway… beyond that, if you look closely, you’ll notice the Yen Press book is slightly larger than the ADV one. And, oddly, the cover art is cropped differently in both - notice how you can see a peg on the pole behind Yotsuba on Yen Press’s cover, but there’s more space beneath Yotsuba’s feet and to the left of the sunflowers on ADV’s cover.

Okay, let’s flip ‘em over.

Not a whole lot to say here. Yen Press’s back cover blurbs are written from the perspective of Yotsuba herself. Note that she refers to herself in the third person. She often does this in Yen Press’s translation on the inside too. It is… somewhat annoying, but acceptable as a quirk of her personality.

I didn’t bother getting any good scans of it, but it’s worth noting that the inside front cover of Yen Press’s book has some extra art which doesn’t appear in ADV’s book. So points to them for that.

Now let’s look at some panels.

This is interesting. First, a bit of background info you may already know; in Japanese comic books (as well as other printed material), the writing is usually written to be read vertically, from top to bottom. That’s why word balloons in Japanese comics are usually taller than they are wide, whereas the opposite is true in Korean or European language comic books. So how do companies deal with that when translating?

Here, we see ADV has kept the text horizontal for us. It’s easier to read, presumably, but clearly it leaves most of the balloon empty, and fails to properly convey the balloon-filling emphasis the original text had. Yen Press, however, goes ahead and writes the English vertically, filling out the balloon much better in exchange for a brief moment of decreased legibility for us English readers. I’ve got to say I prefer Yen Press’s approach much better, but clearly we wouldn’t want to have to read much more than a word or two like this.

Here we see ADV and Yen Press taking a different approach to translating signs and sound effects. Note that ADV translates the “ding dong” sound effect in place, whereas Yen Press leaves the Japanese characters, then adds transliterations and translations next to them - they seem to take this approach with all of their translated comics, actually. I’m not sure if I really like it, because it sure adds a lot of visual noise to the panel. Similarly, ADV has edited in place the “Ayase” nameplate, whereas Yen Press has left it as is, but provided a translation (transliteration, in this case) in the panel gutter. I wish Yen Press would also put sound effect translations in the gutters as well - transliterations can probably be omitted entirely.

Also note the different treatment Yen Press and ADV have given the long vowel sound in Fuka/Fuuka’s name; ADV did away with it in their romanization of her name, whereas Yen Press has preserved it by adding another U. Romanized long vowel sounds can look odd to English readers, but they are more phonetically correct, I think, so I prefer Yen Press’s approach in this regard. See the language issues page where I further pretend to know what I’m saying about this sort of thing.

Here, Yotsuba is failing to properly communicate to Fuuka that her father is a translator. Points go to Yen Press here; the asterisk in their panel points to a translation note at the bottom of the page explaining how Yotsuba butchered the pronunciation in the original Japanese and the implication of it.

Well, that’s all for now. I hope you’ve found this look at the differences of ADV’s and Yen Press’s treatment of the same material as interesting as I did; I may follow up with more posts along these lines in the future, as the interest hits me.

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to check out this similar comparison of Yen Press’s and ADV’s treatments of Volume 4 by someone who totally stole my idea of doing a post like this before I was able to actually do it. Arg.

Update: 17 Sept: About.com’s Deb Aoki discusses translation and localization differences with JuYuon Lee.