What It Takes to Translate One of the Biggest Manga Around

Fall 2024 was irrefutably the season for Dan Da Dan fans. Not only was the Science Saru anime wowing folks every Thursday, its ongoing manga was showing out every Tuesday, giving fans of both reasons to wake up in the morning with a pep in their step at the beginning and end of their week.

Seeing as we’re still a way out from the anime’s second season and the manga is currently on hiatus, we decided to follow up on our interview with the anime’s director by chatting with Dandadan (the manga is spelled without spaces, unlike the show title’s stylization) manga translator Kumar Sivasubramanian to learn how its literary sausage is made for English-speaking sensibilities.

Isaiah Colbert, io9: In the manga translation industry, do translators have to audition or pitch themselves for series like Dandadan, or do publishers arbitrarily assign series to translators they work with?

Sivasubramanian: In my case, series have always been assigned to me by editors. I wouldn’t say it’s completely “arbitrary” though. If you have a past working relationship with that editor/publisher, then they might have an idea of your strengths or weaknesses, or even what kind of material you like to translate, and assign jobs accordingly. Also, I’m a freelancer, so they’re more “offers” than “assignments.” If I was offered, say, a baseball manga, I would probably say no, because I know nothing about baseball.

Sometimes if you suggest a series to a publisher and they end up licensing it, then you would probably be the translator assigned to it. I haven’t had any luck with this yet. (None of the series I suggested ended up getting licensed.)

Once or twice I have heard a series announced and then begged to be put on it, but they were already taken.

io9: Were there any signs for you as a translator that Dandadan would blow up like it has now as an ongoing series and an anime, or was that unknown to you when you started translating it?

(Manga spoilers from here on out.)

io9: While serving as a shonen sci-fi fantasy rom-com, Dandadan also depicts pretty heady subject matter like sexual abuse. This topic made distributors like Crunchyroll wary of promoting it as a new series. While there’s not much you can do about the imagery on display in the series, which has proven to be a barrier of entry for folks in its early goings, how did you approach localizing the language of those scenes?

Sivasubramanian: My general sense of the language in the series is that it’s not really that rough or obscene. Despite the sexualized attacks in the early chapters, the language was “light,” if you know what I mean. And my feeling is that a word like “schlong” is going to be funnier than something ruder. Maybe it’s just me, but I find “turd” funnier than “shit” for some reason. So there was almost no cursing in my original scripts.

However, in the early chapters, I didn’t translate all of them, and the alternate translator did come in and put in the F word a lot. Much later on, I got a memo from my editor saying the higher-ups at Viz didn’t want the F word in the series anymore. I thought it was an odd note since I hardly ever used it anyway, and also the series is in Jump “Plus”, but whatever, I’m not the publisher. (In fact, the request could have even originated for some reason at Kodansha or the artist, I don’t know.)

I did try to put it in there once, in the scene where—spoiler warning!—Vamola dies, and I had Momo scream it out. But I’m pretty sure it got changed. It’s interesting that Yukinobu Tatsu himself steered away from the sexual material early on as well.

io9: Weekly episodes of Dan Da Dan were airing while the manga received new chapters. Out of curiosity, were you keeping up with the anime while translating new chapters? If so, did any of the anime’s localization choices impact how you approached translating the manga, or did you compartmentalize them as separate entities?

Sivasubramanian: I haven’t seen the anime! If I did, I would probably see that the translators made better choices than me, and I would punch my fist into my palm and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?!”

io9: From chatting with letterers and translators, I’ve learned that each series brings unique challenges and something to relish about localizing it. What aspects of localizing Dandadan proved to be an obstacle for you, and what elements of the story did you enjoy most about translating?

Sivasubramanian: The most difficult thing is references to, like, TV shows from the ’70s. Or maybe some comedian’s catchphrase from the ’80s or ’90s. Often, I have to ask friends in Japan, “What is this?!” and they explain it to me. And I can kind of translate it and include a note to the editor in my script. But there’s nothing you can really do about it. I don’t attempt to localize it, but my editor might, or I might offer some suggestions at least.

Okarun referring to himself as “JIBUN” (“myself”) in the very first chapter is a reference to a coffee commercial Ken Takakura did in the ’80s. That’s linguistically and culturally lost in translation. What can you do? It happens sometimes. Translation is approximation. I changed it to “I am a fellow,” but no reader from any other country is going to get a nostalgia hit from it.

The thing I love most about working on Dandadan is that when a series is well written, it’s easy to translate—the translation just seems to flow out. I’m not staring at run-on sentences and plot holes wondering how or even if I should port them over into English. And when the characters have really clear personalities, it’s such a joy to try to give them that voice in English, too. Dandadan is really my favorite thing to work on every week.

io9: Dandadan is a series of references to yokai, cryptids, and Japanese and American film pop culture. Do you also have to do some leg work to read up on some of the niches and overt references the series often features to make them land as effectively in English as in Japanese?

Sivasubramanian: Yes, I do have to spend some time investigating these things. The Japanese pop culture stuff, as I mentioned, often simply dies on the page. Sometimes, these references are so obscure that even Japanese readers would have to Google them, so what chance does an audience reading a translation have?

The yokai are not too bad since these days, many of them have English wiki pages, so I can just name the creature, and an English reader would be able to look it up themselves. The urban legends are very tricky as sometimes they’re extremely regional and don’t exist anywhere else. Some references I had trouble finding out anything about. There was a recent one about some celebrities having seen miniature people. So weird, very little info about it. I wonder if even Japanese readers knew what [Tatsu] was talking about.

io9: Dandadan‘s ensemble of characters all have unique personalities and patterns of speech. Are there moments when you must refer back to a style guide to keep colloquialisms, dialects, patterns of speech, or power naming conventions between characters straight?

Sivasubramanian: Not really. Because it’s a weekly series, I’m basically in a rhythm with it. If a character or something comes back after being away for months and months, then, yes, I have to go back and remind myself about it. The worst thing is, sometimes a character or plotline comes back, and, at my age, I’ve forgotten and treat it like it’s new. Also, the editor Jennifer LeBlanc, is the one that’s really making sure the series stays on track in this regard.

io9: Which Dandadan character do you have the most fun localizing and why?

Sivasubramanian: Ooh, tough question. Maybe Turbo Granny? Though I don’t know if I’ve done a good job making her sound like a foul-mouthed old lady. Then again, maybe Yukinobu Tatsu hasn’t either.

io9: Whether it’s a comedic, horror, or romantic moment, what line or scene in Dandadan that you’ve translated has resonated with you the most?

Sivasubramanian: This is also a tricky one, but more because there have been so many chapters it’s hard for me to remember specific moments. Okarun trying to get some push-ups in in between classes is pretty much literally what my work day is like every day, so, personally, I felt that.

io9: Mangaka Yukinobu Tatsu is a creator who doesn’t often take breaks but has recently researched more for the next arc of the story. For recent chapters, have there been moments where you have to predict where the story might be teasing and where it’s going next, or do you take words at face value while translating?

Sivasubramanian: There’s no way to predict what might be coming, especially with this series. Although, that five minutes I spent on Reddit, people were pulling together all sorts of threads that I could hardly remember and making predictions based on them. But, even then, what might happen down the line, or what you think might happen, almost never affects what you’re translating at the present moment.

However, with something like the current Kouki Yukishiro storyline, we don’t know the gender of her blackmailer yet, and that’s fine in Japanese, but it’s made some of the English renderings awkward. As with every series, to avoid such problems, it would be better if it were being translated in volumes rather than simultaneously every week.

When the concept of “empty space” appeared, I translated it literally. But then it came up again and again and became a core concept, and months later, I realized “void space” would have been cooler (and better for a term that was going to become important and long-term), but by then, it was far too late to change it, especially at a weekly pace. Them’s the breaks.

io9: In your 20+ years of translating manga, what characteristics of Dandadan make it stand out from other series you’ve worked on? 

Sivasubramanian: It’s so kooky, the cast of characters is amazing, the art is beautiful, the tempo is breakneck. It’s like those peak early years of DragonBall. Comedy is the genre I most gravitate towards reading, but I don’t get to translate a lot of it, so Dandadan is really special and precious to me. It’s a pure joy.

You can read new chapters of Dandadan on Viz and Manga Plus. All episodes of Dan Da Dan are available on Netflix, Crunchyroll, and Hulu.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.