This research paper is a contrastive and descriptive analysis of the English and Spanish translations of a manga (japanese comic), which focuses on translation problems, the translators’ decisions (translation techniques) and the concepts of documentary translation and instrumental translation, considering the receiver’s demands regarding this type of text. The analysis consists of 25 cases taken from the first three volumes of the manga series Bakuman (2008), in which both the translation problems (Nord, 2005) and techniques (Hurtado, 2007) are classified, compared and described to determine whether the TT1 and TT2 are faithful to the ST or the TT’s translator decided to adapt it to the TT’s culture (Nord 1997, 2005). In addition, an opinion survey was conducted for Spanish-speaker people to express their opinion regarding manga translation and manga adaptation, since this research paper states that a translated manga is a text in which the ST’s culture and everything it comprisesneeds to be maintained to satisfy the receiver’s needs. The results of this investigation show that, even though there’s a great number of instances in which the TTs are faithful to the ST’s culture (documentary translation), the TTs adapt the ST to their own cultures (instrumental translation).
Isabel Benimeli is an MD’s student of Magíster en Traducción (2015-2016) at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. At the moment, she is working on her master’s thesis, which focuses on manga translation (Manga Translation: A Descriptive and Contrastive Analysis of Translation Problems and Techniques in Bakuman). Before her Master’s Degree, she studied English Literature and Linguistics (Licenciatura en Letras Mención Lingüística y Literatura Inglesa) at the same university, from 2010 to 2014.