Anime and manga fans often come across the odd joke or pun in their favorite series that lands in Japanese but doesn’t translate well to English. While English translators do their best provide context behind cultural or phonetic puns in editor’s notes (usually in the margins of a manga panel or next to anime subtitles), a Viz Media translator quit their project after revealing Shonen Jump The last chapter of the series was practically impossible to translate.
The “lost in translation” manga series in question is Cipher Academymystery series written by monologues author Nisio Isin and illustrated by Yūji Iwasaki. Next is the series Iroha Irohazaka, a teenager attending the prestigious, titular high school. As the name suggests, Cipher AcademyThe “battles” of revolve around a bunch of difficult puzzle games between Irohazaka and his classmates.
In Chapter 10, “Yesterday’s war is still today’s war,” Viz Media translator Kumar Sivasubramanian had the unenviable task of translating based on lipogram a cryptic battle between Irohazaka and a support character Tayu Yugata. A lipogram is a type of word association game in which participants must avoid using a certain combination of syllables or letters. Irohazaka and Yugata’s lipogram battle had them asking each other about famous manga series such as Demon Slayer, Studs, One pieceand Dragon Ball Z without using a bunch of “forbidden” consonant and vowel combinations.
The main problem with the translation Cipher AcademyThe battle of the lipogram is that the original Japanese syllables will not correspond to the syllables in the English language. Instead of manipulating rough English equivalent to Cipher Academythe Sivasubramanian lipogram chose to print a transliteration of the Japanese lipograms.
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“Although we’ve translated roughly every answer, these lipograms don’t work in English due to phonetic differences from Japanese,” Viz Media wrote in Cipher Academyeditor’s notes.
Although Sivasubramanian’s transliteration of the lipogram was a Herculean feat, it would also mark his last major contribution to Cipher Academy’s English translation. On Sunday, Sivasubramanian announced on his Twitter account that he will no longer translate the series and will be replaced by a new translator.
my city has reached out to Viz Media and Sivasubramanian for comment.
If Sivasubramanian’s recent retweets of text-intensive “raw translations” for Cipher Academy what to get rid of, the next English translator has a tough road ahead of him, especially if Issin creates yet another mysterious word association game that his academy of brainiacs (and real-world translators) must solve.