Ask John: Why Did Kodansha Stop Publishing Bilingual Love Hina Manga?

Question:
Why, despite their huge popularity, have they stoped producing the Love Hina Bi-Lingual manga? I know of dozens upon dozens of manga fans who love this style of manga and even more who are fans of Love Hina. Why not simply release the already translated bilingual versions of the manga?

Answer:
From October 2000 through July 2001, Kodansha Publishing of Japan produced 8 volumes of bilingual Love Hina manga. These books, intended to assist Japanese students in learning English, included English text in the word balloons with the original Japanese text in the margins. While no content was edited out of the bilingual volumes, each bilingual volume had fewer chapters than the same numbered untranslated Japanese “tankouban” (collected volume) manga. The Love Hina manga story encompasses 14 collected tankouban volumes. If all of it were to have been published in bilingual format, there would have been significantly more than 14 bilingual volumes.

Our best guess is that Kodansha ceased printing the Love Hina bilingual manga precisely because of the massive popularity of these books among American manga fans. The bilingual Kodansha manga are intended for Japanese speaking students learning English, not as a substitute for the original Japanese language tankouban. Nor were the bilingual manga intended as a means for English speaking fans to gain access to translated manga. Although this has not been confirmed, we suspect that Kodansha ceased publishing the bilingual Love Hina manga for two reasons: partially because they believed that these books were being “mis-used” by readers other than their intended target consumer audience, and partially in order to help propagate the sale of the official American translation from TOKYOPOP.

Because the bilingual Love Hina manga are intended to be aids for Japanese speakers to learn English, the English translations are highly faithful to the original Japanese dialogue, but resultantly do not always read like natural conversational English. For some die-hard fans, this precise, literal translation is preferable to a more colloquial and localized translation. However, a more colloquial and localized translation is much more marketable to a mainstream American audience, which explains why TOKYOPOP would naturally want to produce their own original translation for the American release.