Part 6: The Sound That Is Drawn: Onomatopoeia, and the Word for Silence

Every other problem in this series is a problem about words. This one is a problem about ink, and it is the only genuinely unsolvable thing in the trade.

In an American comic, a sound effect is lettering. It is added on top, in a separate pass, by a specialist, and it can be removed and replaced without anyone touching a drawing. In manga, a sound effect is very often drawn — by the artist, in the same pass, as part of the composition, tangled through the linework, curving around a fist, tapering into the speed lines, occupying the same visual plane as the figure. It is not a label on the picture. It is in the picture.

Which means translating it is not a text operation. It is surgery.

The Category English Does Not Have

Start with the harder half, which is not the ink at all.

Japanese has two large, productive classes of mimetic word. Giongo imitate sounds — the ordinary business of onomatopoeia, and English does this too, adequately. Then there is gitaigo, and English does not have it, in any real sense.

Gitaigo are mimetic words for things that do not make a sound at all. They depict a state, a manner, a texture, a quality of attention. Kirakira, the sparkle of something glittering. Fuwafuwa, the way a soft thing is soft. Jiiii, the sensation of being stared at, which is not a noise but which everyone has heard. Nurunuru, sliminess. Dokidoki, a heart going, which sits on the border. These are not a poetic flourish available to clever writers; they are a standard word class that ordinary speakers use constantly, and Japanese has thousands of them.

English has perhaps a handful of accidents — shimmer, glimmer — and no productive system. We cannot coin one on the spot and be understood. A Japanese writer can, and readers will follow.

So the untranslatable thing here is not a word. It is a category. When a manga page puts キラキラ around a girl's face, it is not describing a sound and it is not a simile; it is stating a fact about how she looks, in a register English does not stock. The translator's options are to write "sparkle," which is a caption and reads as a caption, or to leave the marks and lose the reader, or to delete them and quietly amputate a layer of the medium's grammar. Every solution is a loss. There is no fourth door.

Shiin

And then there is the one that gives the game away entirely.

シーン — shiin — is the sound effect for silence.

Not for quiet. Not for a pause. It is the mimetic word for the condition of there being no sound: the ringing hush after someone says the wrong thing at a dinner table, the deadness of an empty classroom, the moment a joke lands in a room that does not laugh. Japanese looked at the absence of sound and decided that it, too, has a noise, and gave it one. Tezuka is often credited with establishing its use on the manga page, and whether or not he coined it, he is the reason it is everywhere.

English cannot do this. Not "has not gotten around to it" — cannot, because the concept violates the rule that onomatopoeia imitates a sound, and there is no sound. Write "silence" on the panel and you have written a stage direction. Write "..." and you have written a pause, which is a different thing. Leave シーン and the English reader sees decoration.

The word survives in fan translation mostly as a footnote — a little asterisk explaining that Japanese has a sound effect for silence — which is the correct solution and also an admission of total defeat. You have not translated it. You have written a small essay about it in the margin, exactly as I am doing now, and the reader gets the fact and not the sensation. They learn that the room went quiet. They do not hear it go quiet, which is what the Japanese reader gets, for free, in one glance, because the noise of silence is drawn on the wall behind the character's head.

Shiin reduces to a Destiny 5, the Freedom Seeker — freedom, disruption, and restless movement — which is a comic result for the word meaning "nothing is happening," and I offer it strictly as evidence for the prosecution. The arithmetic does not know what shiin means. It has never known what anything means. Onomatopoeia itself, run through the same engine, comes out a Destiny 4 with a Heart's Desire 4 — the Builder doubled, structure and labour — which is at least a nice accident to hang an essay about lettering on, and I will take it in the spirit in which it is offered, which is none.

Four Bad Options

Practically, an English edition has four choices, and the history of the industry is a slow walk across all of them.

Erase and redraw. Paint out the Japanese marks, redraw the artwork underneath them, letter an English effect in the hole. This was standard in the early Viz era and it is the most destructive thing anyone in this business does routinely. The marks are inside the composition — over the figure, through the background — so removing them means someone who is not the artist reconstructs whatever was behind them, guessing. And then the replacement is set in a font, which cannot do what a hand-drawn stroke does: taper, tremble, accelerate, get heavier as the punch lands. You have swapped a drawing for a typeface, and the page's rhythm goes flat in a way most readers feel without being able to name.

Gloss in the margin. Leave the art untouched; put a small English word beside the panel or in the gutter. Nothing is destroyed and the reader's eye has to leave the image to get the information, which is precisely the thing manga's whole grammar is built to prevent. The Grammar of the Page essays spent forty parts on how a page controls the eye's path; a marginal gloss is a detour sign nailed to that path.

Overlay small. Tuck a discreet English word beside the Japanese without removing it. The current compromise, and probably the best available — the drawing survives, the reader gets the sense, the page stays legible. It is also visibly a compromise, and busy pages turn into a thicket.

Leave it. Print the Japanese, explain nothing, let the reader learn. This is what a decade of scanlation culture pushed toward, and a surprising number of English readers now simply know a dozen effects on sight — that ゴゴゴゴ means dread is arriving, that ドドド is a rumble, that the big ones with the jagged edges are impacts. The audience taught itself the vocabulary rather than have the pages mutilated for its convenience, which is the same discovery Part 5 ended on: the readers were always more capable than the machine believed.

Araki's Case

ドドド — dododo — reduces to a Destiny 3, the Creative Communicator, which is the number of the public stage, and I promise I will stop doing this soon.

But JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is the argument's best exhibit, because Hirohiko Araki uses sound effects as design. ゴゴゴゴ stacked up the side of a panel is not reporting a noise; there is no noise. Nothing is rumbling. It is a texture of menace applied to the image, closer to hatching than to lettering — a way of making the air in the panel feel loaded. It has become so identifiable that it escaped the manga entirely and is now a meme, recognized by enormous numbers of people who have never read a page of it and could not tell you it is meant to be a sound.

Try to erase-and-redraw that. You cannot. The marks are the composition; take them out and you have a picture of two men standing in an empty room. There is no English word for "the air has gone heavy," and no font that could carry it if there were. The only honest options are overlay-small or leave-it, and the market — the actual readers, voting — chose leave-it, and were right.

The Close

This is the floor of the whole subject. Everywhere else in this series, the losses were choices: a lawyer's caution, a marketing department's nerve, a dub director with a deadline and a mean streak. Someone decided, and could have decided otherwise. Here nobody decided anything. The loss is structural. Japanese has a word class English lacks, and manga draws that word class into the artwork, and those two facts multiply into a problem with no solution — only four ways of choosing what to give up.

The best English-language manga lettering in the world today is genuinely excellent, done by people who care enormously, and it is still, every single page, a managed defeat. That is not a failure of craft. It is what the border actually looks like when you stand at it: not a wall someone built out of carelessness, but a river that was always there.

And on the other bank, in a language that thought to give silence a sound, a girl walks into an empty classroom and the air says shiin, and every Japanese reader hears it, and there is nothing — not one thing — that I or anyone else can do to hand that across to you. I can only tell you it is there. The word for what silence sounds like. Drawn on the wall, in ink, by the artist's own hand, in the same stroke as the room.