this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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Panels from manga. They are read right-to-left
Self-evident, but thank you. My question is about why.
English media, including the media on the website you're reading right now, is arranged left to right. Adherence to this rule is what makes our language comprehensible. These grammatical rules are not impediments; they are the foundations of understanding.
Violating them is done with specific purpose in mind. Anagrams are a puzzle in which the order of letters is scrambled, and the player must correct it. In this case the violation of the rule is a game, valuable because it provides enjoyment to the player.
Although I appreciate your quick response, I am looking for a more thorough one. If this arbitrary and meaningless syntax violation has any redeeming qualities I'm not seeing them. But thanks again.
Because it's japanese and japanese is often written right to left. You can't make it read left to right without changing the art. People who read manga understand the convention. It's surprising if you haven't run into this before given the popularity of manga now.
The text is in English. That's why the text in the comic is written left to right. I understand that other languages read right to left, but those cases don't apply here.
The text is translated to English, yes, but the original art was drawn for Japanese text which usually flows top to bottom, right to left. The entire visual design of a manga or comic book is structured around the reading direction for the language it was originally written in. When adding translations, you can't just change the bubble locations since they're almost always incorporated into the artwork directly.
With the above in mind, you effectively have two options with manga: flip the artwork before adding the English translation so the bubbles flow left-to-right, or leave it alone and just explain the reading direction differences. There are often artistic, logistical, and financial reasons for the latter approach, so it tends to be more common.
When on physical paper, most manga books are also read by flipping the pages right to left, and most of them explain this to English-language readers trying to read it the "normal" way on the last page.