English-English term for "Shōjo manga"


Is there a standardised English-English (as opposed to English that borrows
words willy-nilly from Japanese) term for Shōjo manga (少女マンガ) used when
describing it to people not familiar with manga and anime or the Japanese
language?

One person suggested "girl-oriented manga", but that sounds ambiguous, because
it sounds like it's talking about manga with lots of girls in it, as opposed
to manga whose target audience is girls.




Unfortunately, I don't think we really have a term for this. Keep in mind
there's a vast cultural gap between Japan and English-speaking countries, so
our terminology doesn't exactly overlap.

If you're talking about movies, **chick flick** can come reasonably close. The
demographics aren't a perfect match-up, and there are certain elements you
might expect from chick flicks not always seen in shōjo media, but it's the
closest the average English speaker can get.

My best suggestion is to go with the descriptive route: **(Japanese) comic
targeted at females, mostly preteen or younger**.

[Wikipedia's article on shōjo
manga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Djo_manga#Meaning_and_spelling)
suggests the following:

> As shōjo literally means "girl" in Japanese, the equivalent of the western
> usage will generally include the term: **girls' manga** (少女漫画 shōjo manga),
> or **anime for girls** (少女向けアニメ shōjo-muke anime).




I'm sure the other people that answered are much more informed than myself,
but I just wanted to say that back in 2000, Tokyopop was putting out
'Americanized' shojo manga (they changed the left-to-right format over to
right-to-left, they changed character names to English names, and they often
changed names of Japanese food or places to American food or places), and they
put them out under a line of books they called 'Chix Comix'. These versions
were pretty much forgotten when the better ones came out later, but since they
did introduce a lot of people to manga, I heard some women and girls still
refer to shojo as 'chick's comics' for a few years after. Just thought I'd
mention that.

