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Despite us westerners reading from left-to-right, top-to-bottom from the front
to back with the book spine on our left, when manga is translated and
localized (officially) it retains the Japanese way of reading, right-to-left
from the back forward with the book spine on our right.

From my understanding the Japanese read text from top-down in vertical lines
and since this is probably too much for westerners, it's "corrected" in manga.
However, while we still read the text left-to-right, the frames/pages of the
manga still retain the right-to-left ordering.

With light novels however, this doesn't appear to be the case. With the light
novels of _Strawberry Panic_ localized by Seven Seas and _Spice and Wolf_
localized by Yen Press, the books are read from left-to-right with the spine
on our left; this includes the order of pages.

Now ignoring the obvious problems of printing the words backwards, why aren't
English translated light novels printed with the reverse page ordering? Where
we start from the back of the book with the spine on our right?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-04T01:22:31.523
37171
2016-11-04T08:05:25.627
2016-11-04T02:12:42.197
1908
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question
light-novel-production
Why don't English translated light novels retain the "backwards" page ordering?


It makes absolutely no sense for a book consisting of just English text to
have its pages ordered such that you read the page on the right followed by
the page on the left. So of course people don't publish English translations
of light novels that way.

However, it makes _some_ sense for a book consisting of English text
superimposed on images to be read right-to-left if that's how it was
originally drawn. Why? Because to make it read left-to-right, you have to flip
the images, and flipping the images can cause problems.

  * Does character A mention out loud that character B is standing to the left of character C? Well, the _opposite_ will be true if you flip the images. 
  * Is the manga set in Japan? Are there depictions of roads? If so, guess what? Japan drives on the right now! 
  * Does your swordsman use a peculiar left-handed stance to throw off his opponents? Not anymore - we're in some bizarro world where _right_ -handed stances are apparently peculiar.
  * Japan is now the land of the setting sun. (Or, we're on anti-Earth, and the sun rises in the West. Your choice.)

And so on and so forth. There are legitimate reasons why you would want to
publish English-translated manga right-to-left. Contrariwise, there are not
any legitimate reasons to publish English-translated _text_ right-to-left that
come to mind.

(Light novels do have pictures in them, but since the pictures are typically
on separate textless pages, one can freely include those pages unflipped in a
left-to-right English text without doing any harm.)


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-04T02:11:32.190
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2016-11-04T02:16:50.607
2016-11-04T02:16:50.607
1908
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37171
answer