Sight in japanese
 

I am working in my manga pilot (name/nemu), and i want to name the main character "sight" because of his ability. So if you could translate sight into romanji, i'll appreciate it.

Translate or transliterate?

The former won't work for a name. It almost never does.

If you wanted the latter, then it would be サイト .

EDIT: Forgot to give romaji. Saito

Thanks for the help.

Any reason you can't use a language you speak?

What's a "manga pilot"?

I think it's where you tie a piece of string to a trained rat and put it into your wall to eat the termites (the string is so you can pull him out incase of trouble).

Thanks for your help.

In all seriousness, I suspect the guy is making a comic book but wants some "mystical Asian names."

I've had some recent experiences with artists/authors who needed to verify some Japanese because they have a character ending up in Japan as part of the plot and wanted to use dialogue to show how fish-out-of-water the character was. So I'm now more patient with people who need that type of translation.

But "I want to give my character a fake, quasi- not-actually-Japanese name that uses Japanese sounds but English vocabulary for some mystical quality that only Americans obsessed with an artificial image of Japan will enjoy"?

I don't get that.

However, OP can convince me otherwise and put me in my place. I'll apologize if there is a good reason for wanting to name your character サイト. Hell, if a Japanese-speaking person even sees サイト or "Saito," they're going to assume it means "site," right? “サイト”の検索結果（1737 件）：英辞郎 on the Web：スペースアルク

It is a one-shot manga, in other words it is only a one issue manga, usually between 15 to 60 pages.

Moreover Saito is also a Japanese name, so they might not thing about Sight and just take it as Saito....am I wrong?

Very good point.

But I highly doubt the target audience can even speak Japanese, though, so I doubt this matters.

Then they also will not get "sight" from "Saito".

Which is why I sort-of ridiculed OP as politely as I could.

good luck with your manga

Raises a very good point: What is "manga" as used in the English language? Can something in English written by someone who can't speak Japanese qualify as manga?

If someone calling it "manga" makes it manga, can I paint a cubist painting and call it romanticism or post-modernism?

It raises linguistic quandries that expose me as something of a descriptivist and something of a prescriptivist!

What is a manga?
I mean, I had a collection of over 500 manga and I read some walt disney comics as well and I didn't know it actually exists a difference. I have always treated a manga as a comic made in Japan...thus I agree with kyle that should be called comic book since not made in Japan.

Surely it's a stylistic difference? I don't know; to me manga just look and feel categorically different to 'comic books' of the spiderman or beano ilk. Also manga can be for adults as well as children whereas comics to me are for children pretty much exclusively. Then again I also differentiate between 'western' and 'asian' manga as well. :/

But there are a number of American comics in the style of manga (big eyes, sound effects Japanese-stype, etc.). Yet we wouldn't call this "manga." See, e.g., Runaways. Heck, even X-Men has done it for years.

Plus, there is not a uniform Japanese style of comics, either, unless you mean "black and white, released weekly under a single person's name (usually)."

And you think "comics" is for kids? Does that include the Spiderman you refer to? There are plenty of comics for adults in Japan and in the US.

Heck, Marmaduke is a cartoon or comic strip, and there's no way you could consider that boring, awful crap as anything other than a comic for old people who mope around in slippers. ;)

lol that's a good point... but since it's in katakana i doubt this'll happen.

Eh, point taken. I don't really know much about it TBH. I pretty much just operate on broad categories. Must say though as looking in from the outside, so to speak, the word 'comic book' to me brings up only a few limited titles, whereas 'comic' in general gets much broader. Yes, Spiderman seems pretty kiddy/teen stuff to me, albeit I have never read one. I can see that stuff like Watchman and Sin City aren't though. Then again, aren't they 'graphic novels'? Then there's newspaper 'cartoons', which are def. for adults, so where do they fit in?

Probably there's some intuitive difference I neither get nor can readily describe. I think if you can call it 'manga' instead of 'komikku' in japanese and no one goes 'eh?' it's probably manga.

Isn't manga just essentially the Japanese word for comic? Also just out of interest, do they call American comics 漫画 (sorry when actually writing Japanese speech I refuse to use romaji)?

I think your terms are a little off, and I usually wouldn't say anything but that is what we are talking about.

"comic book" is a subcategory of "comics", which include 4-panel comics, i.e. newspaper funnies.

"cartoons" are animated shows.

"Watchmen" started as a comic book, but collected together it is a "graphic novel" which is a bit of a misnomer, as it should really be called an "omnibus" or maybe a "trade paperback". I don't remember if Sin City was a comic book first or graphic novel first.

"Spiderman" does have series for kids and teens, but also most certainly series for more serious and seasoned readers (i.e. "Spiderman Noir").

"Manga" is Japanese for comics, so by that notion, in Japanese "Spiderman" can be called both a "manga" and a "komikku". However the opposite isn't true in English.

Just as "manhua" is Chinese comics, and "manhwa" is Korean comics, "manga" is the word we have adopted in English to describe Japanese comics.

Yeah, I will fight tooth and nail to prevent weeaboos from importing Japanese words and using them imprecisely more than they already have.

With posts filled with nothing but sogoi, kawaye and other random, badly romanized adjectives. I've seen it before but I don't understand it :S.

Both Watchmen and Sin City were originally serialized as monthly releases just like Spiderman and Archie and such.

Wikipedia seems to indicate that コミックス is for US comics, while 漫画 is used for kanji-based countries' works (Korea, China, Japan): 漫画 - Wikipedia

Regardless, the term "manga" hasn't been imported to be a synonym for "comics" in the US.

I guess I should quit being a fogey about this, though. It's not like English speakers agree on what is the best English term, either. There's a movement toward "sequential art" and other less-elegant terminology. Probably to use "that cool weird mystic Oriental language use my kung fu and my chi and Kamehameha some groovy stuff EXTREEEEME."

Also, I think it's safe to say that "manga" was imported and used for a long time as a term for "Japanese comics/sequential art." However, recently people are trying to call their non-Japanese comics "manga" for some reason.