Women’s Language in Comics Translation

Analyzing Female Characters’ Speech Patterns Across Three Japanese Versions

Abstract

While there have been many studies on women’s language in English to Japanese translation, none of them have covered comics so far. This paper seeks to close this gap by analyzing X-Men’s Dark Phoenix saga, an American comic book story that has been translated three times into Japanese since the 1990s. It will do so through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis of the female characters’ language usage. While gendered language is present in all three versions, there are slight differences in the usage ratios with an overall reduction in sentence-ending particles for the newer versions.