Picture and Text Direction in Translated Japanese Children's Stories

What is it about?

In picture books and illustrated chapter books, the pictures and the text work together to tell a story. Pictures have direction, for example, the direction a character is looking or moving. But in translation into Japanese the text direction changes from left to right, to right to left. This paper discusses what happens to the pictures in children's fiction translated into Japanese.

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Why is it important?

The different options that publishers have about the pictures, and how they respond to the problems of picture direction can teach us a lot about the relative perceived value of text and picture. It is not a simple question of whether to reverse the pictures, or not.