Publishers: Yen Press

Since I’ve mentioned Yen Press a few times in the last months (in reference to K-On and Kobato, as well as some upcoming titles), I figured I should give a little background on them.

Yen Press is a subset of Hachette Book Group USA, a company owned by Hachette Livre (a French company, so it’s not surprising that they’ve tackled such a wide range of manga titles--there's a lot more manga translated into French than there is into English, and titles tend to come out faster over there, too. The entire run of Yugioh was out in France when Shonen Jump was just getting into the start of the card game). Yen Press is also one of the newest of newcomers (that are still around) to the manga translation world: it was founded in 2006.

Yen Press took a page out of Del Rey Manga’s book and published translation notes with their volumes. They also tend to include honorifics; there are some exceptions, such as Black Butler, where they’ve eschewed honorifics because they would feel out of place to an English-reading audience (since that series is set in Victorian London). Unlike Del Rey, however, Yen Press doesn’t usually include a few translated or untranslated pages of the next volume at the end of a manga; they default more to a ‘teaser,’ similar to Tokyopop’s model. The difference is that Yen Press tends to do a full page teaser complete with summary and a panel from the coming volume, while Tokyopop typically only does a summary.

Yen Press is also what I would consider the most otaku of manga translators--they pretty much dived in assuming that their predecessors (Del Rey, Viz, Tokyopop, and some smaller companies like CMX or DrMaster) had sufficiently introduced manga and basic Japanese culture to the mainstream that they could dispense with Anglicizing their titles. They’ve also been the main introducer of manhwa, or Korean manga, to America (like Cynical Orange and Hissing); and they’re also publishing a few original English titles, like the Maximum Ride series and the Twilight graphic novel. So while they may not be the best place to start if you’re unfamiliar with manga, once you get the hang of it I highly recommend them!