Categories: Techwriter
Translating foreign language comic books is a great way to improve your foreign language vocabulary. Plus, it's a great project that may eventually encourage you to take up translation tasks professionally. As a plus, you can add the finished project to your collection of comic books.
Why comic books?
Translating whole documents is a serious and more difficult task. Comic books are composed of both graphics and text. The text isn't very long and thus easier to transcribe. The illustrations, on the other hand, help you interpret what the text is saying. Personally, I love comic books and find it more interesting and fun to translate than a dissertation, white paper, or legal document.
Tools of the Trade
Undertaking the task really doesn't need much more than the Internet and basic software tools. For this tutorial, the following are the minimum requirements:
- Photo-editing/vector-editing software - Expensive software isn't needed here as any free or inexpensive product would do. Photoshop Elements is a popular choice but the open-source Gimp, Pinta, and many others are available for Linux and Windows. Users of vector-editing software might prefer using Illustrator and Corel Draw when replacing the foreign language text due to its more flexible and cleaner text-handling features. They're also better for dynamic text that stretches and zooms across panels (commonly found in Marvel, DC, and manga).
- Access to Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator
- Foreign Language comic books - There are plenty of free foreign language comic books floating around on the Internet to practice on. Some of them are freely downloadable and even samples would do. Besides the ever-popular manga, there are plenty of European comic books in French and Italian, many of them dealing with adult themes and very different from American comic books.
Not included in the list are grammar books or dictionaries for the serious foreign language student - but these are optional. There are many reference sites or even apps available online for looking up obscure or slang words. Also, you may need an unarchiver utility like 7-Zip to unpackage the comic book if it's compressed as .cbr or .cbz. Moreover, a separate comic book viewer such as Comical or Comic Book Reader can be handy for viewing the image as you translate (Linux users will already have Evince and Okular in their respective operating system).
The most important requirement needed in this task is a lot of patience and time. No prior knowledge of a foreign language is needed considering that Bing and Google will do most of the work. For the screenshots below, I used pages from a popular European character by Hugo Pratt named Corto Maltese. I had watched the animated releases of Corto Maltese and loved the character's rich background and unique milieu. This prompted me to find the comic books and work on translating the Italian text to English.
Workflow
The tasks are fairly straightforward and the work cycle is as follows:
1. Assuming the files are in .cbr or .cbz, unzip the files to a folder. They will be unpacked as individual .PNG or .JPG files. This step can be done at the end or middle of the process if the user prefers to translate the comic book with a comic book viewer running.
2. Translate the text using Google Translate and Bing Translator. This process requires you to type the text in the online translator and then record the translation. Since the comic book page is scanned to .JPG or .PNG, the text can't be copied and pasted. This is probably the most time-consuming and annoying part of the task.
3. Edit the text, making sure that the structure, mood, and idea are accurate to the story's plot. If you're already aware of the story, then refer to the synopsis or source to verify if your writing is on the spot. A lot of love for the comic book and a lot of imagination can go a long way.
4. Erase the text from the comic book image and replace it with your own dialogue. Use a clear, readable font that is appropriate for the panel.
5. Compress the .PNG or .JPG files back to .cbr or .cbz for reading on a laptop, netbook, iPad, or Android tablet.
Part 2: Translations and Editing the text
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