Since I’ve been working on these comics—translating, cleaning, editing, typesetting—I wanted to write a little something about my process. Self-indulgence is one of the purposes of this blog after all.
The translation is the most collaborative part. I try my best with Google translate and dictionary apps, but I’ve also had some help. With Japanese, my sister-in-law (a linguist who has studied Japanese for many years) has been a great help. I also used the iPhone app “imiwa?” extensively for kanji recognition. With German, I managed to secure the assistance of a German speaker from the DKVine forums, Caramelman, who is doing most of the translation work on my current project. My parents-in-law also lived in Germany for several years, so they have answered some of my questions. This is usually the first step, and I put it all in one or several text files using TextEdit.
The step I refer to as cleaning usually just involves whiting out the speech bubbles, although for the Kirby comic at least I had to do some image compositing. This is easier with some scans than others. The Super Mario-kun scans were very clean with great contrast so it was easy to just draw white boxes over the text and leave it at that. The Club Nintendo scans are not as nice, so I have to go around each speech bubble with the paint brush tool while zoomed in. They are somewhat pixelated at that level of zoom, so the granularity of editing makes it easier. I try not to edit or change any of the actual art outside the speech bubble, that’s an obvious decision on my part. All of the image editing is done in Seashore app, which I settled on after trying many different painting apps.
The editing and typesetting phase occur simultaneously, and sometimes require retranslation on my part. I type out the contents of the next speech bubble, change the wording if it needs to fit better, sometimes change the size. After all that, I usually ask my wife to proofread what I’ve done to make sure it sounds natural and flows well. The font I use throughout the speech and narration of a comic is SF Toontime. Again I tried various programs to find the best way for this process of positioning text boxes, and none of the paint apps were any good at it. Finally I hit upon OmniGraffle, a professional tool for making flowcharts and stuff, which I used during Honours at university to make diagrams for my thesis. It works great, and now I have a workflow for each stage of the comics process.
Oh there is a final step. After cleaning I try to save as raw an image as I can, to import to OmniGraffle. I then export, and finally use the export options in Preview to make the final product as close to the original in terms of data size. This usually involves saving to jpeg and adjusting quality, which I’ve found doesn’t make too much of a difference visually. The image size is the same throughout.
Well that was fun. See you next time.