[Background Blog] Pawprint Press Translation Workflow

Hello all, Compymono here!

So looks like you guys were the most interested in our process for localising comic content for Pawprint Press so we'll be talking a bit about that today. (However, seems like nearly the same amount of you were interested in the Beek topic so I may write that one up in the near future as well!)

As you may know, we currently have two comic series being published by Pawprint Press. The Nekojishi spin-off, The Divine Battles and the Astatos spin-of, Astatos: Flippant Academy. While the production and story content of these comics are overseen by us, our main contribution is handling the localisation process and typesetting for the English and other language versions of the comics. (And Werewolf in the K-9 Squad as well)

So today we'll be looking at Astatos: Flippant Academy for the most part as it's easier to show this process with it's 2 page releases.

Setting up the Process

To begin with, I'm going to go back to when I was first given pages of part 2 which was the pilot for the series internally and completed before part 1. My initial task was to set out the text formatting standards for the English version of the series. 

At this point the CH version of this part already had it's text formatting completed including text boxes. However, I soon realised I had more freedom than usual as the base files for all the pages are drawn without any text boxes integrated into them. (Sometimes the artist will draw the text boxes into the artwork itself so they don't have anything drawn behind them.)

So for Flippant Academy, rather than follow the lead of the traditional manga style formatting, I decided to get creative and make it something a bit different in English.

Above is the three formatting options I came up with. The left was a more traditional style using the same font family as The Divine Battles and K-9 Squad, the right is what I would consider a very "graphic novel" approach to the text formatting, and the middle is a middle ground between the two. In the final comic you can see the middle option being used for aside text and the right one being used for when characters are speaking. 

For the typography I wanted to go for something a bit more modern feeling. Initially the idea was that the colour of the text boxes would flip between gold and purple depending on who was talking but that didn't make as much sense in the actual comic considering the swapping of the direct flip mechanic of the game with the flip point concept in the comic. (and I found the gold a bit too difficult to keep legible) At first I tried using the font used in Astatos itself (Yorkten Slab) but I didn't really feel like it fit well with the comedic tone of the comics. As such I went with a narrow hand-written font called Neucha. (It's available on Google fonts so its licensing is nice and open too) In the end I guess the text boxes ended up giving a sort of Night in the Woods vibe off from them.

One last thing you may notice is the "Read This Way" notice on the English pages. This was sort of a last minute addition as we were actually completing new the Pawprint Press website around this time and came into the conflict that a few of our series were read in different directions so we wanted to add an indicator to each release of this release to clarify that up. (Unintentionally it also helped out on part 3 which I had to reverse the read direction for to fit the English text boxes in) On the final release we went with the middle design, however you can find the design on the right used on the Pawprint Press website.

At this point we hadn't actually come up with an English name for the series so a quick brainstorm later I came up with the name "Flippant Academy". Flippant coming from both the side flipping mechanic of the game and to try and express the less serious comedic tone. (But mostly because it's a pun on the word flip 😅) And academy coming from the alternate college universe the comic is set in. I was surprised how adding some striped outlines made the Astatos font (Yorkten Slab) uncannily college-feeling.

Text Translation and Localisation

Now the next step is translation. In the case of Flippant Academy the original language for the scripts is in Simplified Chinese. Our translation and release process is managed through Trello where we have cards for each chapter of each series through from production to release.

I've left out the columns to the left and right to prevent spoilers of course but I'm sure you can get the idea of how this works. On our Google Drive we have spreadsheets set up with the text for each page which we can all access collaboratively. 

Above is an example of the spreadsheet for page 1 of part 4. (It was the easiest to grab in progress since I completed it just before writing this post.) Now from here we'll just be talking in the context of English since that's what I work on but just copy this process for Traditional Chinese and Japanese. (releasing in the future 🎉)

First our translator goes and takes the CHS text and translates it to English— from there I get my first look at it and start the localisation process. As you can see above I usually open a second document so I can work on the lines while being able to see the direct translation. (And yes, as "Untitled 16" implies, I keep way too many notes open on my computer for different projects 😅) Editing and localisation is an important step for us since it cleans up the quality of the writing, fixes jokes that don't make sense, adds context where needed, and catches inconsistencies between our source material and the comic text. (In Flippant Academy this particularly applies to the game mechanics found in Astatos and the specific wording used there that the translator may not have been aware of.)

For comics specifically, a lot of this editing is trying to shorten text while keeping the original meaning intact in order to fit the lines within text boxes and the limited space available. English takes up a lot more horizontal space than Chinese and Japanese so I have to get creative a lot of the time. Once the text is re-written I'll grab the original Photoshop files for the pages and begin blocking out the text boxes with the script as indicated in the spreadsheet.

When positioning the text boxes for Flippant Academy I try to do my best to cover as little of the artwork while keeping everything as readable as possible. At this point some final adjustments may be made to the English text to make it fit the best on the page, such as using shorter words or adding hyphens when needed. Thankfully, having the ability to place the text boxes for Flippant Academy gives me a lot more freedom than our other series where I may have to rely more heavily on hyphenation or changing the font size or tracking between text boxes which is generally not something you want to do for readability and consistency sake.

Every now and then you have onomatopoeia, signs, and other graphics in the background that need to be localised. If the artist had the nicely on their own layers in the original file, it's easy to clean up and replace, otherwise you need to do a little bit of Photoshop work. Or in the case of the last few chapter of The Divine Battles, you have loads of onomatopoeia that need to be localised and drawn to match the original style. Which is mostly the reason why we've been unable to keep up with The Divine Battles releases in English since between my other duties I don't have the time for it. (Thankfully, we've got an extra person on hand to help with this now so you should be seeing more regular releases of The Divine Battles chapters in English.) 

Once all the text boxes, dialogue, and other text is formatted and ready I run one last spell check (you know, just in case) I reformat and export the files to the standard format we upload to our website and social media pages and update that the work has been completed. And then we're done, the comic has been successfully set up for release in English and I can take a break!

And that's all for this background blog! I probably rambled on for a bit too long but I hope you guys found this walkthrough of our process interesting. Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments and as always thank you for supporting us! 👏

- Compymono