Comix Influx Blog: Clyde Mandeline - Fan Translator

Catching up on some old blogposts, I had meant to talk about this interview with a chap called Clyde Mandelin, who does fan translations of computer games (the textual bits of them anyway). Apparently this is a relatively wide-spread activity, with the aim of making Japanese games, which haven’t been translated (or “localised”), available to English-speaking audiences.

The process of creating a translated version of a game is very interesting. First a “hacker” opens the original game program (referred to as “a ROM” – for Read-Only Memory – due to the way they are normally stored). They then look through the program to locate the font used to display the original text. With that, they can find in-game text, by recognising where the font is used. They extract that text into a regular file which a translator then takes and translates. Finally the new text has to be inserted back into the program (which may require new font characters to be embedded in the program as well), and the new, translated game program game can be saved.

The original programs are typically stored on cartridges which are inserted into consoles, but for these translated games the programs are normally made available on the web for people to download and play using software which emulates the original consoles.

Mandelin does the translation bit of the process, and, as well as working on these fan translations for the love of it, is a professional game translation too. I won’t rehash the article here, but there’s lots of interesting stuff about the pros and cons of doing fan translations as opposed to professional ones (mistakes can be more easily fixed in the ROM-hacked versions for one thing).

But still, apart from the “fan translation” aspect this may all seem of little relevance to Comix Influx. There is an obvious connection with the scanlation scene, both in the material and also in the way the translations are produced. There, people scan the pages pages and then add translations using a graphics program like Photoshop or Gimp.

Comix Influx, on the other hand, deals almost exclusively with hard copies of printed books, so there is no direct analogue to opening up the program and locating and replacing the original text. However, the emergence of electronic comics in various forms seems to raise some interesting possibilities, with more in common with Mandelin’s approach. Comics are now becoming available on the Kindle (despite the quality really not being there yet), and the web-comics scenes is burgeoning, as Wim wrote about recently. Indeed, Katherine Farmar has already translated one of Aurélia Aurita’s web-comics.

However, one essential difference between the text within a game and within an electronic comic is that in the game the text is stored as genuine text – i.e., as characters corresponding to individual letters; in electronic comics they are normally just part of the image. Most of the them would not have used a computer font in the first place – instead being hand-lettered and scanned – and those that do still tend to have have the text flattened into the image. In fact, most web-comics are presented as JPGs which don’t even support embedded text.

A notable exception to this is the public information comic, No Ordinary Flu, which I wrote about last Summer. In this case, the publisher wanted to get the comic out to a wide readership in 12 different languages (actually, 16 languages now now) as efficiently, effectively – and legibly – as possible, so using regular computer fonts was clearly the best option. Additionally, due to the way the agency actually produced the various translations, the comic was distributed in PDF, and most translated versions had proper text which supported search and cut’n’paste (try the search functionality on the French version – it’s really nice!).

In time, high-quality, personalised fonts will be more affordable, and will probably become the norm for creating comics. But even then, unless there are good reasons to do otherwise creators will continue to distribute their comics as JPEGs, with the text flattened into the image. And although, as people start to read comics on their eReaders, iPhones and computers they might expect standard functionality such as text-search and cut’n’paste, they aren’t the killer-apps which would make a difference to the standard production practice.

I actually expect it will probably go the other way – with things like search being added to electronic comics using OCR techniques to identify the embedded text, rather than changing the distribution format. Until something like that happens, though, in this medium of words and picture, the words will remain second-class citizens.

Thanks to Mike Rhode for the initial link.