ComixInflux.com Blog

No Ordinary Flu is a public-information comic from Public Health – Seattle & King County which aims to educate people about the potential risks of a flu pandemic. The inspiration for the comic came from Meredith Li-Vollmer, who also wrote it and enlisted Seattle-based comics creator David Lasky to illustrate it. In order to reach its target audience of immigrant communities and refugees, No Ordinary Flu was published in 12 languages simultaneously (in print, and as a PDF download), and it is fascinating and instructive to see how much more rigorous the approach to translation has to be in an educational comic of this nature, compared with that of Comix Influx.

Meredith Li-Vollmer decided to use the medium of comics books for this project as it enabled her to deliver the information to a wider range of her target audience of local immigrants and refugees than other media would have allowed. She discovered through audience research at Public Health – Seattle & King County, where she works, that immigrant communities wanted more pictorial information, with comic books being particularly popular in many parts of Latin America and Asia (in a small focus group of Vietnamese immigrants, more said they get information from comic books than from email or the internet!).

She says that an additional benefit with comics is that the number of words used is much lower than in regular prose – this makes the information more accessible to audiences with relatively low literacy, and also help keeps the cost of translation down. Lower costs allowed for the comic to be translated into eleven languages, targeting communities who do not receive much of their information through the mainstream media. The twelve languages in which No Ordinary Flu is published are Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, English, Khmer, Korean, Laotian, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Public Health – Seattle & King County make the comic available in print to people who live in King County, but make it generally available to everyone as a PDF download.

A lot of information had to be packed in to the 12 pages of No Ordinary Flu, and yet it retains an accesibility which is key to the comic’s success. Li-Vollmer, had to figure out how to get all the important messages into a short book, and so decided on a simple story describing how one family survived the 1918 flu pandemic, told from the perspective of that family’s descendants. She shows the effects of pandemic flu and delivers advice on the appropriate precautions and procedures to minimise the impact of a new pandemic.

The genesis of the story was “the image of a lone person walking past an empty playground” she says “it seemed like it might reach people on a visceral level”. And yet despite such bleak imagery, No Ordinary Flu does not come across as a scare-story (nor, at the other extreme, as a dry, fact-based infomercial). Cleverly Li-Vollmer makes her protagonists the descendants of survivors of the 1918 pandemic, so that the story is inherently positive while still getting its very serious message across.

Li-Vollmer approached Seattle-based comics creator David Lasky to illustrate the comic. When she discovered that his great-grandmother had died in the 1918 pandemic she knew he was ideal for the project. Lasky does a great job on No Ordinary flu. His duotone art works very well for the subject matter – sufficiently realistic and detailed to deal with such a serious subject, and yet clean and simple enough to be accessible. The shifts in the story between 1918 and the present day are very clear. Overall it’s a great work of the comic art – gracefully communicating its story without getting in the way.

It is fascinating, from a Comix Influx point of view, to see how rigorous the approach to translation has to be in a project of this nature. The idea with Comix Influx is that a “just good enough” translation is better than nothing; for No Ordinary Flu this is not true at all. The translation must be not just accurate (especially in its use of medical terminology), but must also use language that is appropriate for the immigrant communities in America, not for native speakers in their own countries. In order to ensure this, the translations, which were carried out by an agency, were extensively reviewed by independent speakers of the various languages (apparently Ukrainian and Laotian speakers were the hardest to find).

In order to keep the translations relatively straight-forward, Li-Vollmer’s team tried to avoid using colloquialisms in the original script, changing “glad to see you made it home in one piece,” to “great to have you back, soldier!” (Li-Vollmer tells of one occasion when an “information hotline” about the trans-fat ban was translated as “a line that is (temperature) hot” – fortunately the error was caught before going out!). They also provided in-line explanations where necessary to make the meaning absolutely clear – a similar approach to that used by some people on Comix Influx, annotating their best attempts at translation.

All in all, this is an astounding attention to detail, and it is no surprise that, according to Li-Vollmer, translation has been one of the most challenging aspects of the work they do at Public Health – Seattle & King County. For this project, though, they found a great translation agency in Lingua Linx, who are not only very experienced in translation services, they also were good at the Desktop Publishing side of the project. In fact it was Lingua Linx who suggested that, as Arabic is read right-to-left, the art in the Arabic version should be flipped horizontally – the reverse process from the flipping of Manga for a Western audience (interestingly, the Manhwa of Korea and the Manhua of China are read left-to-right, and correspondingly the Korean and Chinese versions of No Ordinary Flu were not flipped).

David Lasky provided the art as InDesign files, with blanks left where the words were due to go. Lingua Linx would then insert their translations into the InDesign files, before sending those to the publisher. One consequence of this process is that when viewing the translated versions in a PDF reader (such as Adobe Acrobat) it’s possible to use the cursor and select the text (for example, to copy and paste it)! This is even true for some of the text that’s part of the image such as newspaper headlines, and a coughing sound-effect. This is very unusual for electronic comics, partly because many comics creators hand-letter rather than use computer fonts, but also because the lettering is generally flattened into the art as part of the production process; clearly this wasn’t the case with No Ordinary Flu where the lettering was applied to the finished art, and so the text survives as a distinct part of the PDF file.

While this effect was not deliberate in No Ordinary Flu (although you could argue that it has some accessibility benefits), it is intriguing to speculate whether it might become more prevalent as computer fonts that mimic hand-lettering improve and as the number of comics available in PDF or similar formats increases. And there is another advantage to the electronic version: Li-Vollmer let me know that a small proof-reading error crept into the Spanish version of No Ordinary Flu; the printed copies now need to go out with a explanatory slip, whereas the PDF version was corrected immediately. Nonetheless, this is all a little academic at this stage, as unsurprisingly the print version has proved far more popular with the target audience than the electronic versions – indeed, the Russian, Somali and Ukrainian editions had run out at the time of writing.

If you compare the original English version of No Ordinary Flu with one of the translated versions, it is easy to see where Lasky had to erase things in the original version, such as the newspaper and the coughing previously mentioned, so that the translations could be more incorporated into the comic. Lasky said that he would love to see more of his own work translated, but if it were he’d love to be able to go in and do those kind of things by hand. Nonetheless, while computer fonts generally look a little jarring when used in comics, for this project a clean, clear computer font was most appropriate for reasons of legibility as well as, obviously, reasons of cost.

It is clearly evident how the need to bring this important information to as much of its target audience as possible – an audience that is traditionally difficult to reach through the normal mainstream channels – has driven every aspect of this project; from the story, to the art; from the careful choice of register, to the painstaking care applied to the translations; it has even driven the choice of comics as a medium.

The book succeeds due to the effort and attention to detail from Li-Vollmer, David Lasky and the many other contributors to the project, but realising that a comics story was the ideal vehicle to deliver her message was Meredith Li-Vollmer’s really brilliant insight.

My thanks to Meredith Li-Vollmer and Alanna Beebe of Public Health – Kings County and Seattle, and David Lasky for their generous help in writing this post. Please check out No Ordinary Flu at the Public Health – Seattle & King County website.

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Courtesy of the excellent Boing Boing.

Katherine Farmar (puritybrown, of this parish) has just started another translation – Chute De Vélo by Étienne Davodeau.

I’m not yet familiar with Davodeau’s work, but Katherine wrote enthusiastically about it on her blog back in April:

_“Chute de Vélo is an astonishing piece of work that builds towards its climax in almost imperceptible increments. ... Davodeau is an incredibly gifted storyteller: whatever English-language publisher snaps up the rights…

From the excellent work that Pikayev’s done on translating Les formidables aventures de Lapinot: Vacances de printemps, Gus 1: Nathalie and Le Long Voyage de Léna, I just realised that Amazon must have changed the format they send data back over their web-services.

For example, whereas I had expected to pick up the cover:

:http://www.amazon.fr/long-voyage-L%C3%A9na-Christin/dp/220505743X%3FSubscriptionId%3D1CERAAFN191K9DWFYJR2%26tag%3Dws%26linkCode%3Dxm2…