Has anyone on here ever translated your series into another language?

[Missapogee]

The beta-reader is good advice, thank you!

I don't think you should feel ashamed! It was probably really good language practice, even if it wasn't perfect!

[thecrystalrook]

I havent yet, but I've considered translating my series into Japanese

[rajillustration]

I've considered getting it translated into Spanish, but only if it got big enough that I could like...hire someone to help me. I can do a big chunk of the translation, since I can speak a good amount of Spanish, but I'm not truly fluent, and a lot of idioms and rythm would be lost. I'd need a natural to polish it off and make it more engrossing for other fluent speakers.

Thing is...I go back and forth on whether it would be worth it to just do a rough draft version of "this is my best, but it's here" so I can have an alternate available, to get more readers, to make it more possible to get a translator to help me out later, or to not.

[GloamingCat]

I had a fan translate my comic to Russian, but the site has been down for a while

And I consider a lot translating it to Brazilian Portuguese, which is my native language, but damn it's too much work lol And I don't have many followers from Brazil, and those I have can also read in English so it's not worth it. But I still dream about it. ;-;

A question about Japanese: wouldn't it be better to jap readers if the text is vertical? All manga use vertical text so I guess reading horizontally might be uncomfortable or something. Idk I just never saw jap comics with horizontal text before so there might be a reason for that.

[sorible]

It can be confusing to translate sometimes because some phrases wouldn't make sense if you translated it directly. Like the phrase, "시작이 반이다." It means Well begun is half done, but translates literally to "The start is the half."
Or certain references that only make sense in a certain culture. Puns and play on words are also hard.

[Missapogee]

Japanese can be read vertically or horizontally comfortably! In some Japanese books I have they go from vertical to horizontal back to vertical on a single page! But choosing between vertical and horizontal is definitely something I may ask a Japanese friend about.

Since my comic is originally in english, it's read left to right, but Japanese text is read right to left when vertical and left to right when horizontal, so it may be awkward going from bubble to bubble if you're reading R>L but the page is formatted L>R. I'll have to do more research!

[Oto_Kouda]

It's possible! The same way we read manga right to left, they read comics left to right in Japan. Sure it's a little awkward, but weeaboos and westaboos happily reverse their brains to read each others' media!

For some examples:

[thecrystalrook]

Works of Japanese literature are typically written top to bottom, right to left. There is most definitely left-to-right horizontal reading as well in Japan, so it's definitely not something out of the ordinary for them. For the spiderman comic posted above, it uses left-to-right reading likely because its easier to fit into the speech bubbles. If you're doing something out of the ordinary for a particular region, just make a note of it somewhere to let the reader know how they should read it

[SpavVy]

I used to have a friend who translated my comic into Portuguese but sadly we slowly drifted apart as the years went by and I don't know what happened to him but I hope he's alright.

After that, I had my comic translated a few other times but not with my consent, normally I'd be upset that people would take my work and post it on other sites but I found this rather interesting and was credited for my comic at least. One of them was posted on Facebook and one of my fellow comic friends managed to find out it was translated into a language from an Asian country that I can't remember for the life of me because it wasn't any of the ones I'm more familiar with like Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, or Korean as an example. I'm kinda tempted to give their Facebook page a like and seeing as my comic is currently the only one on there I think it would be a friendly way to kinda mess with them a bit.

[RSung]

My comic's original language is chinese, I want to post my comic her but I decide to translate it myself. So the english version of my comic is all translated by me.

Regular life of Eliza | Tapas

[magnavarra]

I wrote my comic in english from the beginig, and then i started translating into russian (my native). Some problems that I encountered

1. It's hard to translate jokes and puns based on word sounding, I need to find similar meanings to work with another language and sometimes the meaning is lost or has slightly different flavor.
2. It's hard to translate names that has slightly different equivalents in another language. I played with letters here again but in another language its different.
3. Less fonts support the Russian language - I couldn't find the exact same font so used a weird substitution.
4. i try to keep the meaning and flavor of dialogues but sometimes its less or more words in Russian, so I need to resize speech bubbles.
5. I translated songs that I have literary so the rhyme was lost, and one song was impossible to translate because it was based on specific terms and game thats in english and feelings so it had no sense, i agve up and left it in English
6. I tired making characters diverse and from different regions so that they have accent - which is lost with translation. Also one of the chars was russian and speak with strong russian accent for fun - while others are kinda english-americans. But with Russian version I had to make her misspronounce some sounds and words as a low education person from a countryside so that she still has some accent because everyone now speaks russian

[AmandaJ-art]

I translate my comic into Latvian. This comic is set in Latvia so it makes sense to do so.

It can get messy if two languages show up. In the original everything is in English. In the comic one character is speaking in English at some point and then I have to make it known in the Latvian somehow.

Jokes and saying don't translate well. I lose a lot with the translated version. English sayings don't work in Latvian.

Everything can't be translated perfectly. Sometimes I have to change the whole sentence for it to sound normal.

There can also be a problem with the speech bubbles. Some sentence can get squished in the bubbles.

[mcarrowolga]

My novel "Cold Obsidian" was originally written in Russian (translating it into English was totally worth it!) and my comic "Gifts of wandering ice" had a Russian translation (wasn't worth the effort, alas).

[FafasMcMelt]

Yes, translated The Ghoul from portuguese to english. It's pretty tricky when either the language doesn't have the word you need, or you just don't have the vocabulary to pull it off. It's a fun and frustrating process.

[Lilmonstart]

Well...I might translate my comic to spanish (my native language) once it´s finished
Since I´m working with english I really gotta watch out for any grammar mistakes and such xd

[Darth_Biomech]

The originals of my comic are in Russian, so I kind of have to in order to publish it internationally.

[Caro]

I’ve always wanted to translate to spanish since its my first language but I’m not mega confident in my ability to translate especially some of the jokes. I also want to translate to japanese for fun as a kinda language learning side project.

I’ve had one of my comics officially translated and released in print in Korean and I have a copy of it and some of the merch they made along with the release and its nice because I didn’t have to do any of the work, all of the creative direction was good on their end, but I hate that I can’t read it and be sure its a good translation!

[Leverance]

People have asked me before to translate my stories. The reason why I said ' no ' is because sometimes, especially if they're a stranger, they can steal it from you. That's why I don't allow any translations of any kind in my work. Considering that plagiarism seems to be wild online, I don't want to take any chances.

I advise having a professional translate it over a fan.

[starless]

I do my own translation and onomatopoeia is killing me.
Not only I have to find the right words but also have to draw the words fitting. It's super time consuming.

[hjpetersonauthor]

I'd really like to get "Project: Achilles" translated at some point, but I really don't know what language would be best for it. I have some lines that'll be in German in the main English version, so maybe that'll be the first language I eventually translate it into.