A case study of two panels from fenta's comic Our Home, which you can find in SYSTEM 01: Hot Net Hotel.
We rarely talk about the processes behind our work, but as we encounter more and more people at our public events, we're realizing there is a curiosity about what we do as a "publisher." Here we've honed in on the translation workflow for one of fenta's comics in our latest anthology.
Every translation we make usually passes through at least three sets of eyes. Orion, Xinmei and Jason take turns translating the comic. There's no set team member who goes first (sometimes the artist gives us a first draft translation); we simply build on the work of whoever goes first by passing PDFs with comments back and forth with one another.
We translated it as "the dude" above, but technically it says "big brother" in Chinese. It's always tricky translating older/younger sibling terms into English In this case, since the usage is part of a casual utterance, we went with a casual translation (rather than suddenly dropping "big brother," which would feel like a formal honorific.)
You can see here that one of us tried to add more detail to the translation to make it more "accurate" to the original text, which mentioned "grain" and "two individuals." But at the same time, they sacrificed the flow/legibility of the speech bubble. It sounds fine in Chinese, but in this English rendition, it's kind of clunky.
As one of us later said (in a PDF comment): "We'll get to it later. For now, I feel like it's a little tricky because it doesn't sound great in English, at least to my ears."
The bottom panel update is much more minor:
Simply a rephrasing of the first sentence to make it smoother and to add an alliteration on the "quality quinoa."
As you can see, we reverted back to the first translation for the top panel. But kept the second translation for the bottom panel.
And that's just two panels from one comic. Our anthology, Hot Net Hotel, has 15 comics total. (Though they vary in terms of how dialogue or narration heavy they are.)