"The Language Barrier" usage

[Valkyrk]

I once did a two-comic stint involving translating. Essentially, one character was translating from Chinese into English, and from English into Chinese. I thought this would make for an interesting little idea, so I did it. You can see it http://valkyrk.comicgenesis.com/d/20070917.html there.

However, everyone I talked to thought it was a TERRIBLE idea. And instead of actually just reading the English, "Uh......yeah, your comic looks good, but it's too bad I can't read it because it's all in Chinese." I did not intend for the reader to be able to read the Chinese, but just to induce what was being said through the panels displayed and through the English dialogue.

I was originally planning to have a few segments like this, but after hearing all of their negative comments, I'm having second thoughts. Are "Language translating" segments really that bad? If not, is there any way I can do them better?

((Note: Instead of writing out the characters, I stuck with the pinyin. Looking back on it, it was a bad choice. It's just that writing characters in Microsoft Paint seemed kind of daunting at the time.))

((Second Note:I am not fluent in Chinese, but I know it pretty well. I asked for help from a fluent speaker I know to tie up loose ends for me.))

[Levi-chan]

Do both languages in english. Put identifiers for characters speaking another language - a different font, or closing and opening tags for it. Put a footer afterwards that explains what the identifiers stand for.

[Lap1994]

Or do like Megatokio comic
<Chinese>
English
<Chinese again>
Just write english between < And >. I read about 50 pages before notice this

[Levi-chan]

Yeah, that's why I recommend the font idea better. It's more distinctive; and you can match a font to the "feel" of the language being depicted. I'll send examples later.

[KWill]

Bean had an interesting way of doing this. He put both languages in the same balloon, only the original was lighter and in the background while the English translation was clearly visible. Example here.

[Galaxydefenders]

I'm proud to be the first person to say something positive here.

~ Good work. ~

Now that I said that, let me explain - I think the other guys may have missed the point slightly; it was perfectly clear to me that one character was acting as a translator. Even if I hadn't come from this forum to your comic, I'd have seen "he says '...etc etc...' " being said by one of your characters and understand that a translation was being given for that which I did not understand.

As a balance for this comment, there is always a danger that the audience might think that they are supposed to be multilingual to read your comic - which would be less good. Picture composition and clues like "he says" in the dialogue are vital to keep this up in a written comic.

For anyone who thinks that translation is always nessecary, I refer you to the utterly brilliant mini-TV-series "Shogun" in which the main character - English - spends the entire time in Japan. For the first few hours the vast majority of the dialogue is Japanese without translation. Superb direction and acting convey all the important meanings. Eventually the main character is taught some Japanese - which we as an audience see - and then uses it later - again without translation.

-Tom