A while back, just as an exercise to practice my French, I–with a bit of help from my then French teacher–translated the first chapter of my book, Oyster War, into French.  It was an interesting experience that gave me a bit of insight on the kind of issues professional translators must deal with on a day-to-day basis: character names that have weird connotations in other languages, sound effects without easy analogs, etc. 

It also, though, allowed me–since I was translating my own book–to do some things during the translation that I wish were possible in all translations: things like changing the shape of word balloons, for example. One thing that often stands out in translated comics is that the “word shapes”–meaning the overall shape of the group of words contained within a balloon–don’t match the balloon shapes. This is the result of those word shapes being different in the base language and the translated language. Here’s a pretty egregious example of that:

The example above would actually be fairly easy to fix, since the worst case is the bottom balloon–a balloon that’s mostly drawn over a white background. In many cases, this would be a much more difficult problem to fix because the balloon would more than likely be drawn over a rendered background and unless the translator had access to unflattened files, they wouldn’t be able to change the balloon without affecting the background underneath–which is why (I assume) this stuff is usually left as-is.

In my case, though, when the French word shapes differed substantially from the original English ones, I was able to redraw them and then fill in new background material as needed:

I was also able to redraw my hand-done sound effects so they integrate with the art, as you can see with things like the “Clac” and “Jette” on the second page. 

I’ve never had one of my books translated/published in French (or any other non-English language for that matter) , so maybe this is the closest I’ll get! But, hey, it looks like I’ll finally be going to Angoulême this year–so French publishers, hit me up, yo!