New Translation Tech Available

For the life of this website, I’ve been reading French comics websites (especially ActuaBD.com) with the help of built-in translation tools inside the web browsers. Both Chrome and Safari make it a one-push button to turn a website written in one language into something readable in English. It’s never a perfect translation, but it’s good enough that I can read the story.

The other tool worth using is the Google Translate app on your phone. It has a picture mode. It turns your camera on. You point to the text to be translated, and it does it right on your screen in real time. I can imagine this is super useful for those overseas looking to read a sign for safety’s sake, or just for better directions.

The Google Translate app, though, takes it a step further. It will attempt to translate comics dialogue. It’s not that great, but it does give it a try. Open up Google Translate, turn on your camera, and point it at a comic to try it out.

I did that with a recent Spirou Journal issue and got this:

Forgive the shakiness of the image. That’s from the shake of the camera as I pressed the screengrab buttons. I notice from using this that there are sweet spots on the screen where translations can work better. If you’re too zoomed in on the thing you’re trying to translate, Google Translate tends to miss it.

Let’s look at one panel in more detail:

This is an example from Nob’s “Dad”. The girls are talking about The Little Mermaid. The younger one on the right is singing “Under the Sea,” but the translation missed the “Under the” part at the top, and isn’t smart enough to get the reference. Maybe it needs a little more artificial intelligence…

If you click the white button at the bottom of the screen in Google Translate, you can get a text file with all the words in the camera’s view translated out into one place. That can be useful when reading an article, but less so with comics.

This advanced translation of word balloons hasn’t been available in browsers. It’s a little weird in this day and age as all the lettering in comics is done on a computer using a font. The character forms are clean and consistent. There ought to be a way to figure this out.

It’s the kind of thing Artificial Intelligence was made for — not “creating” “art”, but recognizing patterns and helping us do things.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that Safari translates comic book word balloons now. Check this out:

You may even notice that in the signature in the bottom corner, Safari has translated the artist’s “Pardon a Uderzo” to “Sorry A Uderzo.” Not a perfect translation (it also doesn’t understand direct references, weirdly), but that does show it can translate handwriting as well as known fonts.

In fact, it translates the simple all-CAPS text as well as that super scripty-looking style that a lot of biographical comics like to use.

Again, it’s not perfect. In fact, it’s far from perfect in spots where it doesn’t even see every word, but it gets you far enough there that it’s handy. And they’ll only improve upon it from here.

It also looks just like Google Translate. The words look like they’re printed out on a label maker machine and stuck to the screen.

That’s why it’s triply weird that Google Chrome’s translation mechanism doesn’t include this. I have to think it’s a quality control thing. Maybe Google doesn’t want to put it into Chrome until the results are more accurate more often?

Firefox considers its translation feature a Beta thing. It’s no surprise, then, that it’s text only right now, too.

It’s good to see these translation tools getting better and being more widely available. It’s super helpful in learning about other cultures. Maybe not all of their Olympics Opening Ceremony culture–

— but regular language, at least…

(And, yes, I Googled it. I get it, but it is still strange.)