Check out my buddy Matt's comic on Zuda!

New Material as of Saturday, December 22, 2007:

Although you don't have to, it'd be nice if you could read and respond to this whole post if you're planning to help transcribe or translate the comic, but if you want to just skim over the first part, that'll tell you all you need to know. The rest is probably just me rambling anyway. The latest info it here, toward the top.

The short version

First off, there aren't real hard and fast rules for this. Basically, I'm asking people to just post comments to each day's comic with a transcription, either in English or another language, using the language of the translation/transcription in the title in a way readable to speakers of that language and for English speakers.

For instance, a title for a German translation might be "German, Deutsch." If you've already done it some other way, that's cool--No need to go back and change it. Just thought it would make it easier for people to search.

As for content, here are the basics--At a minimum, please just write down what each character is saying and who is saying it, and give some indication of the breaks between frames. That's about it.

(Note: Angle brackets enclosing things will not show up here as-is, so I suggest perhaps three asterisks on each side for sound effects. Like so: ***sound effect***

Here's an example of a transcription.
----------------

(title: English)

TRANSCRIPTION:
1
Sarah: Hey, I remember you guys.

Crash: Same here. I'm Crash, and this is Blue and Kit. Looks like we're neighbors now.

2
Sarah: Pleased to meet you. I'm Sarah, and this is Seth.

3
Sarah: So is Crash some sort of nickname?
Crash: Dating these two, it's more like a way of life.

------------------

Although I've got some formatting and additional content suggestions below, they are just that--Suggestions. The main thing is to get the dialogue down--Sort of like subtitles--and show who is saying what.

Nice little extras:

Remember, if you don't do any of the below, it's okay.

Getting the joke or story across is more important than word-for-word translation. If a joke doesn't translate to another language well, it might be a good idea to maybe explain it.

It would be especially nice to either a) describe the action and all characters present, or b) put characters present and other keywords in list form--For instance, if Sarah and a zombie are both there, but neither is mentioned in the translation/transcript, it'd be nice to have them listed as keywords.

It'd also be nice to have the entire newsbox translated, but again, anything is better than nothing.

Perks for translators
It's not much, but I want to give all translators and transcribers who do a significant number of translations the ability to browse the site ad-free, and those who do bunches and bunches (I haven't yet defined how much a bunch is) a listing on an Translation Staff page, and perhaps a bluecrashkit.net subdomain and email address. Your thoughts? If you've been transcribing and/or translating and I seem to have forgotten you, contact me. My memory's never been very good, and it's even worse since the accident.

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Where we are

First of all, if there isn't a transcript or translation available for a given comic, then it still needs done, so it's easy to figure out whether something has been done or not.

Over 400 episodes have been transcribed in English over at ohnorobot.com, and I'm going to copy and paste those, and edit them later if I need to. If anyone else wants to help with that, be my guest! As I said--If you don't see it in the newsbox or a comment below the comic, it hasn't been done yet.

No need to wait for the English transcripts to start translating, either.

The why
The purposes of this project are a) to make the comic more accessible to non-English speakers, b) and to the visually impaired, while at the same time c) making the comic easier to search by keywords.

For instance, say someone can't remember what specific installment they're looking for, but remember it had zombies in it. They could just do a search for zombies. The visually impaired can have their computer read aloud dialogue and a description of what is going on. Non-English speakers, of course, get to read a transcript in their own languages.

The how
Now that I've thought it through, I don't know why I didn't just ask people to put their transcriptions and translations into comments below the comic. Doh! *thwaps own forehead* So, um... Yeah. Just do them as comments for now, and when the mega-cool translation stuff is ready fo Drupal 6 and I can get switched over, I'll convert them all then.

The format I'm thinking of so far...

What I've been trying to do when I write a transcript of the comic is to briefly describe each frame and give the dialogue. I've thought about adding keywords and a list of which characters are in each installment, too, but frankly, I'm grateful for any and all help with this.

I figure that descriptions are less critical for translations, because I imagine that readers with a combination of visual impairment AND not speaking English would be fairly rare. I'll try to keep descriptions in the English version as much as I can, but I'm not going to complain if other's don't.

It'd also be great to have the entire contents of each newsbox translated, but hey--That is probably asking a bit too much.

Here's an example of what I'm thinking... (And I'll have to go back and edit the transcripts I've done so far.)

----
The comment subject line would be the language, ie, "English." If non-English, it might be cool to list the language in both English and the native spelling, i.e., "German, Deutsch." If you've already done it some other way, that's cool--No need to go back and change it. Just thought it would make it easier for people to search.

Then in the body, something like this (and keep in mind that this is an idea--Any kind of translation is great as long as people know who's talking:

1
(Blue & Crash still hiding in the bushes)

Crash: Hm... Now the problem is to get to the island without being seen.

2
Blue: You could fly us both across.

Crash: They'd see us. We need a better way.
Crash: I know! We'll swim across! Fortunately, I came prepared for just such an eventuality.

3
(Blue & Crash in women's bikinis like the one worn by Ursula in the James Bond film, "Island of Dr. No.")

Blue (looking uncomfortable): Are you SURE this is the only swimsuit they had in my size?

Crash: Heh...

--------------

Give me input
I am thinking that if we describe each panel, then the keywords and character lists would be unnecessary.

For instance, "Blue, looking barely awake, is still wearing the coffee beans on his head, has put the coffee pot full of fish on top of the Nip the cat, and is trying to plug Nip's tail into the electrical socket.")

On the other hand, anyone who doesn't want to mess with all of that could just list all the characters present and a list of keywords. For instance, using the comic above as an example, somewhere in the body of the transcript would be something like--

characters: Blue, Crash
keywords: bikini, blue in drag, swimsuit

Again, if the action in each frame is described, the character list and keywords would be superfluous.

So, whatcha think?

For now
Right now I have a stopgap solution up--Buttons for the Google Translate service. Machine translation, however, is not nearly as good as human translation. Eventually I'll be able to take all the transcripts and translations you good people provide and make it so that one can simply choose their language.

What do you get out of this?
Well, I wish I could buy you all a pony, or at least a few beers, but as it is, I can't. What I can do (although it isn't much) is change your permissions on the site to let you change your theme to one without the advertisements.

Sorry I can't do more. Thanks to everyone who can lend a hand. Even if you're not able to willing to help with this, we still love you more than cheese.