Before coming to MIIS, I taught English in a little tourist town in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, called Gero. Gifu is a beautiful place, with amazing nature, fresh food, and — best of all — hot springs. It also, like many things in Japan, has a cute mascot: Minamo, the Water Fairy. A friendly character that brings happiness to everyone he encounters.

So, in an effort to let more people know about Minamo and, by association, Gifu Prefecture, I decided to localize the below children’s book featuring Minamo and famous sights around Gifu from Japanese to English. You can find the original book on Minamo’s official webpage (obviously he has one).

I’ll go into more detail about the process I took to localize the book, but first, the finished product:

I’m pleased with the result! It wasn’t a too difficult project, but it presented some interesting challenges.

The Process

This project can be broken up into a few distinct phases. They are:

To-Do

1. Download all assets
2. Prepare pages for translation
3. Localize reading order
4. Translate
5. Insert back into website format

I wanted the final product to be as close to the original as possible, which meant recreating the simple webpage that it is embedded in. I didn’t have access to the original files, but masking out the text wasn’t too difficult, as it’s mostly on a white background with just a few sentences overlapping the pictures. In some places the text was quite narrow because of the vertical orientation of the Japanese writing. And, being a Japanese book, the layout was right-to-left, which meant reworking the page numbers and the order that the pages appeared within the website.

The last page of the book is a map of Gifu with short descriptions of famous places. This map features a few different fonts and lots of small text, and so took a little longer to localize. Finally, the cover page had some characters separated into little bubbles — a practice that looks fine in Japanese, but wouldn’t work well in English. You can see below a comparison — Japanese on left, English on right — showing how I chose to localize these pages.

Localizing the reading order involved first using Adobe Photoshop to erase the pages numbers completely, and then using Adobe InDesign to add real page numbers to the project that could be manipulated. Photoshop and InDesign work seamlessly together, and you can edit an image from InDesign at the same time right in Photoshop without doing any file juggling by Right Clicking > Edit With > Adobe Photoshop. When you save within Photoshop, the changes will instantly be reflected in InDesign. Couldn’t be simpler.

I also needed to go into the HTML of the webpage to change how the reading panel behaved. To my surprise, the code for the webpage was very well commented — in English, no less. It was a simple matter of renaming files and changing a few attributes.

For places where the margins were very narrow and I didn’t want to cover up any of the illustrations, I used the Pen tool in InDesign to create custom borders around the illustrations where no text was allowed. This saved me from having to resort to awkward line breaks or squished text. You can find a great tutorial on how to do this here. The final product looked like this:

If I did it over, I might make the border a little bit further from the picture. But, not too bad for a proof-of-concept! While we’re on this page, if you read my English translation you may be thinking to yourself, “What on earth is a ‘milkvetch’?” Or maybe it’s just me. In any case, I went back and forth on whether to translate the flower’s name literally, or just localize it to “flowers”. In the end, I decided that since this book is meant to be showcasing specific things found in Gifu, I should use the flower’s real name. However, I did try to make it clear that it is, in fact, a flower.

And that’s pretty much it! I’m glad I was able to do this project. It was nostalgic seeing all these places in Gifu again and reading about them. I hope I’ve done Minamo proud!