Case Study

talk about the challenge

Talk About Cowboy Bebop is a perfect title for this book.

It tells you exactly what you'll find inside: Writers, actors, and series staff talking about this beloved science fiction anime. While some of this book is dedicated to introducing characters and key story concepts, the bulk of its pages are dedicated to essays written by three prominent Japanese subculture columnists, who give their thoughts, opinions, and interpretations of each of the series' 26 episodes and its interquel film. The book also features a roundtable discussion with the voice cast and an extended interview with Shinichiro Watanabe. The book is the sixth entry in the Library of Otakuology series, which is dedicated to analyzing notable science fiction anime, such as Space Runaway Ideon and Armored Trooper Votoms.

I was approached by someone to translate this book from Japanese to English. Inspired by their love of the series and hoping to hone my Japanese skills in order to take a proficiency test, I eagerly jumped at the opportunity. Everything seemed to be all well and good. Equal parts challenging and satisfying, I was able to develop a good routine and saw a noticeable improvement in my language skills. The client's requirement was simple: Make the translation as thorough and accurate to the original as possible. Easy enough.

talk about the visual design

Ideally, you'd just tear the book apart, scan each page, and then replace the Japanese text with English. That's how fan translations are usually done (Trivia: This kind of translation is known as a "scanslation"). One problem: It's not my book to destroy.
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Plus, once I decided to build a website, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to go through all of that effort. Of course, the downside was that I didn't have any access to the images in the book. In addition to character and mechanical line art, the book's essays are also peppered with screenshots, and captions, that provide additional context and information. Thankfully, most of the captions didn't require their corresponding images to make sense, meaning that the loss of these screenshots wouldn't compromise the quality of the translation. The fact that most of the line art has been published elsewhere was also a huge boon.

Now comes the challenge: Despite being unable to use the book's visual assets, I still wanted the website's visual style to match the book's.

There are a few reasons for this, but the biggest factor is that I believe that a translation ought to be as faithful to the original as possible. Naturally, a translation will always differ from the original. That's unavoidable because a translation is, by nature, an interpretation. No matter how hard you try to capture the original, something will always be lost. And when you factor in the space constraints that print translations face, you end up losing even more. That can leave you holding on to whatever you can retain for dear life. But this isn't a translation case study, it's a UX one. So let's talk about the visual design.

My client asked me to be as thorough and accurate as I could. Why wouldn't that also apply to the visual design? After all, someone spent time creating the book's layout and graphics. And in order to maximize the reader's experience, I would need an engaging and accessible layout anyway.