I've been doing manga typesetting for going on seven years now, and I can tell you the exact moment most localization projects go off the rails. It's not during translation. It's not even during the initial typesetting pass. It's when someone — usually a project manager who's never touched Photoshop — looks at a finished page and says, "Can you just make the font a little bigger?"
That "little bigger" is where pages die.
A speech balloon in Japanese manga is designed for vertical text that runs top to bottom. Japanese characters are dense — you can pack a lot of meaning into a very small space. The same line translated to English typically expands by about a third, sometimes more. The balloon was never built for it.
So you compress. You find ways to say the same thing with fewer characters while keeping the emotional weight. "You're not making sense" works. "The hell does that mean" works better if the character is angry. "What?" with a more expressive font treatment works if the art already carries the emotion. Every single balloon is a negotiation between the translator and the typesetter, and there is no formula for it. You just have to read the page and feel where the breathing room is.
Sound effects are where most people give up
Here's the thing about Japanese onomatopoeia that catches newcomers off guard: it's everywhere. Not just in action scenes — everywhere. A quiet panel of a character at a bus stop might have three or four sound effects woven into the background. The wind. Footsteps. A distant train. A bird. Each one is hand-drawn as part of the artwork with a style that matches the artist's linework. They're not an afterthought. They're part of the composition.
When you localize these, you have three options, and two of them are bad.
Option one: remove them. You clone-stamp the original text out and leave the panel bare. The reader can tell something's missing. There's a gap in the visual rhythm. It's like watching a movie with the ambient soundtrack muted — technically the scene still works, but it feels hollow.
Option two: overlay English text on top. You pick a font, type "WHOOSH" or "CRASH," slap it roughly where the Japanese was, and move on. If the font doesn't match the artist's style — and it almost never does — it looks like a sticker pasted onto the page.
Option three: hand-render each replacement. You study the original artist's rendering style — stroke weight, perspective distortion, integration with speed lines — and you redraw the effect in English to match. Every. Single. One. Individually. This takes forever. There's no shortcut. But when it's done right, the reader cannot tell it wasn't there originally.
I've worked on projects where the sound effect budget was literally zero — the publisher just expected us to "handle it" in the same pass as the dialogue. We spent more time on sfx than on everything else combined. That's not unusual. It's normal.
DTP sounds boring until you realize it's the whole operation
Nobody gets into manga localization because they're excited about Desktop Publishing. I sure didn't. But DTP is the backbone of everything we do.
Most manga pages come to us either as flattened high-res images or, if we're lucky, as layered files where text exists on separate layers from the artwork. When you get layered files, great — turn off the text layers and you've got a clean canvas. When you get flattened images, you're doing what we call "redrawing": cloning and painting out every piece of Japanese text while keeping the underlying artwork intact. Sometimes the text is integrated into a detailed background — a shop sign, graffiti, a newspaper headline — and you're reconstructing art that was never meant to be seen without text on it.
Bad redrawing is visible. Good redrawing is invisible. And most publishers don't want to pay for the time it takes to do it properly because they don't understand that it's not just "erasing text" — it's reconstructing artwork.
Print manga in Japan is typically produced at 600 DPI or higher. Digital releases can get away with less, but we still typeset at print resolution because downscaling is fine — upscaling isn't. If you work at 150 DPI because "it's only going on a phone screen," and then the publisher decides to do a print run six months later, you get to start over. I've seen it happen. It's not fun.
Color manga adds another layer. White dialogue text on a dark moody panel doesn't look right if it's pure white — it needs to be slightly warm or cool to blend with the scene's color grading. These are small adjustments that most readers won't consciously notice, but they contribute to the overall feeling that the page was always meant to look like this.
Fonts matter more than you'd think
I maintain a font consistency sheet for every series I work on. It tracks which typeface goes with which character, which register — normal speech, shouting, internal monologue, whispering — and any special treatments. This sounds obsessive, but here's why it matters: a reader who's been with a series for ten volumes has learned to "hear" the characters through the lettering. When a hot-headed character suddenly appears in a generic sans-serif instead of their usual angular aggressive typeface, something feels wrong even if they can't articulate what changed.
Different languages complicate this. A font that works for English might not have the right weight or kerning for French, which has different proportions, or German, which tends to have longer words and needs tighter tracking. We sometimes end up using different typefaces for the same character across different language versions, calibrated to look as close to equivalent as possible within each language's typographic conventions.
The workflow nobody tells you about
Here's what actually happens on a well-run project, stripped of the marketing language:
● Separation: Text layers off, or digital removal and art reconstruction. Can take days for a full volume.
● Translation: Translator gets pages with balloon dimensions noted. Informed compression from the start.
● Typesetting: Every balloon gets individual attention — font, size, leading, tracking, baseline. Sfx hand-rendered. Reading direction checked.
● DTP formatting: Color matching, resolution validation. Print (CMYK, bleed), digital (faster turnaround), webtoon (vertical scroll, different panel pacing) from same source.
● Quality review: Page-by-page against original. Not checking accuracy — checking that the page looks right.
That last point is the whole job, really. If the reader never thinks about the localization, we did our job.
At Artlangs Translation, the manga and comic localization team handles this full pipeline — from text removal and translation through typesetting, sfx rendering, and DTP formatting — across 230+ languages. No shortcuts, no overlays, no "just make it bigger."
