Multilingual Publishing

The story

Translating a comic has meant re-lettering every page. In the PanelWave format every reader-facing string is stored per language and balloons re-letter themselves, while artwork and voice audio can carry per-language variants. The CMS extracts the strings, machine-translates a first pass, exchanges XLIFF with professional translators, keeps a glossary and translation memory, and generates spoken lines per character. The player resolves a fallback chain so a partly translated work never shows a blank.

Why now

The bande dessinée and graphic novel tradition is European and multilingual by nature, and the company is based in Munich with the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the world's largest rights fair, as its first public stage. Localization tooling is where publishers spend money today.

Key facts

• Locales are BCP-47; a work declares its languages and a default that serves as the ultimate fallback.
• Machine-translated strings carry a badge until confirmed; source edits flag translations as stale for review.
• Voice audio per bubble can be uploaded or generated, with characters carrying a default voice.
• Alt text, captions and transcripts are localized too, so accessibility follows the reader's language.