Glossary
Cleaning
Cleaning is removing the original text from a comic page before the translation is lettered in. It covers erasing the lettering inside speech bubbles and restoring the art, tone or color underneath, so that the page looks as if the text had never been there.
What cleaning involves
Cleaning gives the typesetter an empty bubble to write in. On a plain white bubble that means painting the letters out in white. On screentone, gradients, color or art behind the text, the cleaner has to rebuild what the letters covered, line by line or dot by dot.
Cleaning by hand
- Plain bubbles: select the lettering and fill it with the bubble's color.
- Screentone: copy matching tone from nearby and line up the dots.
- Art behind text: redraw the hidden lines with a brush.
- Sound effects: the hardest case, because large parts of the picture are hidden.
Cleaning with software
Automatic cleaning works in two parts. A mask marks the pixels of the lettering, and an inpainting model fills the masked area from the pixels around it. That is fast and works well on plain and lightly toned bubbles. On busy backgrounds it can leave faint marks a careful human cleaner would not.
How RuneManga handles it
RuneManga cleans every speech bubble it translates: the lettering is erased and the background under it filled in, instead of covered with a white box. The fill is a simple one today, so busy screentone can show where the text was. Sound effects and text outside bubbles are not cleaned, because they are not translated yet. On colored pages, Translate keeps the colors as they are.
Common problems and fixes
- Ghost marks on tone: a sharper, larger scan gives the fill more to work with.
- Letters left at the bubble edge: lettering that touches the outline is harder to mask.
- You want a perfect page: download the PNG and touch it up in an image editor.
Related terms
Inpainting is the method software uses for cleaning, and typesetting is the step that follows it. Sound effects are the hardest thing to clean, which is one reason they are left as drawn.
What is the difference between cleaning and typesetting?
Cleaning removes the original text. Typesetting places the translation in the cleaned space.
Can I get a cleaned page without a translation?
Not today. RuneManga cleans and typesets in one run.