Why translated text does not fit the bubble
Why a translation can come out small or crowded in a speech bubble, which languages make it worse and what you can do about it.
Translated text often looks small in a bubble because the translation is longer than the original and the bubble cannot grow. RuneManga sets the text at the largest size that fits inside the bubble, so a long translation in a small bubble comes out small instead of overflowing it. A larger scan and a different target language can help; some cases cannot be fixed on our side yet.
Why it happens
- Japanese, Chinese and Korean pack a lot of meaning into few characters. A bubble with six characters can need a full English sentence.
- Some target languages run longer than English: Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian and Turkish tend to need more space.
- Bubbles are drawn for the original text. A narrow, tall bubble that fits vertical Japanese has little room for horizontal lines.
- Long words cannot be broken freely. When the text is wrapped, a very long word can force a smaller size.
- Some scripts, such as Arabic and Thai, need more room for their shapes and marks.
A quick example
A bubble with four Japanese characters can hold a whole thought. The English for it might be a sentence of five or six words. The bubble did not change, so the same area now has to hold three or four times as many letters, and the size drops to make room.
Tall, narrow bubbles
Vertical Japanese is written in a tall, narrow column. English is written in horizontal lines, so the same bubble can only hold a few short words per line. The text is wrapped into more, shorter lines, and when a word is long the size drops further. Wide bubbles suffer much less than narrow ones.
What RuneManga does about it
The text starts from the size of the original lettering and shrinks until the largest size that fits inside the bubble, with some padding, is found. Lines are wrapped on word boundaries when that does not cost too much size, and long words are split with a hyphen when they would force the text to become too small. On a very small bubble, the result is small text, not text running over the art.
What you can try
- Use a larger, cleaner scan. Small text on a low-resolution page has few pixels to start with, so shrinking it makes it unreadable fast. A bigger image gives the same lettering more pixels.
- Set Original language instead of Auto-detect. A wrong guess can produce a long, wrong translation, and a long translation is one that does not fit.
- Check the target language. If you read several languages, a shorter one like English usually fits better than Spanish or German.
- Do not crop the bubble. The bubble outline is how the space is measured.
Is it a problem or just a long line?
- If you can read it comfortably on your screen, it is fine. Text slightly smaller than the original is normal.
- If you have to zoom in to read it, try a larger scan first.
- If it is both tiny and touching the bubble edge, tell us. That is a fitting problem we want to see.
When it cannot be fixed yet
- A translation much longer than the original just gets small. The text does not grow into free space around the bubble.
- Text outside bubbles is not translated yet, so it has no bubble to fit.
- There is no way to edit the translated wording on the site yet.
If a page comes out clearly worse than it should, send us the page type and the language pair at [email protected]. Examples of text that is too small are exactly what helps us tune the sizing.
A last resort
Download the page and adjust it in an image editor. The result is a normal PNG, so you can retype or resize a single bubble without redoing the rest.