This graphic novel project is part a type of new media, a pioneering effort by a handful of creators in search of a new medium for presenting art, story, voice, and music. A pool of talents was gathered for an old-fashioned romantic adventure with elements of Arabian Nights, Cinderella, and the Shangri-la myth. The story depicts a romantic adventure that spans modern-day New York City and the ancient, fictional country of Gao in China. In the midst of modern and old, fiction and non-fiction, West and East, English and Mandarin, romance and mystery, the graphic novel indeed is exotic to watch.

The work has been produced into ten video chapters. To give you a glimpse of our translation work, among what has been published: Chapter 3 has the most translation voices so far. The significant amount of Mandarin presented among English voices indeed makes the graphic novel stand out as a unique and interesting entertainment piece!

Monterey Language Services took extra time to polish the translations into Simplified Chinese to ensure not only accuracy, but an enjoyable and colloquial read for native speakers. Some of the challenges for this project were derived from cultural differences in how to translate certain phrases created specifically for the graphic novel.

For example, we have the “golden doom,” which refers to a specific event in the story. Because the event transports people similarly to the Christian idea of the rapture, our translation was “极乐升天,” which means “bliss ascension” in Chinese language.

One more example of the cultural challenge is rooted in English homonyms. The sentence: “They follow the standard of Lord Kang and swear on his eyes.” In this sentence, what does “standard” mean? If we suggested “average or normal requirement,” it actually would be incorrect! “Standard” in this instance means a battle flag—something ancient soldiers would follow on the battlefield.

Another difficulty was dealing with the ambiguity of written words. In spoken English, a person’s tone can very easily denote sincerity or sarcasm — consider the phrase “good job” being spoken sincerely and being spoken sarcastically, and their meanings become very different. While the context and illustrations in graphic novels can alleviate this confusion in text, sometimes the tone could be just missed. One such problem occurred in our initial translation of “What a stunt,” a line which our translator took be said in admiration, when in actuality, it was an insult. Through our editing/reviewing process we discovered the issue, and the translation was changed from “真是好身手” (really good) to “真有一套,” which has a similar meaning in a more sarcastic tone.

We are incredibly proud of the work we were able to provide for this project, and would like to add more viewing pleasure and excitement by sharing the above behind-the-scenes glimpses to our translation work. We wish all the success to the audience and contributors to the graphic novel. The chapters will be published in video format weekly on YouTube until the tenth and final one is uploaded.

A lot of people don’t necessarily understand how many services a language company like Monterey Language Services provides. Aside from interpretation, business translation, personal translation, and localization services, we also may be able to help out when it comes to your academic needs.`

We offer a whole branch of services which we call Academic Services. This usually encompasses grammar checking, editing, formatting and translation services for journal and conference articles, doctoral and master’s theses, and research papers and proposals. The convenience of the internet means you don’t know who may be looking to use the research from your thesis; or what languages they may speak!

One of the most popular portions of our academic services is formatting. A lot of people such as the person mentioned in this excerpt from one of our colleagues may have a hard time adapting to new paper formats. However, Monterey Language Services is here to help! They state:

“When I found out that Monterey Language Services offers Academic Services, I immediately thought of a friend of mine. She recently transferred to a new business school that insists on APA formatting for everything, even forum posts. A former History student, she had always used Chicago Style citation. Her first class was a Psychology class. Oh my, did she struggle! Her writing style and content were consistently A-B quality, but the stringent new citation format was very difficult to master. Unfortunately, her professor was a stickler for detail. Consequently, her worthwhile papers were severely graded down. She never earned above a C in that class. All of this could have been avoided if she had known about Monterey Language Services. She assures me that if she encounters another such professor; she will hire them right away. She insists that she will contract Monterey Language Services for her thesis formatting.”

If you would like more information and a larger list of the academic services we provide please visit our Academic Language Services brochure by clicking here: http://www.montereylanguages.com/docs/mls_academic_brochure.pdf

To put this into perspective we can look at a hypothetical situation. Let’s say a business established in the United States is opening a branch in German. In order to sell their product they will need to transform their whole website from English to German. Instead of making a whole new website for the German branch the smart thing to do would be to invest in a website localization service. Technical and translating experts work hand in hand to ensure that the web pages, hyperlinks, navigation bars, animations, and audio/video are all at a perfect translation from the original English version.

At Monterey Language Services we can help you with all of your localization needs, as it is one of our specialties. In fact, we are currently working on an interesting project which involves localizing 14 very different languages including German, Chinese, Tagalog, Finnish, Canadian French, Turkish, and Indonesian.

JAWS stands for Job Access with Speech, a software that uses speech synthesis technology to help the visually impaired enjoy numerous computer applications, programs, and even surf the web. The first version was released in 1989 by the American computer programmer Ted Hunter, who lost his sight in a car accident. That basic version has been updated immensely since then and now has windows support and even its own version of iTunes.

It’s nice to see technologies such as JAWS growing and getting more complex. Computers are one of our best sources of communication and should be available and easy to use for all.

Monterey Language Services watches the development of technology closely since it is such an important part of our work. In a way, the above-mentioned software localizes the computer programs for the blind. In this same spirit, Monterey Language Services offers software translation and localization services. We are currently working on a project to localize software into 14 different languages. In addition, we offer video-conferencing services for communication between two remote parties.