That's a really neat looking site! The only language option is English, so I'm guessing this was in preparation for inputting translations into the text bubbles?
Yes, the idea was to gather the original (English) text (as
text, rather than pixels in part of the image) and the position/shape/size of the speech bubbles as basic data into a central tool so that, when people added translations later on, we could have the tool display the original comic images with bubbles with auto-layouted translated text
overlain onto them, thus avoiding the "fit the translation into the page" workload striking for
every single target language again.
Then the discussion about using a
separate tool to do the actual translation work began (such tools come with features like giving translators lists of previously-used translations of terms and idioms so that the translated text will have better internal continuity) and AFAIK we never got nailed down which one to use and how to provide APIs to make the two tools exchange the texts (which requires persistent IDing of text snippets so as not to allow errors in
which bubble of sound effect is supposed to receive an update) ...
(don't know enough about Chinese dialects to know how possible this is, of if there would be a better choice in the region though).
I know pretty much squat of non-European languages in general, but I'm under the impression that, while
randomly selected dialects of Chinese are quite likely to be close to complete gibberish to each other, there's enough history of
trade within China that people tend(ed) to have some grasp of their
neighbor's dialects ...
Never dwelled on it long enough to figure out who "Finland" would be.
There are a number of
ethnic minorities within China, including some with
non-Sinitic
languages. No idea which of those would be
totally incomprehensible to nominal Chinese, though, and of course you'ld have to pick one whose users live reasonably close to wherever the
other groups of your AU are.
I seem to remember, though, that other Chinese (used to?) see the
Miao as a tribe of magic-users with weird customs (one of them being that they're a rather
matriarchal society).
