Localizing a banner for the city of Bungotakada

By Nicole HenryMulitlingual Desktop Publishing

Introduction

From 2015 to 2020, I lived in a small town of 20,000 people called Bungotakada. This tiny, rural city is located in Oita, Japan, on what I lovingly call “the pimple,” due to the round shape of the little peninsula. A beautiful place with nature aplenty, I love Bungotakada like a second home.

When I thought of potential localization projects to work on, the first thought that popped into my mind was localizing a little piece of my second home into English, so that more people might be able to learn about Bungotakada. I searched and sifted through several images before I came across this banner.

Peaceful, beautiful, and warm. This banner represents Bungotakada perfectly.

Steps

  1. Preflight – Create a second copy of the banner. Make a picture list. Etc.
  2. Erase Text in Photoshop
  3. Replicate Background in Photoshop/Translate Text
  4. Choosing a Font
  5. Recreate Text Effect in Photoshop
  6. Generate Deliverables

On a sidenote, I tend to jump back and forth between steps, so I couldn’t figure a good place in my steps list to write “translate text,” as I did it in several areas. First – when I erased the text in the circle, and second, when I erased the outer text. I then did a final proofread and edit before deciding on the final version of the text for the project.

Step 1 – Preflight

Before I did anything, I made sure that I had a copy of my original file, just in case I messed up irreversibly, as well as for use as a reference as I worked on editing the banner.

I created three folders: 1. Files, 2. Working, 3. Delivery, and moved one copy of my banner into the files folder, and another into the working folder. Then I created my excel file for the translatable text.

Step 2 and 3 – Erase the Text, Replicate the Background, Translate

I knew from the getgo that this project would be time-consuming, to say the least, as the circle housing some text is not entirely opaque. Rather, there is a noticable amount of background bleeding through it. The simplest way to go would have been making an opaque circle of a similar color and ignoring the background. I decided to try to replicate that effect.

The background is just barely visible through the circle.

The background was too detailed to use the auto-fill feature, so I resolved myself to doing it by hand. I erased the text using the dropper tool to select the closest color to paint over it, then I slowly recreated the background to the best of my ability, using the original file as reference. The results weren’t bad at all!

First, erase the text.
Then, replicate the background.
The top section of the circle was easier, as the details were not as pronounced.
End result

The surrounding text was a different beast, as the details here were much more pronounced with the letters written cleanly over the image. I tried the auto-fill tool in some bits, but it didn’t always work very nicely. I ended up autofilling where I could and then fixing things up by hand afterwards.

There was a lot of clean-up involved in the outer ring of text.
Auto-fill replaced one letter for another…
…so I did it by hand!

Step 4 – Choosing a Font

I spent a long time debating on whether I wanted to be faithful to the original text and go for a more generic look or if I wanted to choose a bubbly text to help replicate the warm feeling that Bungotakada is supposed to bring. In the end, I went with one that has a little bit of a whimsical nature while retaining a more elegant look: one that I personally love: CCSignLanguage.

CCSignLanguage is elegant while still managing to be bubbly.

Once the font was chosen, I typed the text out, made sure it was the appropriate size, reformatted to my liking, then moved onto STEP 5.

Step 5 – Recreating the Text Effect

The multi-colored letter effect did not exist for this text, so I had to do it by hand. As text can’t be colored the way I wanted it to, I had to revert it to a layer instead. Then, I was able to work my magic. Using the dropper tool, I chose the appropriate color from the original text, then I slowly painted over sections of the English version, one letter at a time.

Slowly color it, just the way I like it!

Once the text in the circle was to my liking, I moved onto the outer ring of text. Unlike before, where erasing the text and recreating the background was more difficult with the outer ring, the process of recreating the rounded text effect was quite simple. I did mess around with the translation a little more before I was happy with it.

Once everything was to my liking, I moved onto the final step:

Step 6 – Generate Deliverables

I saved the final version as a .png then created a .jpg file of similar size. At last. the project is complete! And what a satisfying end!

Source

Final

Thanks for your time!
Check out this video to see a little more about my process:

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