The Greys

One of our hopes when we selected a Creative Commons licence for The Greys was that readers might take our work and translate it into their own language. Indeed, within a short period we’d had a couple of drive-by translations – people who translated a single comic that appealed to them, but who never translated any others. But we’ve also been honoured by a varied group of volunteers around the world who have translated numerous comics so that they can be enjoyed more widely. There are a few in particular who deserve special mention for the generous work they’ve done:

• Marina, OpenCode and especially Spaventapasseri, all from inkscapeforum.it. Spaventapasseri continues to provide new translations from time to time, and thanks to these three we were able to provide Italian versions of 20 of our comics on our first CD-ROM.
• Samuel, our French translator. He’s been working his way through the strips starting with the very first, but also regularly provides translations for our very latest comics (including the Easter Eggs and commentaries) just days after we post them.
• chimode, our main Indonesian translator. He has provided textual translations of almost all our strips, which we then put into the SVG files and post a couple of times a week.

You can see the current state of all our translations on this Google spreadsheet. The green ones are those that have been posted, whilst the orange are those that we’ve received but haven’t got round to posting yet. The [ABC] indicates whether the translation includes the comic (A), the Easter Eggs (B) and the commentary (C).

We would love to have more translations. Perhaps you can help with a language we already cover, or you’re fluent in one that we haven’t even touched yet. Translating a comic can be as simple as providing us with the text and letting us put it into place, or as involved as editing the Inkscape source file directly, hunting out Easter Eggs in the process. We’re especially keen to get a couple more Spanish translations, as the single drive-by translation we have seems a little paltry compared with our collections of Italian, French and Indonesian strips.

If you’re interested in translating any of our comics, please email us at [email protected] for more information.