One of the most beautiful aspects of creativity and fandom is that it transcends borders. Great stories and authentic communities bring us together in ways that many people sorely need in a world that feels increasingly isolating. But at the same time, the world isn’t a monolith. Diversity makes the world beautiful, but things like language barriers and cultural differences can and will get in the way. We recognize that there are challenges we need to overcome to truly bring the world together through creativity.

Today, I’m proud to announce Studio Countdown’s commitment to our international audience.

We’re reaching out to the world.

So… how did this start?

Studio Countdown was founded on a fandom without borders. Our team met online, and we grew from there. I officially set up Studio Countdown as a company in the UK because Europe is home to me, and Britain in particular has always seemed like a cultural bridge between Europe and the Americas - mainly because several countries on the continents of America (notably the United States) also speak English.

In fact, here’s a little bit of trivia: I personally lived in the US for a significant part of my childhood. That’s why I tend to speak this mangled hybrid of American English and British English.

That being said, starting as a UK company working on a silly little adaptation project for a webcomic from the US definitely gave us a head start on building up an international audience. We’ve expanded beyond just working on #CTCAnimated but our international reach stayed roughly the same, with a large audience across the US and the UK + Ireland. Things have changed a bit though. We started to notice something new.

Knock knock, it’s Asia! Our web analytics were starting to show an interesting pattern - Japan was now the 4th most frequent origin country of network requests to our website servers. Something interesting was taking shape: We had built up a regional audience with a different primary language than us. And while this much web traffic could most likely be attributed to English-speaking people in Japan (of which there are quite a few), we realized that the best way to make a local audience feel more welcome would be to speak their language too.

Well, I guess you know what time it is.

Translation time is upon us

For the past 2 years, Studio Countdown’s websites have been built with a single language in mind. Translating an entire website is not a simple task, especially when you have multiple websites filled with their own content. Getting translations set up would take away valuable time that we could spend on things like finishing up our webcomic reader site for A Guide for Imagination. So, what do we do?

We decided to do a test run on the most boring part of our website (because hopefully nobody would care if it broke for a few minutes) - the login system. Of course, it would be incredibly stupid to start directly editing the server-side code of a system that relies on being secure. We made a development copy of the Accounts system with a separate database and domain for testing. (For all the software engineering nerds out there, we technically just made a separate Git branch for testing multi-language features and used local development instances.)

Let’s see where that got us!

Oh! Yōkoso to you too. Totally didn’t have to look that one up…

So… our translated websites aren’t necessarily ready yet. And we don’t really plan on publishing or advertising an international site that isn’t the same quality as what we’d put out on our main English site (especially since we don’t want to gate any content that’s available on our English site).

You can help test our login system in Japanese at accounts-jp.studiocountdown.com if you’re curious. If you speak Japanese and you spot any glaring issues, please let us know.

We’re going to continue testing translations on our other sites, too. We’re most likely going to start with the KZQ website because it’s arguably one of our simplest websites (and it’s already built on vocal synthesizers that are primarily made for the Japanese language).

What’s next?

We’re planning on gradually rolling out translations across our sites as time goes by. We also plan on working with our distribution providers to create translated subtitles for our upcoming animated series. We’ll also be expanding our list of languages based on our next largest international audiences.

Back to Europe for a moment, we also spotted another trend on our web analytics.

Hi, France. We know you’re there (and French translations are next on the list too).

That’s a wrap - thanks for reading. This was a pretty text-heavy post, but it’s something I felt we should be talking about.