When you translate a comic, you think you're moving words. You're not. You're moving four separate flows that all have to stay synchronized — and most translation tools only care about one of them.
What you're looking at
Four vertical lanes representing the simultaneous systems active when translating a comic: semantic (what the words mean), typographic (how they fit in balloons), visual (how the eye reads the panel), and temporal (the rhythm of reading). Each lane has three sub-components stacked vertically. Two red arrows cross from the typographic lane to the visual and temporal lanes, labeled "BREAKS" — these are the failure points where balloon reflow destroys the composition and reading rhythm.
Why I drew it this way
I wanted lanes, not a flowchart, because these aren't sequential steps — they're concurrent streams that have to stay synchronized. The vertical stack within each lane shows depth: translation isn't one operation per lane, it's three or four nested decisions. I marked only two boxes red (balloon reflow and eye path disruption) because those are the catastrophic failures — the ones that break the comic even when the semantic translation is perfect. The blue in the semantic lane is cold and clinical because that's the only part most tools care about.
What it argues
The diagram argues that translation is a synchronization problem, not a substitution problem. The arrows don't flow left-to-right through all four lanes — they jump from lane 2 to lanes 3 and 4, skipping the semantic entirely, because the typographic choices (how long the translated text is, whether it reflows the balloon) directly kill the visual and temporal experience. Meaning can be perfect and the comic still dies.
What I left out
No "output" box at the bottom. No "success" state. Because most comic translations don't succeed — they produce readable text in broken layouts. I also left out any feedback loops or revision paths, which a real production pipeline would have, because I wanted to show the one-way damage: once you reflow a balloon, you can't un-break the eye path.