Asterix

Accents are also a problem. The French are familiar with a Belgian accent; we have no way of reproducing one in English, although we can do a German accent. The French version of a British accent is extremely difficult to translate into English, and has been done with a dated upper-class-twit style of English in Asterix in Britain and elsewhere. To date, policy has been not to try substituting British regional accents for French regional accents — and for Belgian and African accents, for instance — but instead to substitute extra jokes for those accents not readily imitated in English. Look at p. 7 in La Galère d’Obélix / Asterix and Obelix All At Sea which illustrates the problem, and the approach used in dealing with it.

Finally, the books contain wordplay that is sometimes quite simple, aimed at amusing fairly young children, the kind to be rendered (p. 6 of Asterix and Obelix All At Sea) by the corny old joke, for which there was never a suitable opening in the earlier twenty-nine books, ‘The galley slaves are revolting’, of course allowing Caesar to reply to his terrified and sweating informant, ‘And so are you!’

Sometimes, however, they are extended cultural references. Look at p. 31 in Le Cadeau de César / Asterix and Caesar’s Gift in which Asterix fights a former Roman soldier who believes he has a claim to own the village, and assumes the persona of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac by composing a ballade during the duel. There is also a fleeting pictorial reference to the character of Zorro. The solution in English was to take perhaps the most famous swordfight in English literature, between Hamlet and Laertes, and use Shakespearean quotations (also including the pictorial Zorro reference, present in frame 9 of the page anyway, and pointing it up in the English text in frame 8 with the somewhat old-fashioned abbreviation ‘’Nuff zed’ = ‘enough said’).

The French series is enjoyed by children and adults alike. Olivier Todd, in an article in L’Exprès, once wrote that French parents gave their children the Tintin books and then borrowed them back, while they read Asterix before passing the albums on to their children. The original books appeal across a wide age range, and the general aim of the English translations is to do the same, not by giving a word-for-word version of the original (which would be impossible anyway) but by conveying a similarly broad variety of humour.

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