Asterix

As a task of translation, the Asterix stories present a fascinating set of challenges all of their own.

The pictorial element is inseparable from the text. But, and paradoxically, translation of the text, if it is to be faithful to the spirit of the original, has to be very free, indeed unusually free, where the letter is concerned. The reason for this is that the French text is crammed with puns, wordplay and verbal jokes of all kinds, which will not translate straight. Often the task is one of adaptation rather than ordinary translation (and everything is carefully read in France before it is approved for English publication).

There are special pictorial constraints, then. The contents of the speech bubbles can be no longer than in the French, and however free the translation, it must still fit the course of the action and match the expressions on the faces of the characters. There are sometimes references including pictorial parodies:

Asterix the Legionary/Astérix Légionnaire in French p. 35

This drawing parodies the dramatic painting by Géricault of the notorious incident when a number of seamen were set adrift on a raft to die; their place is taken, in the Asterixian rendering, by the pirates who are constantly having their ship scuttled by the Gaulish heroes — originally an import from another strip cartoon and a friendly in-joke between cartoonists. The pirates proved such a success that they had to come back time and again by popular demand. In the French, the pirate captain is exclaiming, ‘Je suis médusé!’ = ‘dumbfounded’ — from the Gorgon Medusa whose gaze turned the beholder to stone, but with reference here to the ship called La Méduse whose raft and seamen were painted by Géricault.

Musée du Louvre, Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa

The solution, in English, was to use a pun on Géricault/ Jericho (by Jericho!) instead — the pun itself was the idea of a friend of the translators, who then worked it in by pointing up the artistic connotations with a rueful: ‘We’ve been framed.’ To give a further clue to the pun, space in the frame, bottom right, was used to add a footnote: ‘Ancient Gaulish artist’, which is not present in the French.

Notice how the footnote has been added above the stylized waves, bottom right of the frame, which are still visible. It is too expensive to make alteration to the artwork, especially in colour; any changes must come out of the black film, on which of course the lettering, most of the onomatopoeic noises and so forth are included, which is then put together with the three colour films in the course of printing. Apart from minor changes to the comic strip section of a newspaper (Cleopatra, p. 33) the only real pictorial change ever to have been made is in in Astérix chez les Helvètes / Asterix in Switzerland, p. 20, where the little Antar petrol advertising figure was not going to be very familiar to British readers. Permission was obtained to change him to the Michelin man, who was. But the Michelin man is all in black and white anyway; it would have been difficult and costly to make the change had he been in colour.

Read more...Translating Names

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