When Asterix speaks Chinese
June 16, 2011 2:51 PM Subscribe
Have you read Astérix in a Chinese, Korean, or Arabic translation?
If so, I was wondering what do they with the Latin phrases? Some other translations leave them in Latin as in the original but I was wondering what cultures that are outside Europe and don't have any referent for Latin would do. Do they translate them into the target language or into another high status and dead language?
(I've looked around a fair bit but can't find anything that I can read on this, not knowing any dialect of Chinese, Korean or Arabic.)
If so, I was wondering what do they with the Latin phrases? Some other translations leave them in Latin as in the original but I was wondering what cultures that are outside Europe and don't have any referent for Latin would do. Do they translate them into the target language or into another high status and dead language?
(I've looked around a fair bit but can't find anything that I can read on this, not knowing any dialect of Chinese, Korean or Arabic.)
Best answer: I have an Asterix book in Bahasa Indonesian. It still uses the Roman alphabet, but I doubt there's much of a Latin tradition in Indonesia.
In it, the Latin phrases are written in Latin, but they are immediately followed by a translation in brackets. So it looks like this:
"Quod erat demonstrandum (akan dibuktikan)"
posted by Paragon at 3:48 PM on June 16, 2011 [1 favorite]
In it, the Latin phrases are written in Latin, but they are immediately followed by a translation in brackets. So it looks like this:
"Quod erat demonstrandum (akan dibuktikan)"
posted by Paragon at 3:48 PM on June 16, 2011 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thanks for the answers: if you're interested, I've managed to get some people to agree to read a bunch of Asterix in Arabic, Chinese and Korean so I might have some answers (provided I can manage to get hold of the books via interlibrary loan).
Also, apparently the Indonesian translator is quite famous and was known as Mrs. Asterix. :)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:40 PM on June 18, 2011
Also, apparently the Indonesian translator is quite famous and was known as Mrs. Asterix. :)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:40 PM on June 18, 2011
Hmm, it's too long since I read one or two Asterix books in Arabic for me to remember precisely how they dealt with the Latin, but basically I doubt that they 'dealt with it' at all. The translations were extremely disappointing, all the spark and fun leached out and replaced with leaden pedestrianism--as you might expect from a translation carried out in-house by an authoritarian dictatorship (they were a government publication in Egypt, where I was living at the time; I can't remember if it was ministry of education or ministry of culture). As far as I could tell, puns in the original simply got ironed out, ignored in favour of a straight translation. In English they get replaced with other wordplay; similarly in German, I'm told, and other languages. The characters' names, which are a source of endless fun not just in the French original but also, suitably modified, in the English versions I grew up with and the translations into other languages I've read (or been told about by other readers) were just transliterations from the French. So if the Latin comes in at all, I suspect it's simply in Arabic.
I'd like to be told I'm wrong, though--I wouldn't make any great claims for my Arabic now, and it was worse when I read them, so there might have been stuff I was simply missing. And there could have been better translations since, that do a better job of this kind of thing. Though I'm still not sure what they'd do about Latin.
Incidentally, the one I particularly remember reading was, naturally, Asterix and Cleopatra. I don't know if I struggled through any others, after finding that one so disappointing.
posted by lapsangsouchong at 3:56 PM on June 20, 2011 [1 favorite]
I'd like to be told I'm wrong, though--I wouldn't make any great claims for my Arabic now, and it was worse when I read them, so there might have been stuff I was simply missing. And there could have been better translations since, that do a better job of this kind of thing. Though I'm still not sure what they'd do about Latin.
Incidentally, the one I particularly remember reading was, naturally, Asterix and Cleopatra. I don't know if I struggled through any others, after finding that one so disappointing.
posted by lapsangsouchong at 3:56 PM on June 20, 2011 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: In case anyone is interested in the answers:
1. I could only get hold of one Arabic translation via ILL: according to the Arabic speaker who translated it for me, it did some clever things with fonts (varying them for different language groups and so forth) and it sounded like it was quite witty, but it simply translated all the Latin without comment into Arabic.
2. The Korean translation, translated the Latin, and then footnoted it with a transcription in Korean script, and the original Latin with notes on the author of the original. Actually the Korean translations had quite a lot of footnotes.
Unfortunately the Chinese translations (which were bootlegs) proved impossible to get hold of, so I don't know how they dealt with various issues.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:52 PM on October 27, 2011
1. I could only get hold of one Arabic translation via ILL: according to the Arabic speaker who translated it for me, it did some clever things with fonts (varying them for different language groups and so forth) and it sounded like it was quite witty, but it simply translated all the Latin without comment into Arabic.
2. The Korean translation, translated the Latin, and then footnoted it with a transcription in Korean script, and the original Latin with notes on the author of the original. Actually the Korean translations had quite a lot of footnotes.
Unfortunately the Chinese translations (which were bootlegs) proved impossible to get hold of, so I don't know how they dealt with various issues.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:52 PM on October 27, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
I'll try to see if I can find a scanned page of the book or something, but at least according to the interesting discussion on this page (it's a blog entry commemorating the full run/translation of the series, as well as talking about how the published order of the Asterix books in Korea is not the true published order in France, and providing a list of the books in its original correct order), there are complaints of a lot of mistranslation as well as liberal or crude translations in the books. I wouldn't be surprised if the Latin was mostly glossed over.
posted by kkokkodalk at 3:40 PM on June 16, 2011