Disney-comics digest #635.

deckerd@agcs.com deckerd at agcs.com
Wed Apr 12 17:03:44 CEST 1995


> I have done some work with
> translating computer screens from English to French and German.  The French
> and German versions require a lot more real estate to say the same things as
> the English versions.
> 
> Do they need larger word and thought balloons for the overseas versions?
> Or am I way off base here?
> 

>From my experience with translating comics, word balloon size is seldom
changed. Part of the reason is that the color separations are often supplied
along with the artwork, and would have to be redone at great expense if the
artwork is changed. For some editions, comics are printed for several
countries at a time to reduce unit costs, and they just change the black
plate every so often to go from one language to another (which can lead to
problems of another sort: I have a German Disney pocket/digest book of
comics in which a signature of Dutch pages was accidentally bound in).
In general, I'd say dialogue tends to get chopped down in translation:
colorful slang and colloquialisms are blanderized, panel word count is
reduced -- as a rule (there are exceptions: the German translator of
Barks stories, Dr. Erika Fuchs, is widely considered as canonical as
the Old Duck Man himself). I'm sure the Eurofans on this list can answer
more authoritatively. But one of the strangest examples I've come across
was comparing the French and Dutch editions of a comic album published
by Dupuis of Belgium: the original language of the scripter was French,
but the Dutch translation was done in house and published by the same
company -- yet the two editions were noticeably different. The color
and spirit of the French was gone, and the Dutch translation was dry
and perfunctory. The Dutch version was condensed compared to the French,
with the text reduced to the barest possible minimum to convey the story
at the expense of characterization and flavor. The word count was reduced
considerably and many balloons looked gapingly empty, but it just wasn't
the same story. And this was done by the same company that published the
original!

--Dwight Decker 



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