DCML digest #846

Francesco Spreafico frspreaf at tin.it
Sun Feb 24 22:46:16 CET 2002


From: "Don Rosa" <donrosa at iglou.com>

> Any proper, effective dialogue in a story, whether it's a movie or a book
or
> a comic, should show a distinct character when that would benefit the
story
> and help identify the character or personality of the speaker. If the
> Norwegian editions sabotage that aspect of a story (and I don't know if
they
> do, I'd hafta take your word for that), probably with the well-meaning but
> misguided idea that to have even some small bit of dialogue written with
an
> accent or broken grammar would cause all the readers to suddenly UNlearn
> everything they know about their language, that is a fault in that
editor's
> view of good storytelling.

In Italian it's always been "perfect" Italian too, so the first time I saw
an original strip (Gottfredson's If I remember correctly), I was amazed by
that. I absolutely loved it, but I also realized that there could be no way
to make that in Italian.
We only have one way to write things and one way to read them (we have
accents, but we can't "write" them). And we don't have "errors" like "he
don't like it", nor short forms like "gotta", "gonna"... or "hafta" that you
use so often.

About the aliens in "Attack", I remember that in Italian they speak with a
Roman accent! (That's not Italian, it's more like a dialect, even though
it's not really a dialect). That was quite weird to read! (But Alberto
placed a note in the introduction, explaining the reasons for this
decisions).

--
Francesco




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