English translations of Asterix

All Asterix stories by Goscinny and Uderzo which have been officially translated into British English were translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. Their first volume was published in 1969. However there have been some additional translations, one in English prior to the Bell/Hockridge version and two in attempts to enter the U.S. market.

"Ranger" magazine

"Ranger" was a British magazine for boys published in 1965 and 1966. It included a version of Asterix transferred to Britain. The strip was called "Britons Never Never Never Shall Be Slaves" with Asterix renamed Beric and Obelix being the son of Boadicea. Their foes remained Romans. "Ranger" was merged into "Look and Learn" magazine and the series continued there for a time.

American newspaper syndication

From November 1977 until early 1979 five albums were serialized in syndicated form in a number of North American newspapers. Since these were printed as part of the standard daily comics, and were broken into separately licenced but concurrent daily and Sunday strips, the art needed considerable reworking. This required editing a lot of the dialog. In addition, a number of names, jokes, and pieces of art were further changed to be more politically correct or idiomatic for the newspapers' family-oriented audience. The results were very different from the original translations. The stories printed appeared in essentially random order as well, and the experiment came to an end quickly.

The stories which appeared were
* "Asterix the Gladiator" from November 27, 1977 to February 26, 1978
* "Asterix and Cleopatra" from February 26 to May 28, 1978
* "Asterix and the Great Crossing" from May 28 to August 27, 1978
* "Asterix and the Big Fight" from August 27 to November 26, 1978
* "Asterix in Spain" from November 26, 1978 to February 25, 1979 (however, most papers had dropped it well before the final date)

The Sunday color comic between stories contained the end of one story and the start of the next, each as a half page.

American albums

Robert Steven Caron translated five volumes into American English. These are "Asterix and the Great Crossing" in 1984, "Asterix the Legionary" and "Asterix at the Olympic Games" in 1992, and "Asterix in Britain" and "Asterix and Cleopatra" in 1995.

For copyright purposes most characters' names were changed. With Asterix never achieving great popularity in the United States, this series of retranslations was halted after these albums, leading to some confusion among the few American fans of the series (the other volumes were issued with the British translation in the same market).

Translating names

In Asterix stories, many of the original names are humorous due to their absurdity. For example, the bard is "Assurancetourix" ("assurance tous risques" or "comprehensive insurance"), the translation of which is pointless since the bard has no connection to insurance of any kind — it's the silliness that makes it humorous. To maintain the spirit and flow of the story the translators change the joke in the name to a comment on the character. Thus in the English language edition the bard's name is "Cacofonix" which is an allusion to the term "cacophony" (a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds), since the central trait of the bard character is that the Gauls all hate listening to his music.

This happens in the original as well, as with "Geriatrix" (French: "Agecanonix" — canonical age — a French expression meaning very old or ancient), but it is not common, while absurd names in English, such as "Dubius Status", are reserved for minor or one-story characters. Fictional place names however tend to be equally silly in all translations, for example the four camps (castra) which surround Asterix's village: Compendium, Aquarium, Laudanum and Totorum (Tot o' rum, colloquial English for shot of rum) — in French this camp is called "Babaorum", a pun on "baba au rhum" or rum baba, a popular French pastry. (In one of the American translations, one of these camps is named Nohappimedium.)

Lost in translation

Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge have been widely praised for their rendition of the English language edition, maintaining the spirit and humour of the original even when actual translation is impossible — as it often is when translating puns between languages which are not closely related. A good example occurs in "Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield" — when Obelix redistributes the water in the spa pools by diving in, the other guests complain and the druid in charge arrives asking Vitalstatistix, "Where are your Gauls?" In the original French he responds "Mes Gaulois sont dans la pleine" ("My Gauls are in the full one") which is a play on a famous (in French) quote "Les Gaulois sont dans la plaine" ("The Gauls are on the plain") which of course sounds almost exactly the same, though not in English. Instead the translated reply is "Pooling your resources" (the water), a clever double entendre on a common phrase even though the original pun is lost. "Avoir la pleine" also is a common French phrase for "to have one's fill", maybe a reference to the druid's potion.

Sometimes nothing of the original joke is salvageable. In "Asterix in Britain", there is a scene in Londinium where a produce vendor argues with a buyer — in the next panel Obelix says (in French), "Why is that man wearing a melon?" This relies on the fact that the French word for melon is "also" the name for the iconic British bowler hat; with no way to convey this in the English translation, in the British edition Obelix says, "I say, Asterix, I think this bridge is falling down" referring to the children's rhyme "London bridge is falling down", leaving the original joke incomplete. In the panel shown, the reply of the British man on the right was "Rather, old fruit!", in some publications of the book; a good pun and typical of the way the British address each other in "Asterix in Britain". In the same book, much of the humor came from Goscinny's high-fidelity rendition of the English language "using French words". This, of course, is totally lost by retranslation in English.

Sometimes the translators even go further and add humor of their own when it is appropriate. An example of this is in Asterix and the Goths, where a group of Goths who kidnapped Getafix run puzzled through a forest populated by Romans looking for Asterix and Obelix, who they think are responsible for the kidnapping. In the original, the Goth chief says "Faut pas chercher a comprendre", meaning "We shouldn't try to understand", a common French phrase with no particular pun attached. In the British version, the chief instead comments "Ours is not to reason why", a reference to The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which states in its third stanza "Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die".

Comparison of names of major characters

External links

* [http://www.asterix-obelix.nl/hjh/dos-engl.html English & American edition comparisons]
* [http://www.literarytranslation.com/workshops/asterix/ Asterix: What's in a Name - Anthea Bell] at LiteraryTranslation.com
* [http://asterix.openscroll.org/ The Asterix Annotations]
* [http://www.asterix.co.nz/review/englishpublishing/index.html Asterix in Britain: The Untold Story (or how Asterix crossed the channel and was published in English)]