S.P.Q.T.! (Those Translators Are Fool!)

MICHELA CANEPARI

AN INTRODUCTION TODISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND

TRANSLATION STUDIES

Milano 2010

© 2010 EDUCattEnte per il Diritto allo Studio Universitario dell’Università CattolicaLargo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano - tel. 02.72342235 - fax 02.80.53.215e-mail: [email protected] (produzione); [email protected] (distribuzione)web: www.unicatt.it/librarioISBN: 978-88-8311-768-8

Edizione realizzata a scopo didattico. L’editore è disponibile ad assolvere agli obblighi di copyright per imateriali eventualmente utilizzati all’interno della pubblicazione per i quali non sia stato possibilerintracciare i beneficiari.

3

Indice

Introduction ..............................................................................7

Chapter 1The Development of Language Studies ..................................11

1.1.The Beginning of the Twentieth Century..........................111.1.1. Saussure..................................................................14

1.2.Structuralism...................................................................181.2.1. Jakobson .................................................................231.2.2. Peirce......................................................................301.2.3. Chomsky.................................................................321.2.4. Barthes....................................................................36

1.3.Poststructuralism.............................................................481.3.1. Deridda...................................................................45

1.4.Recent Developments in Language Studies.......................511.4.1. Newmark’s Componential Analysis ..........................52

1.5.Discourse Analysis and its Disciplines ..............................561.5.1. Ethnography of Speaking .........................................571.5.2. Pragmatics ..............................................................591.5.3. Conversational Analysis ...........................................691.5.4. Interactional Sociolinguistics....................................731.5.5. Critical Discourse Analysis.......................................74

Chapter 2Discourse and its Defining Elements ......................................81

2.1 The Context of Situation..................................................782.1.1. Registers .................................................................862.1.2. Dialects...................................................................90

An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies

4

2.1.3. The Notion of Function...........................................99

2.2.The Co-Text .................................................................1032.2.1. The Co-Text .........................................................1012.2.2. Textual Types and Genre Analysis .........................1062.2.3. Information Packaging in Written Texts .................1122.2.4. Language and Ideology: Morphosyntactic

and Lexical Strategies ............................................116

2.3.The Context of Culture .................................................1322.3.1. Culture-bound Expressions....................................1322.3.2. The Notion of Intertextuality .................................134

Chapter 3An Introduction to Translation Studies.................................155

3.1.Recent Developments in Translation Studies ..................1553.1.1. Communicative Translation and Translation Loss..1593.1.2. Malone’s Translation Strategies .............................1633.1.3. The Cultural Turn ................................................170

3.2.Culture and the Notion of Cultural Translation..............1793.2.1. The Development of Cultural Studies ....................1843.2.2. The Language of Advertising .................................196

3.3.Features of Spoken Language and Written Language......2243.3.1. The Notion of Spoken Grammar ...........................226

3.4.Postcolonial Translation ................................................2473.4.1. The Development of Postcolonial Studies ..............2473.4.2. The Notion of Colonial Alienation

and the Issue of Intertextuality ...............................2513.4.3. The Language of Decolonisation............................2583.4.4. Translating First Names ........................................306

Conclusions ...........................................................................313

Bibliography .........................................................................315

Indice

5

AppendixS.P.Q.T.! (Those Translators Are Fool!)by Enrico Martines ........................................................353

Asterix – Bibliography ............................................................435

353

AppendixS.P.Q.T.!1 (Those Translators Are Fool!)Translation Problems in the Asterix Comics

The aim of this work is to point out some specific problems inthe translation of the French-Belgian comic series of Asterix.After some preliminary remarks on the characteristics of comicsas a paraliterary kind of fiction, which integrates in one system ofcommunication both a visual and a verbal code, the attentionbriefly focuses on puns, a linguistic feature that constitutes afundamental element of humour in comic books in general, andparticularly in Asterix, therefore being the main problem faced bytranslators in their task of transferring the original message notonly into a new language, but also into a new cultural system.

The subject of this short study is a comic series of thirty-fouralbums translated from the original French into over onehundred languages. We will focus our attention on the work ofEnglish translators of Asterix, initially drawing a brief history ofAsterix’s introduction into the United Kingdom and the USAand of its rendition into the language of Shakespeare, thenhighlighting the major difficulties with which translators areconfronted in this specific case and the solutions they havefound. The direct testimony of Anthea Bell and DereckHockridge will be helpful to make us understand the real natureof their job.

1 Adapted from the Italian rendition of Obelix’s famous catchphrase ‘Ils

sont fous ces romains’, which is obviously translated as ‘Sono Pazzi QuestiRomani’ (see infra). In this case the initialism stands for: ‘Sono Pazzi QuestiTraduttori!’, meaning ‘Those Translators are Fool!’.


354

Translators and Asterix have something in common: iftranslating means making the meeting of different languages andcultures possible, our hero often comes across foreign people anddeals with foreign languages and habits. In fact, many of thestories created by Goscinny and Uderzo are set outside Gallicterritory. The foreign characters met by Asterix and Obelixduring their frequent journeys, in 50 BC, are comically definedby the reproduction of stereotypes normally attributed to theirmodern descendants. Language is one of the cultural elementsexplored by the authors so as to create comic effect. Foreigncharacters speak, in the original French, with a foreign accentand this has to be recreated in translation. Perhaps, the mostbrilliant example of a comic use of language and culturalstereotypes in the characterisation of foreign people isrepresented by the Asterix in Britain album: the final part of thiswork will thus be dedicated to the analysis of the additionalchallenge faced by English translators (both British andAmerican) when they had to replicate a British ‘foreign’ accentinto their particular target language. The solutions they opted forwill be compared to the French of the original and to the work ofthe Italian translators.

Comics as a Paraliterary Genre: Distinctive Features

‘Paraliterature’ is a definition that includes a number of differentliterary genres, such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, pulpfiction, detective stories, even photo stories and comic books2.

2 See Nardin, Giorgia, La traduction italienne d’Astérix: à la recherche d’une

possible équivalence, Tesi di Laurea Specialistica in Lingue straniere per lacomunicazione internazionale, Università degli Studi di Padova, pp. 17-18. Inthis article we use a different system of bibliographic reference: since thebibliography is mostly consisting of internet pages, many of them withoutauthor and year of publication, the Author-Year system adopted in the rest ofthe volume is not very helpful, so a footnote style of reference is preferred.

Appendix – S.P.Q.T.! (Those Translators Are Fool!)

355

The term is used to label all those genres which are not generallyconsidered as ‘literary fiction’ by mainstream literary standardsand conveyed by mass media. Therefore, paraliterature isdefined as something that is opposed to literature. Itscharacteristics are not found in the set of values that allows toidentify a work of art as literary. Paraliterature is about theexpression of a different dimension of writing, one connectedwith pure entertainment and leisure time; hence, it is strictlylinked with the system and the ideology of an advancedindustrial society.

Comics are a particular type of paraliterature, since the storiesare told in a progressive sequence of cartoons, in which theauthors add elements of phonetic writing. Consequently, incomic books we find the combination of verbal and iconicelements. This kind of joint expression is a popular andwidespread phenomenon, because any reader can understandthe story, thanks to the communicative effectiveness of theimages.

Though newspapers and magazines first established andpopularised comics in the late 1890s, narrative illustration hasexisted for many centuries, a clear and illustrious example of thisbeing the Trajan Column3. In spite of this, it was only in the19th century that the modern model of comics began to takeform among European and American artists. Comics as a realmass medium started to emerge in the United States in the early20th century with the newspaper comic strip, where its formbegan to be standardised (image-driven, speech balloons etc).Comic strips were soon gathered into cheap booklets andreprinted as comic books. Original comic books soon followed.Today, comics are found in newspapers, magazines, comicbooks, graphic novels and on the web.

3 See Comics, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics, last accessed

1st April 2010.


356

Comics are part of the cultural, intellectual and affectivesystem of many of us. There is a huge variety of comics, destinedto all types of public, from children to adults. Historically, theform dealt with humorous subject matter, but its scope hasexpanded to encompass the full range of literary genres. Comicsare drawn and written to entertain, to provide amusement, to tellstories of any kind, to make people think, to satirize and so on.Comic stories are very varied but all in all they share a similarstructure: they may differ in the set and in secondary elementsbut they have the same framework; the impression of noveltycomes from the plot and from the diegetic organisation.

Some interesting reflections on the definition and the natureof comics are available on Wikipedia’s specific web page4:

Scholars disagree on the definition of comics; some claim itsprinted format is crucial, some emphasise the interdependenceof image and text, and others its sequential nature. The term asa reference to the medium has also been disputed. In 1996, WillEisner published Graphic Storytelling, in which he defined comicsas ‘the printed arrangement of art and balloons in sequence,particularly in comic books’.5 Eisner’s earlier, more influentialdefinition from 1985’s Comics and Sequential Art described thetechnique and structure of comics as sequential art, ‘...thearrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a storyor dramatize an idea’.6 In Understanding Comics (1993) ScottMcCloud defined sequential art and comics as: ‘juxtaposedpictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended toconvey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response inthe viewer’;7 this definition excludes single-panel illustrationssuch as The Far Side, Zanzibear, The Family Circus, and most

4 Ibidem.5 Eisner, Will, Graphic Storytelling, Poorhouse Press, 1996.6 Eisner, Will, Comics & Sequential Art, Poorhouse Press, 1990 (Expanded

Edition, reprinted 2001).7 McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics, Harper, 1994, p. 7-9.


357

political cartoons from the category, classifying those ascartoons. By contrast, The Comics Journal’s ‘100 Best Comics ofthe 20th Century’,8 included the works of several single panelcartoonists and a caricaturist, and academic study of comics hasincluded political cartoons. R. C. Harvey, in his essay Comedy atthe Juncture of Word and Image, offered a competing definition inreference to McCloud’s: ‘[...] comics consist of pictorialnarratives or expositions in which words (often lettered into thepicture area within speech balloons) usually contribute to themeaning of the pictures and vice versa’.9 This, however, ignoresthe existence of wordless comics. […]As noted above, two distinct definitions have been used todefine comics as an art form: the combination of both word andimage; and the placement of images in sequential order. Bothdefinitions are lacking, in that the first excludes any sequence ofwordless images; and the second excludes single panel cartoonssuch as editorial cartoons. The purpose of comics is certainlythat of narration, and so that must be an important factor indefining the art form. Comics, as sequential art, emphasise thepictorial representation of a narrative. This means comics arenot an illustrated version of standard literature, and while somecritics argue that they are a hybrid form of art and literature,others contend comics are a new and separate art; an integratedwhole, of words and images both, where the pictures do not justdepict the story, but are part of the telling. In comics, creatorstransmit expression through arrangement and juxtaposition ofeither pictures alone, or word(s) and picture(s), to build anarrative. The narration of a comic is set out through the layoutof the images, and while, as in films, there may be many peoplewho work on one work, one vision of the narrative guides the

8 Spurgeon, Tom et al., 1999, ‘Top 100 (English Language) Comics of the

Century’, The Comics Journal 210.9 Varnum, Robin & Gibbons, Christina T. editors, The Language of Comics:

Word and Image. University Press Mississippi, 2001, p. 76.


358

work. Artists can use the layout of images on a page to conveypassage of time, build suspense, or highlight action.10

Comics are a communicative system composed by threeelements: the cartoon, the strip and the speech balloon.11 Thecartoon is the significant unit of comics; cartoons aretraditionally disposed in horizontal rows and are separated byblank interstices called gutters. The horizontal rows are largelyreferred to as ‘strips’. In Europe, though, comics are more oftenpublished on specialised magazines rather than on newspapers,so the page is considered as a standard unit, more than the strip,even if this term has a great importance in the specific languageof comics. The speech balloon (or speech bubble), which seemsto get out of the character’s mouth, is the place where thedialogue is inserted. There is a natural hierarchy between thecartoon and the balloon. Indeed, if it cannot exist a balloonwithout a cartoon, the opposite is not true, since there are plentyof cartoons with no speech bubble. The bubble symbolises aphonetic emission that necessarily comes from a sourcerepresented by the cartoon. Normally, the reading of thedialogue demands more time than the vision of the images. Thelength of the dialogues is very important to set the rhythm of thestory, because it determines a pause in the narration andconsequently slows down the action, adapting it to the rhythm ofthe words.

In comics, the narration is conveyed by two different semioticsystems: an iconic one and a textual one.12 So, the fruition ofcomics demands an activity of both vision and reading.Obviously, the verbal element is fundamental in producing theglobal sense of comics, since it transmits an important amount of

10 Driest, Joris, ‘Subjective Narration in Comics’, Retrieved May 26, 2005,

PDF.11 See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit, p. 7.12 See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit., p. 45-52.


359

information which is necessary to understand the story.Therefore, the linguistic message serves at the same time as acommunication among the characters and as an information tothe reader. Comics are created by choosing images, assemblingthem, setting their topographical and chronological relations andadding to them the phonic and literary elements. Being inscribedin a particular space (namely the speech balloon), words incomics are part of the image, as they graphically come out of thecharacter’s mouth, and still they are very different elements.Characters’ utterances, following one after the other, form achain of information which is parallel to the sequence of images:the global sense is given by the interaction of the twocommunicative strings. Bubbles are placed inside the imageaccording to specific criteria that determine the turn-takingsystem, as the language of the balloons mostly reproduces directspeech.

The Language of Comics: Playing with Words

As we mentioned in the introduction of this work, one of thebasic elements of the language of comics is the wordplay, aparticular kind of verbal expression which is central to the globalunderstanding of comics texts and to their humorous effect, aswe will see in the Asterix case. According to Todorov, the termwordplay (or pun) refers to a linguistic practice which is opposedto the referential use of language, the one mostly employed ineveryday life.13 Marina Yaguello agreed with him, when shewrote: ‘Playing with words – sounds or meaning – any activitywhich has language as both subject matter and as means ofexpression, constitutes the survival of the pleasure principle,

13 See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit., p. 9-10.


360

preserving the gratuitous in the face of the utilitarian’.14 Usingpuns means producing a text whose aim is not only to provideinformation, but mainly to produce a particular effect on thereader; that is, puns are an example of a creative use of language,based on intentional manipulation of its normal phonic orsemantic aspect. This refers to what Jakobson calls (in his modelof communicative functions) the ‘poetic’ function of language,which occurs when messages convey not only a signified but alsocontain a creative ‘touch’ of their own. Wordplays also point outthe ‘metalinguistic’ function of language, one which deals withthe code itself. Puns are in fact a superintensive use of language:they are created using the existing words of a language, but theyuse them to go beyond their usual meaning, to break rules, toextend their possibilities. As for the ‘ludic’ function of language,this appears almost tautological for puns, as ‘playing with words’naturally implies a playful aspect.

When we translate a text as full of puns as comics generallyare (Asterix in particular), we deal with some very specificproblems. We can say that puns are the main stylistic feature ofthis kind of texts, so failing to render this expressive elementsalmost means being unsuccessful in the translation of a comictext.15 It is therefore essential to find a strategy that allows thetranslator to reproduce the general ‘spirit’ of the original text. Aswe shall see later on in this study, an approach also confirmed byBritish translators of Asterix, this does not mean finding anequivalent to every single wordplay, exactly at the same place.On the contrary, the most important thing is to maintain thefundamental character of the original text, and to recreate alinguistic texture that may provoke a similar effect in the readers;the distribution of puns in the text could be slightly different

14 Yaguello, Marina, Harris, Trevor A. Le V., Language through the LookingGlass: Exploring Language and Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.16.

15 See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit., p. 11-12, 68-71.


361

from the original, some of them may be lost, some others may benewly created by the translator, because the aim of her/his workshould not be restricted to the punctual rendition of one singlepun but to the recreation of a whole expressive system. In fact,one can say that wordplays are untranslatable, and most of thetime this is no lie. But it would be a paradox not to try andreproduce them in another language (and a different culturalcontext), since every language can assume a metalinguisticfunction and use its codes as objects to reflect upon and to createdifferent effects.

The first restriction that affects the translation of a wordplay islanguage itself. Source language and target language may besomehow similar, have lexical and syntactical correspondences,but the main issues are related to their cultural systems, theirinclination to the ludic function of language, their writtentradition. These and other factors make reproducing a pun intoanother language an easier or more difficult task. Translators’choices are obviously influenced by the resources of both thesource and the target language (generally her/his mothertongue), and by the affinity of the two cultures.

Another important and double factor which must be takeninto account by translators of comics is the function of theoriginal text and the intended effect on readers. A goodtranslation of a pun should render its motivation, its purposewithin the text and the aimed reaction of readers to it. Toreproduce this means to respect the function of the text, its innercoherence and its very nature. The need to aim at reproducingthe functional and pragmatic equivalence of both source andtarget texts could also be a guide to find the best possibletranslating solutions.

A third parameter to be considered by translators is thecontext, one of the fundamental elements that could help themto find a good equivalent to the original wordplay. Context mustbe considered at different levels: it could be a verbal context (the


362

words and the figures used in the textual environment of thepun) or it could deal with a cognitive context (the narrative plotin which the pun is inserted and its relation with it). Both verbaland cognitive contexts should be also considered at a local level(the text portion near the wordplay) and at a global level (thetext considered as a whole).

Possible solutions to the problems posed by the translation ofpuns could be very different and range between an extremefidelity to the source text and an absolutely free reinterpretation.We can indicate four different types of translation:16 anisomorphic translation, in which a wordplay is literallyreproduced; a homomorphic translation, in which a wordplay isrendered using the same linguistic procedures of the original (ananagram, for example) but with other words; a heteromorphictranslation, in which the original wordplay is substituted withanother kind of wordplay, more compatible with the targetlanguage; a free translation, in which a wordplay can besubstituted with another linguistic solution that, even though itlacks the verbal hilarity of the original, is more adequate to thenew context, or when a pun is added ex-nihilo by the translator.

As anticipated in the introduction, we shall now focus on theselected corpus of this work, the comic series of Asterix, and toanalyse the actual problems of its translation.

Asterix, a Gaulish Hero that Conquered the World

The Astérix series originated in the pages of a French comicsmagazine called Pilote, in 1959. The authors, René Goscinny andAlbert Uderzo, had already drawn and written their own stripcartoons, but when their collaboration started, they found outthat it was better for Goscinny to write the scripts and forUderzo to draw the pictures. The new magazine Pilote was

16 See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit., p. 72.


363

looking for a new comics series, so they came up with a newcharacter, based on the ancestors of French people, the Gauls.Headed by the fierce Vercingetorix, the Gauls were brave andnoble, and they valiantly resisted the invasion of Julius Caesar’sRoman army. Of course, they were defeated in the end, butGoscinny and Uderzo decided to introduce a slight alteration tohistory and partially revenge the Gaul’s pride. Their Gaulishheroes live in a little village that would never surrender toRomans, always beating off their assaults thanks to the prowessof its leading warrior Asterix and the magic potion brewed by thevillage druid which gives anyone who drinks it supernaturalstrength, albeit for a limited period of time.

That is the story that has become widely popular, eventhough, as it is well known, this series is not mainly about warsand battles, being mostly a funny subject based on a typical kindof humour. Still, probably not everybody knows that the originalidea was to make Asterix a genuinely heroic Gaul, a big andstrong warrior. But, on second thought, Goscinny opted for amore amusing character, making him small and frail inappearance, but in fact very shrewd and wise; secondarily,Uderzo thought that a well-mixed pair of characters would bemore successful, and invented Asterix’s inseparable friend,Obelix, who is in turn big and enormously strong (indeed,having fallen into the cauldron of magic potion when he was ababy, he enjoys its permanent effects and he is consequentlyforbidden to drink more), but at the same time – and in contrastwith his appearance – is naïve, simple-minded and kind-hearted,though extremely brave. Their penchant for food (which inObelix becomes an insatiable appetite, especially when it comesto a roasted wild boar), their passion for a good brawl with theRomans (who invariably end up beaten) and their fear that thesky could fall upon their heads, are other recurring elements thatcreate the spirit and the humour of this series.


364

The Asterix and Obelix duo, together with a list of otherfunny characters, had their first story published in 1961 as abook whose title read Asterix the Gaul (Asterix le Gaulois). Fromthat moment onwards books began to be generally released on ayearly basis. Up to 2009, thirty-four comic books in the serieswere printed.

Quite soon, the popularity of this new series crossed theFrench boundaries and reached most European countries. Thishappened despite the fact that the subject of Asterix comics,beginning with the two leading heroes, was quite patriotic andthe characters represented the basic virtues and defects ofFrench people. Indeed, their stories have been translated in morethan one hundred languages and dialects, including Esperanto,Latin and ancient Greek.

English Translations of Asterix

As for British English, all the stories have been officiallytranslated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. Their firstvolume of the Asterix series was published in 1969, but prior tothis, there had been a very interesting episode, involving GreatBritain and our hero. In fact, before the first actual translation,there was an attempt at British ‘appropriation’ of Asterix or, aswe should call it, a case of cultural transplantation of this comicseries across the Channel.

A British magazine for boys published in 1965 and 1966,called Ranger, included (starting from the edition of 18th

September 1965) a version of Asterix transferred to Britain,which does not mean Asterix visiting Britain but Asterix beingturned into a pre-British character and inserted into a pre-Britishcontext with the locals also struggling against the Romans. Thevisual element of the comics remained the same of the original,only the names and some referential elements of the story weretransformed, in order to make our heroes ancient Britons rather


365

than Gauls. Thus, at times the text looked pretty different. Inthis case, Ranger magazine adapted the story of Asterix and theBig Fight.17 The strip was called Britons Never Never Never ShallBe Slaves,18 with Asterix renamed ‘Beric the Bold’19 and Obelixbeing called ‘Son of Boadicea’.20 In 1966, Ranger was mergedinto Look and Learn magazine, and for a time the series wascarried on in this publication in 1967, up to 22nd April,publishing a version of Asterix and Cleopatra,21 whose titlechanged into In the Days of Good Queen Cleo. In this case, even avisual detail had to be changed: in fact, at the end of the book,the original map of Gaul became a map of Britain.

This British adaptation is not so bizarre and unacceptable as itmay seem. Sometimes, when works are translated for othercountries, they undergo major changes. The usual reason is tomake them more accessible to the audience in terms of

17 Le Combat des chefs, first published in serial form in Pilote magazine,

issues 261-302 in 1964, then edited as the seventh volume of the book seriesin 1966. It was finally and properly translated into English in 1971.

18 A verse from the famous patriotic song Rule Britannia!.19 This name was taken from a patriotic equivalent of Asterix’s character,

the protagonist of the book Beric the Briton, A Story of the Roman Invasion(1893), written by British author G.A. Henty, which tells of the Romaninvasion of Britain through the eyes of a ‘half Romanised’ Briton namedBeric.

20 ‘Boudica (also spelled Boudicca), formerly known as Boadicea andknown in Welsh as ‘Buddug’ (d. AD 60 or 61) was a queen of the Brittonic Icenitribe of what is now known as East Anglia in England, who led an uprising of thetribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire’. (From Wikipedia articleBoudica, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica. Last accessed 15th April2010).

21 First published in 1963 in serial form in Pilote magazine, issues 215-257,then printed as the sixth volume of the series in 1965. Officially translated byAnthea Bell and Derek Hockridge in 1969.


366

localisation, even though avoiding value dissonances is also acommon reason.22

A similar but more unfortunate case happened in Germany, anation which, in Astérix et les Goths (1963), was somewhatunkindly caricatured as a warlike Prussian country with a tastefor torture and intrigue. The series was first translated intoGerman, in 1965, by Rolf Kauka, who changed the Gauls intoGermanics, naming the main characters ‘Siggi und Barabbas’instead. The situation got embarrassing when Kauka inserted apolitical bias in its adaptation: in fact, in Siggi und die Ostgoten,which clearly referred to the situation of the then dividedGermany, the Gauls were transformed into the Westgoten(Western Goths), while the original Goths, the villains of thestory, were the Ostgoten (Eastern Goths). The village of ourhero was called Bonnhalla (Bonn, former capital of WesternGermany). The druid’s name was Konradin (an allusion toKonrad Adenauer, first Chancellor of the Federal Republic ofGermany), and the name of the chief of the Goths wasHullberick, which reminded of Walter Ulbricht, who was in asimilar position in the former Democratic Republic of Germany.The Ostgoten were made speak an East German dialect, whosewords were printed in red, so as to allude to the communistregime. Other details were adapted with the same intention23.The abuse came to its end when, in Siggi und die goldene Sichel –an adaptation of the La Serpe d’Or (Asterix and the Golden Sickle)album, also dated 1965 – he made the chief villain of the story(who sold overpriced golden sickles) speak with a Jewish accent.Goscinny was enraged after reading the translated comic andforbade Kauka further translations.

22 See Cut and Paste Translation, available at http: // tvtropes.org / pmwiki /pmwiki.php/Main/CutAndPasteTranslation, last accessed 11th March 2010.

23 See Asterix International! Asterix in Germany, available athttp://www.asterix-international.de/asterix/germany.shtml (last accessed 15th

April 2010).


367

Coming back to Great Britain, Anthea Bell has explained thehistory of how the Asterix series was finally and officiallytranslated for English-speaking readers (Asterix, What’s in aName):

several English-language publishers initially turned the seriesdown, on the grounds that it was too French to cross theChannel successfully. Eventually Brockhampton Press, the nameat the time of the children’s department of Hodder &Stoughton, decided to make the venture. To translate the booksthey recruited a team consisting of Anthea Bell (i.e. me) andDerek Hockridge, Derek as a lecturer in French and expert onall the French topical references, Anthea as a professionaltranslator with, at the time, a special interest in translation forchildren. The first English translations were published in 1969;the latest was the story mentioned above, Asterix and Obelix AllAt Sea, which came out in October 1996 in the original Frenchand also, simultaneously, in the major languages of translation.24

Two attempts to introduce Asterix into the American market werealso made. The first one was a serialised publication of five stories ina group of North American newspapers, between November 1977and the beginning of 1979.25 Stories were divided in strips appearingin the daily comics section of some different and concurrentnewspapers. The Sunday colour comics edition contained the endof one story and the beginning of the next, each taking up half apage.26 This particular type of edition required a significantadaptation of both the artwork and the dialogues. Names, puns andother textual elements were modified to get a more idiomatic and

24 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, available at http: //

www.literarytranslation.com/workshops/asterix/, last accessed 7th March 2010,p. 2.

25 The stories are Asterix the Gladiator, Asterix and Cleopatra, Asterix and theGreat Crossing, Asterix and the Big Fight and Asterix in Spain.

26 See English translations of Asterix available at http: // en.wikipedia.org / wiki /English_translations_of_asterix (last accessed 7th March 2010).


368

politically correct version, intended for the family-oriented audienceof the newspapers, producing a quite different result whencompared to the British translation.

The second episode which concerns the United States refersto the publication of five Asterix books, translated into AmericanEnglish by Robert Steven Caron, with the aim of having differenteditions purposely realised for American readers. The volumespublished are Asterix and the Great Crossing in 1984, Asterix theLegionary and Asterix at the Olympic Games in 1992, and Asterixin Britain and Asterix and Cleopatra in 1995. Most of thecharacters’ names were changed for copyright reasons, as we willsee in detail later on, when we will focus on this aspect of thetranslation. But in the States, Asterix never achieved a greatsuccess, and this retranslating enterprise was finally stopped.The remaining volumes were released on the American marketin accordance to the British translation, thus generating a certainconfusion in the public, due to the differences existing in the fivealbums translated by Robert Steve Caron.

Asterix’s relative lack of success in the U.S. confirms whatFlinn Bjørklid wrote about the limits of this comic series:

It seems as if Asterix is firstly a French comic, and secondly aEuropean comic, at least it has never been accepted in thehomeland of comics USA, where it’s been introduced severaltimes. Maurice Horn’s The World Encyclopedia of Comics statesthat ‘There are a few good things in Asterix (the clever use ofballoons, drawing which is clean and uncluttered, and somegenuinely funny situations) but the basic plot is tiresome andGoscinny’s endless stream of bad puns and chauvinistic asidesmake this quite unpleasant as a strip’. 27

27 Bjørklid Finn, (translated in English by Nicolai Langfeldt), A Celtic Gaul

named Asterix available at http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/asterix-article.html(last accessed 7th March 2010).


369

The latter seems quite a narrow interpretation of Asterix or oneshould really believe that the Atlantic Ocean separates two differentworlds, at least as far as comics are concerned, or else that theircirculation is a one-way movement, travelling only from Americatowards Europe.

Lost (and Gained) in Translation

The main difficulty for translators working on a text based onhumour, is that of transferring its spirit from one cultural systemto a different one. We have already pointed out that Asterix wasinitially judged to be too French-specific, which was probablytrue (or at least partially true) for the first albums, and that thisconsideration delayed the translation of the books in GreatBritain and elsewhere. Maybe, after the success of the firsttranslations, the authors, bearing in mind that their audiencemight be foreign, tried to make them more universal. Or perhapsforeign publishers understood that the kind of humour readerscould find in Asterix’s books, centred as it was on puns,caricatures and ironic stereotypes of both French regions andEuropean nations, was not so French-specific after all. Makingfun of history and traditions is something that can be shared by awider public, especially in Europe, where history and culturaltraditions have deep roots. Anthea Bell, commenting on theEuropean nature of Asterix’s humour, states:

[...] I would call the comedy not solely French, but European.French children’s history books traditionally open with a tributeto nos ancêtres les Gaulois. […] all of us in Europe enjoy makinganachronistic fun of the past. Well, Western Europe, anyway: asan eminent Slavonic scholar said to me recently, it is


370

inconceivable to think of the Russians showing this kind ofaffectionate disrespect for their history and culture28.

[...] It is European humour rather than French. It doesn’t crossthe Atlantic so well, the American sense of humour is different.We and the French like the humour of historical anachronism.We have a lot of history behind us and we like to laugh at it inboth nations29.

Indeed, Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge have certainlysucceeded in their English version of the Asterix series, for theyhave proved capable of maintaining the spirit and humour of thesource text even when direct translation was impossible –especially when puns between languages were not closely related.

But, how does the process begin? Which tools do translatorsuse? Do they have a set of principles guiding them in theirdifficult task? Peter Kessler explains all this in his Complete Guideto Asterix, which directly quotes the detailed explanation offeredby Anthea Bell in relation of what she calls their ‘translating kit’:

When a new Asterix book is in production, the translators aresent a copy of the text so that they can start work on theirversion. Often, at this stage, they are working ‘blind’, withoutthe artwork.In recent years, Uderzo has compiled detailed lists of thewordplays and cultural jokes in his texts. These he circulates toall foreign translators, so that they can be sure of not missing asingle trick when combing through the narrative.Anthea Bell describes the process: ‘Besides the French original,we have what might be called our translating kit around us.

28 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, in Electronic Telegraph, Thursday 25th

February 1999, available at http://www.asterix-international.de / asterix /mirror/asterix_my_love.htm, last accessed 7th March 2010.

29 Pauli, Michelle, Asterix and the golden jubilee, in The Guardian, Thursday29th October 2009, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk / books / 2009 /oct/29/asterix-golden-jubilee, last accessed 7th March 2010.


371

There’s a folder labelled ‘Asterix – Names, Jokes, Oddments,Etc.’, full of things that might come in useful some day. Thereare reference books. It’s amazing how often people say, ‘Butyou’re a translator; surely you don’t need dictionaries?’Translators need the biggest, best dictionaries going. Translatorswear out their dictionaries. Among our old favourites areWalker’s Rhyming Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations,Roget’s Thesaurus and the new Concise Oxford Dicitonary, easilythe best of the Oxford English Dictionary range for this purpose,being the most up-to-date and ‘colloq.’, as the entries put it.Any of these may set the mind jumping from word or phrase (a)in the original French, to a related subject, to word or phrase (b)which will provide a comparable bit of wordplay in English’.Also, part of the Bell-Hockridge kit, is a set of six principles,which they always employ when translating Asterix:1. The idea is to render, as faithfully as possible, the feel of the

original.2. With humour of this intensely verbal nature, the translation

must follow the spirit rather than the letter of the original; wemust therefore often find jokes which are different, though we hopealong the same lines as the French jokes.

3. They must, of course, suit Albert Uderzo’s wittily detaileddrawings. In particular they must fit the expression on the speaker’sfaces.

4. From the purely technical point of view, they must be about thesame length as the original wording, or we shall create difficultiesfor the letterer trying to get the English text into the speech-bubbles.

5. Very important: we will try for the same kind of mixture of jokes asin the French, where Asterix appeals on a number of differentlevels. There’s the story-line itself with its ever-attractive themeof the clever little fellow outwitting the hulking great brute; thereis simple knockabout humour, both verbal and visual, whichgoes down well with quite young children; there are puns andpassages of wordplay for older children; and there is some


372

distinctly sophisticated humour, depending on literary or artisticallusion, for the adult or near-adult mind.

6. We will also have the same number of jokes as in the French. Ifwe just can’t get one in at the same point as in the original, we’llmake up for it somewhere else.30 If there is an obvious gift we’lluse it, even if there was no counterpart in the French.31

So, the first important principle is that the translation must befaithful to the feel of the original, rather than to its letter. As pointtwo properly emphasises, this is due to the intense verbal natureof the humour, full of cultural and linguistic jokes, and to theconstraint represented by the drawings, as it is pointed out atpoints three and four. Elsewhere, Anthea Bell speaks about thechallenges translators have to face:

As a task of translation, the Asterix stories present a fascinatingset of challenges all of their own. The pictorial element isinseparable from the text. But, and paradoxically, translation ofthe text, if it is to be faithful to the spirit of the original, has tobe very free, indeed unusually free, where the letter isconcerned. The reason for this is that the French text iscrammed with puns, wordplay and verbal jokes of all kinds,which will not translate straight. Often the task is one ofadaptation rather than ordinary translation (and everything iscarefully read in France before it is approved for Englishpublication).32

Puns are the main concern of Asterix’s translators, for, as Bellsays: ‘Puns abound in the French. Whether or not one agreeswith Freud that puns are the lowest form of humour, they arecertainly difficult to translate, and will not usually translate

30 Hockridge said about it: ‘I’d like to feel the level of punning is about thesame as the French, so if you groan that seems about right’ (Kessler, Peter,The Complete Guide to Asterix, London, Hodder Children’s Books, 1997, p.61).

31 Idem, p. 59-60.32 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 2.


373

straight at all’.33 Still, Bell and Hockridge managed to findsuitable solutions by using their experience, which led them tothe conviction that their work was more about recreating ratherthan just translating. Their target language (and culture) offeredreasonable resources in order to fill the inevitable gaps created inthe translation process:

For we Brits, again like the French, enjoy the dreadful puns inwhich the Asterix stories abound. But if you translate a punstraight, it is no longer a pun. You have the situation, you havethe facial expressions of the characters and the size of the speechbubble, and you must devise a new pun to fit. 34

The target text must produce the same effects on readers, musthave the same balance of humour and adventure. In order toachieve this result, sometimes the translators add humorousremarks of their own, either when a direct translation of theoriginal French is not possible, or simply when they have thechance to put in a joke that would get, in the target language, aneffect which is appropriate and coherent to the spirit of the text.That is not only the case of the English translation. A wonderfulexample of this is evident in the work of Italian translators aswell35, where the Roman legionnaires speak in 20th centuryRoman dialect, which is a real additional benefit to the Italianalbums. Their colourful expressions in the modern Romanvernacular seem to fit exceptionally well the drawings, giving tothose most unfortunate characters – always on the losing side ofthe story, always playing the fools and getting hammered by

33 Idem, p. 4.34 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, cit. Peter Kessler wrote about it (op. cit., p.

61): ‘Fortunately English, with a lexicon twice the size of any other Europeanlanguage, is arguably the language of puns. And sure enough, Hockridge andBell have always delivered’.

35 Asterix’s albums have been translated in Italian by Marcello Marchesi (3albums), Luciana Marconcini (17), Alba Avesini (12), Carlo Manzoni (1),Fedora Dei (1), Natalina Compiacente (1), Tito Faraci and Sergio Rossi (1).


374

everyone – more liveliness and expressivity. Just as the Gaulsembody the qualities and the defects of the modern French (andthe same applies to any other foreign character depicted in theseries), Roman characters are more realistically linked to the witof their contemporary descendants, thanks to the Italiantranslators’ genial idea, which perfectly matches the genuinespirit of the source text. To mention but one example, we canobserve the way in which, in Asterix in Britain, the Romansoldiers react when their British opponents repeatedly interruptthe fight because of the week-end: the original French reliesmore on the visual aspect of the drawings and on the size of thecharacters in the speech-bubble to express the soldiers’ angerand frustration, while Italian readers can also benefit from theverbal strength of the dialect expressions, that clearly makes thisRoman soldier much more ‘Roman’ than the original one.

Another famous addition to the Italian version, is the renditionof Obelix’s famous catchphrase ‘Ils sont fous ces romains’, whichis obviously translated as ‘Sono Pazzi Questi Romani’: the extra-joke is that the initials are printed in a way that clearly alludes tothe Roman abbreviation SPQR,36 a pun that is added to theoriginal, evidently serving the general purpose of the text.

36 An initialism from the Latin phrase ‘Senatus Popolusque Romanus’,

which means ‘The Senate and the People of Rome’. Both the graphic aspectof this catchphrase and the dialect characterisation of the Roman soldiers


375

As we read at point five of the above mentioned list of principles,Asterix’s humour works at different levels. Sometimes the bookscontain rather simple wordplays which aim at amusing fairlyyoung children. At other times, however, they are extendedcultural references. Some important literary works (such asCervantes’ Don Quijote) are ironically referred to and there arevisual allusions to Renaissance’s paintings and classicalsculptures.

After all, Asterix’ stories are full of cultural references, mainly,as it is obvious, to French culture. Despite being full ofreferences to French history and modern French society (in fact,many supporting characters turn out to be caricatures of famousFrench people), Asterix has become widely popular and it isunderstood and appreciated outside France as well. Evenwithout speaking French, or without a good knowledge ofFrench society, readers can decode symbols and characters, allof which are not necessarily specific to France37, present both inthe pictures and the verbal text.

were introduced in the first album of the series, Asterix il Gallico, translated byMarcello Marchesi in 1968.

37 See, Bjørklid Finn, art. cit.


376

Translating cultural references may also pose particularproblems. Bell and Hockridge’s technique when dealing withcultural humour, is to focus on those aspects that Englishreaders will understand. But not all cultural references resist thepassage of time: if a hint to the above-mentioned Quijote can stillbe understood in one hundred years, other allusions are soclosely connected to contemporary aspects and figures that theyseriously face the risk of obsolescence. How must translators actin cases such as these? Let’s see again Anthea Bell’s suggestion:

what is to be done when a reference becomes obsolete? Shouldthis play on words be rethought, and if so with what? […] Butobsolescence can be a real problem in translating this kind ofmaterial – for the series uses the humour of anachronism tointroduce twentieth-century themes into the time of JuliusCaesar. What if anything should be done when a series hasproved popular enough to remain in print for nearly forty years,in France, thirty years in the UK, and around the same length oftime in other major European languages? Some visual themescannot be changed: cf. the faces of characters [for ex. the Beatlesin Asterix in Britain]. But should verbal topical references beallowed to stand as witnesses to their period, or should someattempt at revision be made?38

In fact, as Anthea Bell suggests, transposing a modern ideainto the world of 50 BC is one of the most exploited jokes inAsterix, a kind of cultural humour which both entertains readers,and make them reflect on some aspects of their modern,‘civilised’ lives.

Translating Names

Puns are not just an essential part of the comics dialogues, inso far as, in actual fact, they begin with names. Names play an

38 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 5.


377

essential role in Asterix’s humour and they are the very firstelements that contribute to the comic depiction of a character.39

Some names are funny because they are simply absurd and donot even refer to a character’s quality, but most of the time theyintroduce a humorous comment on the central trait of itspersonality. In any case, names are puns and they have to betranslated into an equivalent that could have the same effect ontarget readers, so as to maintain the spirit and the flow of thestory. The names of the two leading characters have not posedany problem for the English translators, as Asterix (from theFrench ‘astérisque’, rendered in English as ‘asterisk’) and Obelix(from the French ‘obélisque’, ‘obelisk’ in English) can be easilyretained in the target language, because the two words uponwhich the names are created have the same Greek etymology inboth French and English (as well as in Italian), so the wordplayworks in both cases and there is no need for a translation. MaybeGoscinny and Uderzo purposely chose two names with a classicorigin, so that they could be maintained in most Europeanlanguages without any loss of meaning, thinking about theinternational distribution of their series. Anyway, it is a veryfortunate circumstance that the implication of the name of thehero that gives the title to the whole series can be understood bymost readers. Obviously, the same applies to the name of his bigfellow. Anthea Bell dedicates a comprehensive paragraph of herarticle Asterix, What’s in a Name to the problems faced in thisdelicate task:

Names: the books to date contain some four hundred propernames of people (and some place names), nearly all of whichhave had to be changed in translation, since they are not reallynames, but comic spoofs on names made up out of Frenchwords in the original. For instance the village bard

39 See English Translations of Asterix, available at http://en.wikipedia.org /

wiki/English_translations_of_asterix, last accessed 7th March 2010.


378

Assurancetourix = assurance tous risques, ‘comprehensiveinsurance’. As with all the Gauls, his name ends in the suffix –ix,to echo the genuine Vercingetorix. But translated straight thephrase sounds nothing like a name of any kind. In English hebecomes Cacofonix because he is tone-deaf and sings and playsso badly out of tune that his music is mere cacophony. Thenthere is the chieftain Abraracourcix whose name is from thephrase à bras raccourcis = literally ‘with foreshortened arms’, i.e.doubled up ready for a fight; to attack someone violently istomber sur quelqu’un à bras raccourcis. Again, this was impossibleto translate into a convincing name. The chieftain is ratherstouter than is good for him, and was therefore called, withreference to his girth, Vitalstatistix in English. Asterix andObelix remain the same, as far as I know, in all languages, butthe druid Panoramix retains his French name in many otherlanguages, and we too have the adjective ‘panoramic’ availablein English. However, the name of ‘Getafix’ seemed a gift, havingmore than one double meaning: not only does the druid’s magicpotion give the Gauls a temporary ‘fix’ (of a perfectly innocuouskind) to help them defeat the Roman aggressors, but there isalso the theory that the druids of ancient Britain may have usedcircles of standing stones (like Stonehenge) as astronomicalobservatories, to help them ‘get a fix’ on the sun. There aretentative proposals for revision of the Asterix translations. Doespolitical correctness require that the present name of the Druidbe scrapped? If so, what might replace it, or should one go backto the French Panoramix? This is but one of the issues to beraised. Roman names end in -us, to resemble the real Latinnames which they are not, with a very few exceptions inhistorical figures like Julius Caesar and Brutus). Most Britonsend in -ax, possibly because the real Caesar, in his real historicalwork De Bello Gallico, mentions a king of Kent called Segovax –e. g. Jolitorax in French becomes Anticlimax in English. (Astérixchez les Bretons/Asterix in Britain). The Gaulish women end in -ine in French, e.g. Bonemine the village chieftain’s wife, but in


379

the English versions, Gaulish and Roman alike, end in the usualfeminine -a (the chieftain’s wife becomes Impedimenta).40

This testimony by Bell raises many interesting questions. Sherefers to the names of some of the recurring characters of theseries. Most translators obviously chose to create new nameswith new jokes that may produce a comic effect in the targetlanguage. But, for example, Italian translators, made adifferent choice. Their editions tend to maintain the originalnames even if the wordplays are completely lost and thecharacters’ monikers result quite difficult to read andunderstand for an Italian reader. Think about an Italian boyreading ‘Assurancetourix’ or ‘Abraracourcix’: if the boy is notstudying French, the original pun is missing and so is thecorrect pronunciation. Coming back to the English versions,we have already referred to the fact that in the Americaneditions most of the characters’ names were changed, to adaptthem to an American audience or even for copyright reasons,as with Robert Steven Caron’s translations. Here is aninteresting table41 that lists the names of the major characters,comparing the French source text to the English andAmerican versions; a column with the Italian names has beenadded here:

Originalname(French)

Meaning Description

Italianname

Britishname

Ameri-can name(Newspaper)

Americanname(Album)

Astérix asterisk(because he isthe star), also

Gaulishwarrior

Asterix Asterix Asterix Asterix

40 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 3. For the wife of the

fishmonger, the translators prefer to create a new name with the feminineending in –a, Bacteria, rather than keeping the unmotivated homage to theBeatles’ song Yellow Submarine, which is implicit in the original French,Iélosubmarine (see table above).

41 From the Wikipedia article, English translations of Asterix, cit.


380

the medicalterm asterixisrefers to aperiodic loss ofmuscle tone,the opposite ofwhat Astérixdisplays whenhe drinks themagic potion

Obélix obelisk (Anobelisk issimilar to amenhir; and theobelisk symbol† often followsthe asterisk.)

Menhirdeliveryman

Obelix Obelix Obelix Obelix

Idéfix idée fixe (themeor obsession)

Obelix’sdog

Idefix Dogmatix Dogmatix Dogmatix

Panoramix Panorama(wide view)

Druid Panoramix Getafix Readymix Magigimmix

Abraracourcix

à brasraccourcis: (hit,lambast)violently

VillageChief

Abraracourcix

Vitalstatistix

Vitalstatistix

Macroeconomix

Bonemine Bonne mine(healthy look)

Chief’sWife

Beniaminao Mimina

Impedimenta

n/a Belladonna

Agecanonix âge canonique(canonical age)

Villageelder

Matusalemix

Geriatrix Geriatrix Arthritix

Assurancetourix

Assurance tousrisques(comprehensiveinsurance)

Bard Assurancetourix

Cacofonix Cacofonix Malacoustix

Cétautomatix

c’estautomatique(it’s automatic)

Blacksmith

Automatix Fulliautomatix

Ordralfabé-tix

ordrealphabétique(alphabeticalorder)

Fishmonger

Ordinalfabetix

Unhygienix

Fishtix Epidemix

Iélosubmarine

YellowSubmarine

Wife ofFishmonger

Ielosubmarine

Bacteria


381

Falbala Piece ofclothing addedto a dress,usually seen asa bad tasteluxury

Minorrecurringcharacter

Falbalà Panacea n/a Philharmonia

As we can see, the only case in which the Italian translatorschange a character’s name in order to create a joke referring toits main trait, is that of the village elder, ‘Agecanonix’, which inItalian becomes ‘Matusalemix’ (alluding to the patriarchMethuselah – Matusalemme in Italian – who is the eldest mancited in the Bible, having lived for 969 years), in British English‘Geriatrix’ and in American albums ‘Arthritix’, all the namesrelating to his age. As for the remaining names of the recurringcharacters, Italian translators keep the original names, limitingtheir interventions to a slight adaptation, when the similarity ofthe Italian vocabulary to the original French allows to reproducethe pun without a complete recreation. This, in spite of the factthat, in the two cases mentioned above (Abraracourcix andAssurancetourix) their conservative choice means the loss of anykind of wordplay. In another case, Italian translators give to thechief’s wife an existing name which is similar to the originalFrench (Beniamina for Bonnemine), but in doing so, theycompletely loose the pun created by Goscinny and Uderzo(Bonnemine stands for ‘healthy look’); so, they generallyprivilege similarity to the original rather than the humorousexpressivity given to the names by the authors.

Bell and Hockridge’s attitude is entirely different, as we haveseen before. They try to replicate in the target language the samesort of ‘comic spoof on names’. Naturally, the same applies tominors or one-story characters. The translators accept thechallenge to play the authors’ game, a game with some rules, ofcourse. For example, as Bell says, Gauls’ names normally end in-ix, while Britons’ end in -ax, Egyptians in -is (ex. Numerobis)and Romans in -us. The latter happens to be, rather than a


382

constraint, quite a productive feature in the English version,since it allows Bell and Hockridge to create new wordplays forsome Romans’ names:

Roman names end in –us, to resemble the real Latin nameswhich they are not, with a very few exceptions in historicalfigures like Julius Caesar and Brutus. They include, for instance,a legionary called Plutoqueprévus = plus tôt que prévu, ‘soonerthan expected’, who becomes in English Infirmofpurpus (fromLady Macbeth’s speech to her husband: ‘Infirm of purpose!Give me the daggers.’). […] And in the first book of all Astérixen Hispanie/Asterix in Spain, p. 9, a centurion who is ClaudiusNonpossumus in the French (from Latin, non possumus, wecannot) and becomes Spurius Brontosaurus in English. Thetranslators were pleased when they recollected that Spurius wasa genuine Roman name: cf. Spurius Lartius, one of the braveallies who helped Horatius keep the bridge in the brave days ofold (Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome).42

We are pleased when, like Goscinny, we can make a wholephrase into a Roman name [Sendervictorius and Appianglorius,a couple of Roman soldiers],43 but owing to the differencebetween the normal word order of noun and adjective in Englishand French, it is generally much harder to make up suchcompounds in English. We do however have quantities ofEnglish adjectives ending –ous, which can sometimes be used ontheir own to make a name approximating to its bearer’scharacter (‘Insalubrius’ in Gladiator) or combined with a nounto give a Roman two names (‘Nervus Illnus’ in Banquet).44

42 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 4.43 These are characters from Asterix the Gladiator, and their names form a

sentence from the British national anthem, God Save the Queen (‘Send hervictorious, happy and glorious’). Note that the second name ingeniouslyrelates also to the Roman road known as the Appian Way. In the originalFrench, the couple is named Ziguépus and Rictus.

44 Anthea Bell in Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 63.


383

Fictional toponyms are also created with the purpose of creatinga humorous effect. For example, the four camps (castra) whichsurround Asterix’s village are named: Compendium, Aquarium,Laudanum and Totorum (Tot o’ rum, colloquial English forshot of rum). In French, this camp is called ‘Babaorum’, a punon baba au rhum or rum baba, a popular French pastry.45

In earlier translations, such as in Ranger/Look and Learn(dating from 1965 to 1967), other versions of names haveappeared. Panoramix remains the name of the Druid, while thevillage chieftain becomes Tunabrix (ton of bricks), rather thanVitalstatistix. Some of these were used in early English-languageversions of cartoon movies.

We shall discuss later on some of the choices made by Englishtranslators for the names of the characters in Asterix in Britain.These choices have clearly been always discussed by thetranslators and they had to be finally approved by the authorsthemselves.

Asterix Travels: Dealing with Foreign People and theirCharacterization

About fifty per cent of Asterix’s adventures takes place in Gaul,in various parts of the Roman-occupied region, around thevillage or in more distant districts (like Lutetia, Corsica etc.). Inthe rest of the stories, Asterix and Obelix visit countries such asSpain (Astérix en Hispanie, 1969 / Asterix in Spain, 1971), Egypt(Astérix et Cléopatre, 1965 / Asterix and Cleopatra, 1969), Britain(Astérix chez les Brétons, 1966 / Asterix in Britain, 1970), the areaof present-day Germany where the Goths live (Astérix et lesGoths, 1963 / Asterix and the Goths 1975), Switzerland (Astérixchez les Helvètes, 1970 / Asterix in Switzerland, 1973), Greece

45 In the American translations, one of these camps is named

Nohappimedium.


384

(Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques, a book written for the 1968 gamesand translated into English Asterix at the Olympic Games on theoccasion of the Munich games four years later), Belgium (Astérixchez les Belges, 1979 / Asterix in Belgium, 1980), even India(Astérix chez Rahazade, 1987 / Asterix and the Magic Carpet,1988), America (La Grande Traversée, 1975 / Asterix and theGreat Crossing, 1977, although they do not know it is a real NewWorld and believe they are in some Roman colony, maybe Creteor Thrace), and in a more recent book (La Galère d’Obélix, 1996/ Asterix and Obelix All At Sea, 1996) the fabled continent ofAtlantis. They also visit several times ancient Rome and theirhistorical enemy, Julius Caesar, whom they treat with cheerfuldisrespect. In another story, Astérix et les Normands (1966,translated as Asterix and the Normans in 1978) they do not travelbut they receive the ‘visit’ of a foreign people, actually Vikingsfrom the North of Europe.

These contacts with their close neighbours represent animportant reason for Asterix’s European success. Indeed, ourheroes sometimes have a direct influence on crucial historicalevents or peculiar habits to these countries. For instance, in thisfictional re-writing of history, Asterix teaches Spaniards bullfighting, the Swiss mountain climbing, he takes part in theOlympic Games in Greece, causes a civil war in Germany, dropsby Rome a couple of times, follows the route of the Tour deFrance, gifts the British with their first tea.46 Indeed, a veryparticular level of humour in Asterix corresponds to the retellingof historical facts, which is another way to create humour usinganachronism. The authors defy the authority of history and makejokes on it. There is also a nationalistic perspective to this kind ofhumour: Goscinny and Uderzo are describing the French as theinitiators of habits and ideas that would then become a strongpart of other countries’ traditions. But this is obviously a joke

46 See Bjørklid Finn, art. cit.


385

which only works in a comic context; furthermore, this is mostlya way of laughing at the Frenchman’s natural assumption of hisown national superiority47.

The authors made a parody of every population encounteredby Asterix and Obelix, exploiting the most popular stereotypesgenerally attached to their European fellow citizens.48 The Gothsare depicted as martial and disciplined, warring and goose-stepping, recalling the Germans of the Empire and to a certainextent those of the Third Reich, which makes them the onlypeople represented as characterised by a certain degree ofhostility. The British, as we will see in detail later on, are shownas polite and phlegmatic, with their weird habits (like driving thechariots on the left side of the road) and their terrible cooking(like boiled boar with mint sauce or warm beer). The Swiss aremethodical and keep discreet bank accounts for secret investors.The Spanish are very hospitable but, at the same time, hottempered; Portuguese are tiny and chubby, and so on. Thesemodern stereotypes are humorously and affectionately satirized,but all these European populations (apart from Germans who,especially in early albums, represent the only exception), aregenerally described in a positive way. The French themselves arenot let off the authors’ satire. All these people have one thing incommon with the Gauls: they all hate the Romans, because theyare the invaders. But even the Romans are portrayed with acertain degree of sympathy.

After all, Goscinny and Uderzo were not making fun offoreign people, they were more caricaturising the habit ofidentifying other people through sticky labels, they were almostcelebrating European capability of laughing at their own tics andat their own little rivalries. No-one could possibly feel offended

47 See Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 84.48 See Humour in Asterix, available at http://en.wikipedia.org /

wiki/Humour_in_Asterix (last accessed 7th March 2010).


386

by their jokes. In fact, despite some isolated accusations ofchauvinism,49 the series has been very well received outsideFrance.

Dealing with foreign people clearly involves problems as totheir characterisation. A very productive solution found by theauthors is – in some way – to make characters speak with theaccent of their modern descendants. This means that, in thesource text, the authors try and reproduce the modern foreignaccent of those foreign characters who use French words toexpress themselves, thereby making them speak, for example, asa modern German person would speak French. Reproducingthese foreign accents is therefore a fundamental task fortranslators. Anthea Bell states:

Accents are also a problem. The French are familiar with aBelgian accent; we have no way of reproducing one in English,although we can do a German accent. […] To date, policy hasbeen not to try substituting British regional accents for Frenchregional accents – and for Belgian and African accents, forinstance – but instead to substitute extra jokes for those accentsnot readily imitated in English.50

The thinking behind this procedure is that if one substitutesregional English accents, the whole delicate illusion oftranslation is endangered: ‘What’s this man with the Yorkshireor Somerset accent doing in the middle of Ancient Gaul?’ thinksthe reader. ‘Surely it’s France now. Why aren’t they speakingFrench anyway? This is only a translation! Why am I botheringto read something in translation anyway?51

49 For example, in 1983, the Council of the North London Borough of

Brent removed all Asterix books from the library shelves because Asterix wasseen as racist, but after a public controversy and some well-reasonednewspaper articles the books were reinstated (see Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p.87).

50 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 5.51 Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 73.


387

A general example of this, involves a recurring character in mostAsterix volumes, the black pirate from the unfortunate pirate shipthat ends up being inevitably drenched after any encounter witheither Asterix or the Romans. In the original French edition, theblack pirate speaks with the accent of an African French colony.Most remarkably, the African lookout cannot pronounce the ‘r’.This joke is carried over to many translations, mostly literally: inthe Italian edition, the black pirate pronounces ‘v’ instead of ‘r’.The first English editions had an adaptation of the accent to theBritish context. Nowadays, however, the translators do not thinkthis to be funny, and they changed the text. Look at an examplefrom Asterix in Britain:

As we will discuss soon, much of the humour in the book Asterixin Britain comes from Goscinny’s faithful rendition of theEnglish language, while using French words. Co-author Uderzodeclared:

While I like all that we have made, I have a little preference forAsterix et Les Bretons, for the way that René made the Britishspeak with the structure of the English language transformedinto French. I found it an extraordinary idea. For René, whoknew English perfectly, it was like a child’s game.52

It was pointed out that one important level of humour in Asterixcomes from the use of speech-bubbles. What was generally

52 Quoted in Pauli, Michelle, Asterix and the golden jubilee, in The Guardian,

Thursday 29th October 2009, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk / books /2009/oct/29/asterix-golden-jubilee (last accessed 7th March 2010).


388

deemed as a necessary evil in comics, as it got in the way of theartwork, becomes a point of strength in Goscinny and Uderzo’swork: in fact, the latter often adds visual work in the speech-bubbles so as to make them more expressive, as with the graphicreproduction of foreign languages. Indeed, although the authorsalways use French, to make any character’s communicationcomprehensible for readers, they nonetheless add graphicelements to make a particular language appear ‘foreign’. In fact,the speech of some foreign characters is written using differentlettering according to the language spoken. As a result, the Gaulscannot automatically understand these languages even thoughthe reader does understand. Here are some examples:53

– Iberians: Sentences start with upside-down exclamation marks(‘¡’) or question marks (‘¿’), as in real Spanish;

– Goths: Gothic script is used (which constitutes a languagebarrier with Gauls);

– Vikings: Ø and Å characters are used for O and A (languagebarrier with Gauls);

– Native Americans: Pictograms are used (language barrier withGauls);

– Egyptians: hieroglyphics, accompanied by footnotes, are used(language barrier with Gauls);

– Greeks: words are written as if carved, with no curves and aminimum of strokes.

Asterix Visits his British Neighbours

Asterix in Britain (Astérix chez les Bretons) is the eighth in theAsterix comic book series. It was published in serial form inPilote magazine, issues 307-334 in 1965, and in album form in1966. It tells the story of Asterix and Obelix’s journey to Roman-occupied Britain. At that time, the Gaulish village was pretty

53 See Humour in Asterix, cit.


389

quiet and the life of their inhabitants quite dull, because theRomans were busy trying to conquer Britain, which they actuallymanaged to do. But, as for Gaul, there was a little village inCantium (Kent) still resisting the invaders. A cousin of Asterixnamed, in the English version, Anticlimax, being aware of theprodigies of the magic potion brewed by the druid Getafix,decides to leave Cantium, his home-village, and go to Gaul toask for support in the struggle against the common enemy.Anticlimax’s request is very well received by Asterix and Obelix,always in search of a good scuffle with the Romans, who are thensent to Britain by chief Vitalstatistix, taking a barrel of magicpotion with them.

In this story, most of the humour is based on making fun ofBritish culture and habits. People from across the Channel arepresented as being very close to the Gauls. In fact, as thenarrator states at the beginning of page two, ‘Britain had oftenhelped Gaul fight the Romans’ and ‘The Britons were rather likethe Gauls, many of them being descended from Gaulish tribeswho had settled in Britain’. Goscinny and Uderzo fool aroundthe historical love-hate relationship between France and Britain54

and reproduce all the relatively unflattering stereotypes thatFrench people share about British culture.

54 For a comprehensive study on this subject, see Tombs, Robert, Tombs,

Isabelle, That Sweet Enemy: Britain and France, The History of a Love-HateRelationship, Vintage, 2008.


390

For example, as mentioned above, Britons interrupt the battleagainst the Romans at five o’ clock for their ‘hot-water break’(since tea has not been introduced yet) and seemingly take twodays off at the weekend: as we have seen in the cartoonreproduced above, this habit initially irritates the Romans, untilJulius Caesar decides to attack the Britons right during theircustomary stops, taking them by surprise and provoking a ratherindignant but quite phlegmatic reaction in the Briton chiefCassivellaunos (see the cartoon above). Another unfavourablecliché about British lifestyle deals with the alleged distastefulnessof their cuisine, repeatedly highlighted by Obelix’s comments onthe boiled boar (with mint sauce), or on the drinking of warmbeer and chilled red wine. Such gastronomic practices arenaturally unbearable from the French point of view, especially inconsideration of the fact that the Gauls’ descendants considerthemselves as the trend-setters of universal gastronomy andoenology. Of course, it is Obelix who assumes the role of thecritic, since he represents the average French man in hischauvinistic approach to foreign cultures, while his fellow mateAsterix is more open-minded. Let us have a look at the dialoguebetween them, when they are served with the famous boiled boarfor the first time:

Obelix: ‘This is a bit of a jolly old bore, what!’55.Asterix: ‘Eat up Obelix, and don’t pass remarks. In Britain youmust do as the Britons do’.Obelix: ‘But boiled with mint sauce, Asterix! Poor thing!’.

It is also ironic that Anticlimax should be quite sure that theforeigners are bound to like British gastronomic habits: whenObelix, before leaving Gaul for Britain, suggests ‘We should havebrought some food with us’, Asterix’s cousin replies ‘Goodgracious me, old chap, what for? British food’s delicious, you’re

55 See infra for a comment on the wordplay created between ‘boar’ and‘bore’.


391

sure to like it, what!’. Indeed, if British cuisine is mocked, so isthe French sense of superiority and – through Obelix’s character– the French incapability (or unwillingness) to adapt to others’habits (nevertheless, in this adventure even the Romans aredisgusted with warm beer, which obviously again surprisesAnticlimax).

Speaking about food and drink, in this adventure the Gaulsare made responsible for bringing tea – the national beverage –to the British: we already know that at the time Britons drink justhot water, sometimes with a drop of milk; before leaving theirhome village, Asterix is given some strange herbs by Getafix;when the magic potion that is being carried to the British villageis destroyed by the Romans, Asterix, instead of telling the truth,decides to pretend that those herbs could be used to brew themagic potion, hoping that the Britons’ morale would be boostedby this. When they return to Gaul, Getafix informs Asterix thatthe herbs are called tea. So tea works as a sort of magic potionfor the Britons and the habit of drinking it finally substitutes thatof drinking hot water at five o’ clock.

In this story, set in 50 B.C. Britain, there are references tomodern sporting traditions, which in fact were all created byBritish people: the text says that Anticlimax is from the tribe of‘the Oxbridgenses, famed for their skill in rowing’, an allusion tothe annual Boat Race held between the universities of Oxfordand Cambridge. An important episode of the story is a rugbymatch (although the name of the game is never mentioned)between the teams of Durovernum (ancient name forCanterbury) and Camulodunum (now Colchester). We can seehere the British passion for the game, as well as some traditionalcorollaries surrounding the match such as the selling of flags withthe teams’ colours, the entrance of the teams’ mascots and theperformance of a band of bards before the game. The game itselfis depicted as extremely violent, which provokes Obelix’senthusiastic commentary: ‘We must take this nice game back to


392

Gaul!’, clearly referring to the fact that France is now one of thestrongholds for rugby in Europe.

In the original French version of the story, Anticlimax saysthat the match is part of a Five Tribes tournament (‘Unerencontre comptant pour le Tournoi des Cinq Tribus’),obviously a hint to the Five Nations rugby tournament, heldbetween England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France from1910 to 1931 and from 1940 to 199956.

Many other elements of British culture and society areevoked, most of the time making fun of them: for instance,Asterix and Anticlimax engage in a dispute in an attempt todecide on which side of the road it is ‘correct’ to drive (as peoplein Britain drive on the left, whereas in other European countries,they drive on the right). However, at Julius Caesar’s time, thisdebate would be anachronistic, because in those days bothBritain and Gaul used to drive on the left side of the road57, asthe habit of driving on the right side of the road comes fromNapoleonic times. After this debate, on one of the panels sevenpages later on, we have a double-decker chariot driving on theright side of the road, as in Continental Europe (obviously anUderzo’s mistake).

At some point, Asterix’s cousin speaks about building anunderwater tunnel from Dover to France and says that it’s adream project which he hopes he will achieve some day. This isan allusion to the modern channel tunnel (which hadn’t beenbuilt yet at the time the album was published).

There are also references to the measuring systems peculiar tothe British: the British pre-decimal currency system (in use in

56 From 2000, after the admittance of Italy, the tournament is known as

Six Nations. Before the inclusion of France, the tournament was playedamong the four British Home Nations between 1883 and 1909 and afterward,between 1932 and 1939.

57 See Asterix in Britain, available at http://en.wikipedia.org / wiki /Asterix_in_Britain (last accessed 7th March 2010).


393

the UK when the book was published58), the British imperialmeasurements (feet, acres, ounces, stones gallons and so on).Obelix’s invariable comment naturally is ‘These Britons areCrazy!’. On these occasions, British poise is repeatedlycaricatured: we have seen for example Cassivellaunos’ reactionto the Roman attack, and another humorous illustration ofBritons’ phlegm can be appreciated in the following dialoguebetween Anticlimax and a pub keeper called Surtax:

At the end of the book, when the Romans are beaten in battle,Anticlimax exclaims ‘Victory’, while making the V sign, a clearreference to Winston Churchill, whose face we can recognisecaricatured in the character of the Britons’ chief (with amoustache added).

The building where Obelix and Dipsomaniax are incarceratedclearly reminds us of the Tower of London. Furthermore, whenour friends are in Londinium (Latin name for the Britishcapital), they see four bards that can easily be identified ascaricatures of the Beatles, the famous pop band who reached the

58 Anticlimax explains the currency system to Asterix as being ‘really

awfully simple, old boy… we have iron ingots weighing a pound which areworth three and a half sestertii each, and five new bronze coins which areworth twelve old bronze coins. Sestertii are each worth twelve bronze coinsand…’. Awfully simple indeed, for a British of course! Obelix’s reaction isillustrated next.


394

top of their popularity in 1966, the publishing year of Asterix’salbum.

Other British icons that appear in this adventure are double-decker buses and pubs, where customers drink warm beer andplay darts; umbrellas (which, according to Anticlimax’sexplanation, are used to avoid that the sky falls on their heads,which also represents one of the Gauls’ biggest fear), obviouslyrelated to the unpleasant, ever-changing and mostly humidclimate; the almost manic care of lawn gardens; the residentialneighbourhoods, with identical houses aligned etc.

The satire is mainly at the expense of the English; but also theScottish and the Irish are represented, particularly by thecharacters of McAnix and O’veroptimistix. The most famousstereotype related to the highlanders is introduced at one point:when Asterix, Obelix and Anticlimax seemingly buy only onecup of wine for the three of them (simply to see whether it wasactually wine, and not the magic potion from their barrel, whichwas confiscated by the Romans and then stolen by a thief), thelandlord assumes they must be Caledonians (Scots), because oftheir alleged parsimony. Goscinny and Uderzo feared thatBritish readers might feel offended by such a satiric picture oftheir country. So, when the book was first translated intoEnglish, they decided to add the following message, in order toprevent any possible complaint:

As usual, we caricature what we are fond of, and we are fond ofthe British, in spite of their strange way of putting Nelson on topof their columns instead of Napoleon. However, when it comesto presenting this skit on the British to the British, we feel weowe them a word or two of explanation. Our little cartoonstories do not make fun of the real thing, but the ideas of thereal thing that people get into their heads, i.e., clichés. We Gaulsimagine the British talking in a very refined way, drinking tea atfive o’clock and warm beer at the peculiar hours of openingtime. The British eat their food boiled, with mint sauce; they are


395

brave, phlegmatic, and always keep a stiff upper lip. Suppose wewere British, caricaturing the Gauls, we would say they all woreberets, ate frogs and snails and drank red wine for breakfast. Wemight add that they all have hopelessly relaxed upper lips, andthat phlegm is not their outstanding characteristic. And most ofall, we should hope that the Gauls would have as good a sense ofhumour as the British.59

In fact, the authors testified that, in comparison to the reactionof other people whose countries were visited by Asterix & co.,they received no protest from the British as far as the book wasconcerned, which in the United Kingdom is by far the mostpopular album of the series. Indeed, comics seem generallyimmune to the danger of hurting sensibilities, as Anthea Bellrightly states:

And there are the national stereotypes, with their funny foreignaccents. I suppose the comic-strip cartoon is about the onlygenre that can still make harmless use of politically incorrect,xenophobic attitudes. On the whole, we in these islands sharethe French view of such stock figures as the obsessively tidySwiss and the proud Spaniard – but what about thosephlegmatic characters, our own ancestors, the ancient Britons?60

Language and Translation in Asterix in Britain

As we said, characterization of Britons is based mainly on theway they talk. In the presentation of this particular foreignpeople, so close to the Gauls, to which we referred above (page 2of the album), the narrator carried on and stated: ‘They spokethe same language, but with some peculiar expressions of theirown...’. The fact that language peculiarities should be so centraltherefore doesn’t come as a surprise. Much of the humour in the

59 Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 34.60 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, cit.


396

original French versions is based on the mistakes British peopleusually make when they try to speak French.61 For example,when Anticlimax talks to his cousin Asterix, he repeatedly usesthe more formal ‘vous’, instead of the familiar ‘tu’, which shouldbe appropriate since they are related (and in fact, Asterix uses itwhen addressing Anticlimax); this obviously refers to the factthat English has lost the second-person singular pronoun ‘thou’and only has one word for ‘you’, which was originally thesecond-person plural pronoun, like ‘vous’ is in French.

We can also find jokes that reproduce the typical phrasestaught in elementary classes of English. For example, whenObelix asks if the tweed worn by Anticlimax is expensive, theBriton replies ‘Mon tailleur est riche’, which means ‘My tailor isrich’: this was the very first phrase spoken in the first Anglais sansPeine vinyl record English course, published by the Assimilcompany in the sixties. Another example, is when Asterixobserves that his cousin’s boat is small, and Anticlimax repliesobscurely ‘Il est plus petit que le jardin de mon oncle... mais ilest plus grand que le casque de mon neveu’ (‘It’s smaller thanthe garden of my uncle, but larger than the helmet of mynephew’), a French adaptation of a phrase from the same high-school English method in France. Similarly, when a Briton,holding a spear, deters the Romans pursuing the Gauls becausethey are ruining his well-groomed lawn, the Decurion furiouslyasks the Briton if he is actually so brave as to oppose Rome, heresponds ‘Mon jardin est plus petit que Rome mais mon pilumest plus solide que votre sternum’ (‘My garden is smaller thanRome, but my pilum is harder than your sternum’), anotherexample taken from the English lessons on comparatives.

61 See Asterix in Britain, cit.


397

The French book is full of odd-sounding literal translations ofEnglish syntagmas such as ‘I say’ (‘Je dis’), ‘that’s a bit of luck’(‘Ça c’est un morceau de chance’), ‘all that sort of thing’ (‘Toutecette sorte des choses’), ‘Goodness gracious!’ (‘Bontégracieuse!’), ‘My goodness!’ (‘Ma bonté!’), ‘I beg your pardon’(‘Je demande votre pardon’), ‘let’s shake our hands’ (‘secouons-nous les mains’), ‘jolly good chap’ (‘joyeux bon garçon’), ‘Sure’(‘Sûr’), ‘Gentlemen’ (‘Gentils hommes »), ‘ I am grateful to you’(‘Je suis reconnaissant à vous’), ‘How strange!’ (‘Combienétrange!’), ‘Very good’ (‘Très bon’, instead of the correct ‘Trèsbien’), ‘Keep a stiff upper lip’ (‘Gardez votre lèvre supérieurerigide’), ‘he’s gone completely nuts’ (‘Il est devenu absolumentnoix’ instead of ‘fou’), ‘to be out of one’s mind with worry’ (‘êtreen dehors de ses esprits avec l’inquietude’), ‘Fair play’ (‘Francjeu’), ‘It’s great!’ (‘C’est grand de vous avoir ici!’). Britons’speech in the original French is thus full of anglicisms – as forinstance with ‘Plutôt’ (‘Rather’ or ‘Indeed’), ‘Assez’ (‘Quite’),‘Choquant’ (‘Shocking’), ‘Revoltant’ (‘Appalling’), ‘Ennuyeux’(‘Annoying’) – and we also note this kind of wordplay in thetypical home inscription ‘Foyer doux foyer’, which is a literaltranslation of ‘Home sweet home’.

Sometimes, Goscinny purposely plays with the differentmeanings of a word, as we have already seen with ‘nut’>‘noix’,often playing with and mis-applying the strategies identified byMalone (1988) as ‘divergence’ and/or ‘convergence’: first, helooks at the English translation of the word he is going to use inFrench; then, he reverses the process and chooses, from the


398

possible translations of that English word in French, one thatdoes not have a direct semantic relation with the original Frenchword, thus creating a comic effect.62 Other examples of this canbe ‘rotie’ for ‘toast’, and ‘joyeux’ for ‘jolly’.

In addition, the speech patterns of the British characters arechanged to resemble English grammar. For instance, dismissingyet another translation strategy (Malone’s ‘re-ordering’), ‘potionmagique’ becomes ‘magique potion’ (magic potion), therebysignalling the fact that in English, adjectives are posited beforethe noun, rather than after, as in French. Other examples are theuse of the English tag-question structure in the French speechuttered by Britons, as in ‘Il est, n’est-il pas?’ (‘It is, isn’t it?), orthe repetition of the main verb of the question in the followinganswer, as in ‘Puis-je avoir de la marmelade pour les roties?’,‘Sûr, vous pouvez’ (‘Can I have some marmalade for the toasts?’,‘Of course you can’), or else the sporadic use of the Saxongenitive, as in Anticlimax’s assertion ‘Allons essayer de récupérerla magique potion’s tonneau’.

We finally reached the main issue of this work: how did theEnglish translator reproduce the linguistic characterisation ofBritons in their target language? How do Britons speak in theEnglish version, in a way that could possibly maintain a similarcomic effect to that of the original version? How could a comiccharacterization of English be rendered, in English? As usual, wecan make use of Anthea Bell’s answer to this question:

The French version of a British accent is extremely difficult totranslate into English, and has been done with a dated upper-class-twit style of English in Asterix in Britain and elsewhere.63

62 See Rivière, Stéphane, Astérix chez les Bretons: dossier. My tailor is rich:

l’anglais selon Goscinny available at http://www.mage.fst.uha.fr / asterix /bretons/anglais.html (last accessed 29th April 2010).

63 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 5.


399

In Astérix chez les Bretons, they speak French with a trulydreadful English accent. This was a huge problem in translation.We visited the genial René Goscinny, whose own English wasexcellent, to discuss the proposed solution: a stilted Englishstyle, the language of the upper-class twit as encountered in thepages of P. G. Wodehouse. ‘I say, jolly good, eh, what?’ ‘Whatho, old bean!’ ‘Hullo, old fruit.’ […] Since Goscinny’s death, alltranslations published are still rigorously scrutinised at theFrench end of the operation, and the freedoms we translatorstake must be approved. Luckily it is appreciated that, in thiscase, it is far more important to observe the spirit than the letterof the originals.64

In fact, the language of the Britons in the English version is fullof ‘I say’, ‘old chap’, ‘old boy’, ‘jolly good’, ‘what ho!’, ‘Old fruit’and all this kind of dated style of vocabulary, which linguisticallydefines the Briton characters, thus replacing the untranslatableanglicisms of the French source text. In fact, the stereotypesrecreated by Goscinny and Uderzo undoubtedly refer more tothe traditional and conservative British people one can find inP.G. Wodehouse’s novels, than to the ‘swinging London’ of thesixties, which in actual fact works as the extra-textual contextfrom which the album stems. So, the linguistic characterisationchosen by Bell and Hockridge perfectly suits the original spirit ofthe story.

However, when in 1995 Robert Steven Caron worked on histranslation of Asterix in Britain for American readers, he had toface a different set of problems. Indeed, he had to render thestory in a different variety of the same language. So, he generallycharacterises the Britons just by making them speak in modernBritish English, which is obviously felt as linguistically differentby American readers. In a way, his task is therefore easier incomparison to that of his British counterparts, because British

64 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, cit.


400

English is indeed a foreign accent, almost as it is for Frenchreaders. In this sense, to American readers, what the narratorsays about the British when he compares them to the Gaulslooks very appropriate, in that ‘They spoke the same language[...] but had a peculiar way of expressing themselves’. However,in some circumstances, Robert Steven Caron exploits someforms of the dated vocabulary inserted by his Britishpredecessors, like ‘what!’ or ‘old chap’. Probably, he chooses todo so when modern British expressions are not sufficient to markthe Briton characters from a linguistic point of view.

The Italian publication of this story dates back to 1969. Thetranslator was Carlo Manzoni, who limited his contribution toAsterix’s success in Italy to this album.65 Carlo Manzoni was awriter, a journalist, a painter and a humorist; he wrote novels,short stories, plays and satiric cartoons. Not a professionaltranslator, he was nonetheless without doubt a person with agreat sensibility for humour and puns. The linguistic distancebetween Italian and English is very similar to that betweenFrench and English. Therefore, the Italian version can reproducea linguistic characterisation of the Britons which is similar to theoriginal one. Carlo Manzoni’s experience as a humorist leadshim to add some characterising traits, not to rival withGoscinny’s wit but rather to compensate some of the losseswhich necessarily marked his translation and generally to servethe original spirit of the story.

We will now see some examples of linguistic characterisationin the French original, followed by their translation in BritishEnglish, American English and Italian. The marking traits willbe underlined. A short comment will be added, when needed.

65 Actually, this story – which represents the very first Italian publication ofAsterix comics – previously appeared, at the hands of a different translator, inthe 1967 Asterlinus supplement to Linus Magazine. This anonymoustranslation is very faithful to the original French, but lacks the creativity thatcharacterises Manzoni’s version, which we shall discuss shortly.


401

Scene First appearance of Briton characters in the story. Two Briton soldiers watch,from Dover’s cliff, the Roman Fleet approaching the island’s coast.

FR Narrator: ‘Les Bretons ressemblaient aux Gaulois et beaucoup d’entreeux étaient les descendants des tribus venues des Gaule pour s’installer enBretagne. Ils parlaient la même langue que les Gaulois, mais avaient unefaçon un peu spéciale de s’exprimer’.Briton 1: ‘Bonté gracieuse! Ce spectacle est surprenant!’. Briton 2: ‘Il est,n’est-il pas?...’.

UK Narrator: ‘The Britons were rather like the Gauls, many of them beingdescended from Gaulish tribes who had settled in Britain. They spoke thesame language, but with some peculiar expression of their own...’.Briton 1: ‘Goodness gracious! This is a jolly rum thing. Eh, what?’. Briton2: ‘I say, rather, old fruit!’.

USA Narrator: ‘The Britons resembled the Gauls. In fact, many of them werethe descendants of Gaulish tribes that had settled in Britain. They spokethe same language as the Gauls, but had a peculiar way of expressingthemselves...’.Briton 1: ‘Goodness gracious! This spectacle is ever so astonishing!’.Briton 2: ‘It is indeed’.

ITA Narrator: ‘I Britanni somigliavano molto ai Galli perché molti di essierano oriundi. Tribù galle si erano trasferite in Britannia poi non se neerano più andate. Parlavano la stessa lingua dei Galli ma avevano unmodo un po’ particolare d’esprimersi...’.Briton 1: ‘Del cielo numi! Questo spettacolo è sorprendente!’. Briton 2:‘Lo è, esso è nevvero?’.

The marking traits in the original French correspond to theanglicism used by the first soldier and the tag question in hiscomrade’s reply. British translators, as noted above, replace thiswith the upper-class-twit style, while their American colleagueprefers a formal register which is typically British. The Italiantranslator Carlo Manzoni works on the exclamation of the firstcharacter, making it sound old style and English-like, thanks tothe inversion of the syntagmatic order (‘Numi del cielo’ wouldbe the unmarked one). Then, he uses the effect of the tagquestion structure, just like in the French original, making iteven more caricatured by introducing the ‘nevvero’ adverb,which emphasises the formal and obsequious tone of the Britons’


402

speech. A printing mistake however turned the correct ‘galliche’into ‘galle’.

Scene Britons and Romans are engaging in battle. At five o’ clock the Britons stop thefight for the teatime break.

FR ‘Aoh! Je pense qu’il va être l’heure, n’est-il pas?’. ‘Je demande votrepardon. Nous continuerons plus tard’.

UK ‘I say, old chap. I think it’s getting on for time’. ‘Awfully sorry! We’ll beback later’.

USA ‘Oh dear! I believe it’s almost that time again, is it not?’. ‘I beg yourpardon. We shall resume shortly’.

ITA ‘Eouh! Io penso che sia venuta l’ora, che non sia?’. ‘Chiedo venia.Continueremo più tardi!’.

It is interesting to observe that the American version, just like theFrench, can use the tag question structure and a stereotypedexpression like ‘I beg your pardon’ as a foreign trait. RobertSteven Caron also substitutes the initial interjection with aBritish expression like ‘Oh dear!’ and marks the final sentenceusing a typical British register in ‘We shall resume shortly’.

The Italian translator follows Goscinny in using a markinginterjection and the tag question structure. This time, contraryto other examples of the same anglicism that occur further on inthe text, Carlo Manzoni does not translate ‘I beg your pardon’literally – as in the French source text – but opts for the veryformal and old-style ‘Chiedo venia’.

Scene Teatime break. Tea is served to the Briton soldiers by Briton women.FR Briton man 1: ‘Je prendrai un nuage de lait, je vous prie’. Briton woman

1: ‘S’il vous plait, faites!’. Briton man 2: ‘Puis-je avoir de la marmeladepour les roties?’. Briton woman 2: ‘Sûr, vous pouvez!’.

UK Briton man 1: ‘Just a spot of milk, please!’. Briton woman 1: ‘Righty-holuv’. Briton man 2: ‘Please may I have some marmalade?’. Briton woman2: ‘Marmalade’s off!’.

USA Briton man 1: ‘I’ll take a drop of milk, please’. Briton woman 1: ‘In a jiff,duckie!’. Briton man 2: ‘May I have some jelly for the toast?’. Britonwoman 2: ‘Jelly? Jolly!’.

ITA Briton man 1: ‘Io gradirei un velo di latte, per favore’. Briton woman 1:‘Prego, fate pure!’. Briton man 2: ‘Potrei io avere della marmellata suicrostini?’. Briton woman 2: ‘Sicuro, voi potete!’.


403

The French original characterises the women’s answers by usingodd-sounding literal translations of English expressions such as‘Please, do’ and ‘Sure, you can’.66 The English translation(‘Righty-ho luv’ and ‘Marmalade’s off’) changes the registerconsiderably, making the formal English spoken by the Britonsin the source text, much more informal; but only the waitressesand later the thief use this casual level of English. In the secondshort dialogue, the English version not only loses the syntacticalstructure that characterises the speakers in both the originalFrench and the Italian version, but decides to reverse the senseof the answer. The American translator chooses for the firstanswer the old colloquial expression ‘In a jiff, duckie’. Theregister, once again, is old British slang. Furthermore, he prefers‘jelly’ to ‘marmalade’ in order to create the wordplay ‘Jelly?Jolly!’. Carlo Manzoni renounces a proper linguisticcharacterisation of the first woman’s answer, while for thesecond, he reproduces the syntactical structure of both Englishquestion and answer (‘Can I have...?’ ‘Of course you can’).

Scene The panel shows the reaction Cassivellaunos has when the Romans decide toattack during the Britons’ breaks.67

FR Cassivellaunos: ‘Aoh! Choquant. Ce ne sont pas des gentils hommes’.UK Cassivellaunos: ‘Oh, I say, the cads!’.USA Battleax: ‘Oh! How shocking! What cads!’.ITA Cassivellaunos: ‘‘Eouh! Scioccante! Essi non sono affatto dei gentili

uomini’.

Robert Steven Caron uses ‘shocking’ because, just as for Frenchand Italian readers, this word (just like its French and Italianequivalents) represents a British trait. Carlo Manzoni expressesthe subject ‘Essi’ as a defining trait of the English languagewhich, contrary to Italian, does not admit the implied subject.Then, he chooses the syntagma ‘gentili uomini’, whichreproduces the English syntactical order, instead of opting for

66 As far as the use of the word ‘roties’ is concerned, see supra.67 This panel has been reproduced above.


404

the customary adjective ‘gentiluomini’. Thus, on this occasion,the Italian translator adds two characterising traits.

Scene The chief of the Briton village asks Anticlimax to go and visit Asterix in orderto ask him for help against the Romans.

FR Zebigbos:68 ‘Jolitorax! Va en Gaule voir ton cousin et rapporte-nous de lapotion magique. C’est notre dernier espoir’. Jolitorax: ‘Aoh, cela mepermettra de revoir mon cher cousin Astérix: je ne l’ai pas vu depuislongtemps, quoi?’.

UK Mykingdomforanos: ‘Anticlimax, you’d better go to Gaul to see yourcousin and bring back some of this magic potion!’. Anticlimax: ‘Oh, I say,jolly good show! This is my chance to see my dear cousin Asterix again.Haven’t seen him for ages, what!’.

USA Unionjax: ‘Brasstax! Go and see your cousin in Gaul, and bring us backsome of that magic potion. It’s our only hope’. Brasstax: ‘Oh! That willgive me the chance to visit my dear cousin Asterix whom I haven’t seen inages, eh, what?’.

ITA Zebigbos: ‘Beltorax! Va’ in Gallia a vedere tuo cugino e portaci quellomagico pozione. Esso è la nostra ultima speranza’. Beltorax: ‘Eouh! Ciòmi permetterà di rivedere il mio caro cugino Asterix. Non lo vedo daquando avevo i calzoni corti; non lo vedo?’.

In this instance, Bell and Hockridge add the typical exclamation‘jolly good show’ to mark even more Anticlimax’s speech. TheAmerican version follows the British one in the use of the ‘what’trait and adds a British nuance by using the relative pronoun‘whom’. The Italian translator once again emphasises thelinguistic characterisation of the Briton characters: the syntagma‘quello magico pozione’ not only repeats the inversion of theorder noun-adjective (which this time is absent in the Frenchsource text), but adds a trait by using the wrong gender of the

68 The names of the two characters that star in this panel are different in

the four versions analysed here: the chief of the Briton’s village is Zebigbos inthe French source text and in the Italian target text, Mykingdomforanos in theBritish version and Unionjax in the American version. Asterix’s cousin isJolitorax in the French original, Anticlimax in the British version, Brasstax inthe American version and Beltorax in the Italian version. We will comment onthe translators’ choices of these names later on.


405

words, thus stressing the absence of the morphologicalexpression of this category in English, thereby alluding to one ofthe common mistakes that British people make when speaking inItalian. Furthermore, Carlo Manzoni uses the old-style subject‘Esso’ (which again is wrong in gender, as it refers to thefeminine noun ‘speranza’), to hint at the English obligation toutter the subject. When translating Beltorax’s response, hechooses a figurative expression such as ‘da quando avevo icalzoni corti’, instead of the plain ‘Je ne l’ai pas vu depuislongtemps’; the correct question tag to the assertion ‘Non lovedo da quando avevo i calzoni corti’ should be affirmative (‘lovedo?’) rather than negative.

Scene Asterix’s cousin takes leave of the chief of the village.FR Zebigbos: ‘Bonne chance et toute cette sorte de choses’UK Mykingdomforanos: ‘Jolly good luck, old boy, and all that sort of thing...’.USA Unionjax: ‘‘Good luck, and all that sort of thing, old chap...’.ITA Zebigbos: ‘Buona fortuna e tutta questa specie di cose!’.

The literal translation of ‘and all that sort of things’ works as acharacterising trait in both French and Italian versions. On thecontrary, English editions must replace it with old-styleexpressions.

Scene The Briton arrives at Asterix’s house and asks for him.FR Jolitorax: ‘Je dis messieurs : pourriez-vous m’indiquer la résidence de Mer

Astérix?’.UK Anticlimax: ‘I say, gentlemen, could you tell me where Mr. Asterix lives,

what?’.USA Brasstax: ‘I say, my good men. Could you tell me where Mr. Asterix

lives?’.ITA Beltorax: ‘Dico, signori: potreste voi indicarmi la casa di Mr. Asterix?’.

This is a standard situation in which we can observe the mostcommon strategies adopted in the four versions of the story: Belland Hockridge compensate the loss of the comic effect implicitin the literal translation of the intended anglicism ‘Je dis’, byadding the ‘what’ trait. The American translator renounces this


406

feature and tries to add a British nuance by using the vocative‘my good men’. Carlo Manzoni’s ‘Dico’ works exactly like theoriginal French ‘Je dis’; moreover, he can use the inversion ofverb and subject in the following question – which is unmarkedin the other languages – as a characterising literal translation ofthe English structure.

Scene Anticlimax has just ‘shaken hands’ with Obelix (see infra)

UK Anticlimax: ‘What strength! I suppose you get it from the magic potion,what?’. Anticlimax: ‘Actually, cousin Asterix, your magic potion is justwhat we need to help us fight the Romans, what!’. Obelix: ‘What do youkeep on saying what for?’. Anticlimax: ‘I say, sir, don’t you know what’swhat, what?’.

USA Brasstax: ‘What strength! Do you get it from the magic potion?’. Brasstax:


407

‘Precisely, cousin Asterix, we need some of that magic potion to fight theRoman armies’. Obelix: ‘How come you talk so funny?’. Brasstax: ‘I begyour pardon?’.

ITA Beltorax: ‘Che forza! Vi viene essa forse dallo magico pozione?’. Beltorax:‘A proposito, Asterix cugino, abbiamo bisogno dello magico pozione percombattere le romane armate’. Obelix: ‘Ma si può sapere perché aveteparlato a rovescio?’. Beltorax: ‘Io domando il vostro perdono?’.

Bell and Hockridge characterise the Britons’ language byrepeatedly inserting ‘what’ at the end of a sentence, thussubstituting the inversion of the French syntactical order noun-adjective (highlighted in the panels above). Thus, when in thesource text Obelix asks Asterix’s cousin ‘Why do you talk in theopposite way?’, English translators opt for ‘What do you keep onsaying what for?’. The Briton’s answer in the source text is theFrench literal translation of ‘I beg your pardon?’, which in thiscontext has a comic effect, as it is obviously replaced in theEnglish version with the more adequate and very funny ‘I say,Sir, don’t you know what’s what, what?’.

As far as the American translation is concerned, it seems that,actually, Brasstax’s utterances prior to Obelix’s question are notthat funny, so his curiosity appears to be slightly out of context.Of course, Robert Steven Caron does not use the ‘what’ trait todepict the Briton’s language, so Obelix’s question and Brasstax’sanswer follow the French source text, the latter being typicallyBritish for an American reader.

Carlo Manzoni, as usual, also adds the trait of the incorrectgender in the adjectival syntagma ‘dello magico’, which ismasculine, even though it refers to the feminine noun ‘pozione’.Then, he inserts another inversion of the syntactic order noun-adjective, in ‘Asterix cugino’, to go with the analogue ‘magicopozione’ and ‘romane armate’, thus giving emphasis to this trait.

In the following dialogue between Obelix and Beltorax, theItalian version can effectively follow the original French.

Scene After talking with the chief of the Gaul village, Asterix invites his cousin back tohis place. Obelix is with them.


408

FR Astérix: ‘En attendant viens chez moi, Jolitorax’. Jolitorax: ‘Je serai ravi,j’en suis sûr, d’aller dans la vôtre maison!’. Obélix: ‘Vous avez vu monchien petit?’.

UK Asterix: ‘Come and see round my house and garden while we’re waiting,Anticlimax’. Anticlimax: ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, god wot!’. Obelix:‘What’s wot, what?’.

USA Asterix: ‘In the meantime, do you want to see where I live, Brasstax?’.Brasstax: ‘I should be delighted. There’s no place like home sweethome!’. Obelix: ‘Want to see my little dog?’.

ITA Asterix: ‘Intanto vieni con me, Beltorax’. Beltorax: ‘Sarò incantato, nesono certo, di venire nella casa, la vostra!’. Obelix: ‘Voi avete visto il miocane piccolo?’.

In the French source text, we have the pronoun form ‘la vôtre’instead of the correct adjective ‘votre’, which represents acommon mistake made by foreigners speaking French. Obelixseems to get confused by Jolitorax’s way of speaking and invertsthe correct sequence ‘mon petit chien’.

English translators add jokes and other cultural references tomaintain the original spirit and compensate some translationlosses: for example, having renounced reproducing the ‘pronounvs. adjective’ trait, they make Anticlimax say ‘A Garden is alovesome thing, god wot!’, quoting the first line of a famous 19thcentury poem by Thomas Edward Brown called My Garden; tomake this utterance coherent, they also introduce the referenceto the garden in Asterix’s invitation. In the English version, thesubsequent question posed by Obelix refers to Anticlimax’s line,rather than to the dog, and it is a reprise of the ‘what’ issuebetween Obelix and Anticlimax, which opened a few strips aboveand which becomes a characterising trait in Bell and Hockridge’sversion. Maybe, the T.E. Brown’s verse was purposely chosen toreplace the linguistic mistake of the French original, in that thearchaic verbal form ‘wot’ – namely the third person singular ofthe present tense of ‘wit’ – allowed the wordplay with the muchrepeated ‘what’.

The American version of Brasstax’s utterance is clearlycharacterised by a typical English style of language. Obelix’s turn


409

is faithful to the original French, since there is no other linguisticconnotation to emphasise.

The Italian version follows the source text, emphasising anirregularity in the possessive construction, as the pronoun ispostponed to the name to which it refers. Maybe, it would havebe more effective to create a literal translation of the Englishstructure ‘in this house of yours’, something like ‘in questa casadelle vostre’. The translation of Obelix’s marked question alsofollows the original French.

Scene The Druid gives Anticlimax a barrel of magic potion to take to Britain.Asterix’s cousin shows his gratefulness.

FR Jolitorax: ‘Je suis très reconnaissant à vous, druide Panoramix’.UK Anticlimax: ‘I say, I’m most frightfully grateful, o druid Getafix’.USA Brasstax: ‘I’m terribly grateful to you, druid Magigimmix’.ITA Beltorax: ‘Io vi sono molto riconoscente, druido Panoramix…’.

In the French source text, Jolitorax makes another typicalmistake for a foreigner, as the correct form should be ‘Je voussuis très reconnaissant’. Obviously, English translators replacethe incorrect form of the original with the usual old-stylelanguage. The American version is in line with the generalcharacterisation of the Britons. In the Italian translation, noparticular linguistic trait can be found.

Scene The three travellers walk toward the Gaulish coast, when Obelix remembersabout food.

FR Obélix: ‘Nous aurions du emporter quelques vivres’. Jolitorax: ‘Bontégracieuse! Pourquoi faire? En Bretagne, la nourriture est délicieuse. Ellevous plaira j’en suis sûr. Quoi?’.

UK Obelix: ‘We should have brought some food with us’. Anticlimax: ‘ Goodgracious me, old chap, what for? British food’s delicious. You’re sure tolike it, what!’.

USA Obelix: ‘We should have taken along some food’. Brasstax: ‘Goodnessgracious! What for? The food in Britain is divine. I’m quite sure you’lladore it’.

ITA Obelix: ‘Avremmo dovuto portarci da mangiare’. Beltorax: ‘Del cielo,numi! Per che farne? In Britannia il cibo è delizioso. Vi piacerà ne sonsicuro! Ecché?’.


410

Another example of the translators’ strategies observed so far:the anglicism ‘Bonté gracieuse!’ is adapted in the differentrenditions. The tag question structure is applied as a markingtrait in both French and Italian versions. American translatormakes use of a British style of language using expressions as‘divine’ and ‘I’m quite sure’.

Scene The three travellers reach the coast where Anticlimax has left his little rowingboat.

FR Jolitorax: ‘Ah! Voici mon bateau’. Astérix ‘Il n’est pas gros!’.UK Anticlimax: ‘There’s my little jolly-boat’. Asterix: ‘It’s a jolly little boat!’.USA Brasstax: ‘Ah! Here’s my little rowboat’. Asterix: ‘What a dinky little

thing’.ITA Beltorax: ‘Ecco la mia barca!’. Asterix: ‘Non è poi tanto grossa!’.

The British target text adds a wordplay referring to the ‘littlejolly-boat’ – meaning a small sailing boat – which Asterix thinksis a ‘jolly little boat’ – meaning an extremely small boat – using‘jolly’ (a very frequent word in the old-style English spoken bythe Britons) as an adverb.

Scene Asterix, Obelix and Anticlimax had to hide in the pub’s cellar, while they wereeating, because of the Romans break-in, which led to the confiscation of all thebarrels. As they resurface, Anticlimax exchange a typical British comment onthe event.


411

UK Dipsomaniax69: ‘Poor show, what!’. Anticlimax: ‘Rather trying’.Dipsomaniax: ‘Bit of a bore!’. Anticlimax: ‘I say it is, a bit!’.

USA Relax: ‘Rather disturbing, what?’. Brasstax: ‘Rather’. Relax: ‘Quite’.Brasstax: ‘I should say so’.

ITA Relax: ‘Questa è una bella scocciatura!’. Beltorax: ‘Effettivamente lo è!’.Relax: ‘Vero!’. Beltorax: ‘Scocciaturissima, direi!’.

In this quick and haughty exchange between the two Britons, theItalian translator makes some changes: in the first utterance, hechooses the rather colloquial ‘scocciatura’ for ‘ennuyeux’(‘annoying’), when a more severe word like ‘seccatura’ couldhave been more appropriate to the Britons’ tone; then, hereplaces the quite sober ‘Assez’ with a calqued expression fromthe English form ‘in fact it is’; ‘Plutôt’, so far duly translatedwith ‘Piuttosto’, is replaced with ‘Vero’; the typical ‘Je dis’,generally rendered as ‘Dico’, is put in the conditional mode(‘direi’) and accompanied by the irregular superlative form of thenoun chosen for the first utterance. Moreover, the exclamationmark is always used, while in the original French it onlyappeared in the first sentence: a punctuation which is notperfectly adequate to the phlegmatic (and very British) tone ofthis dialogue.

Scene At dawn, our heroes try and get back the barrel of potion, confiscated by theRomans with all the others barrels of wine.

FR Jolitorax: ‘Allons essayer de récupérer la magique potion’s tonneau. Relaxnous prête sa charrette. C’est un joyeux bon garçon’.

UK Anticlimax : ‘Now try and get back the barrel of potion, what!Dipsomaniax will lend us his cart. He’s a jolly good chap, don’t youknow!’.

USA Brasstax: ‘Let’s try and find the cask of magic potion. Relax has lent ushis cart. He’s such a good chap, eh, what?’.

ITA Beltorax: ‘Cerchiamo di recuperare la magico pozione’s botte. Relax cipresta il suo carro. Egli è un gran caro ragazzo’.

69 The name of the Briton publican is changed in the British version. In the

other three editions we take in exam it is Relax.


412

Both British and American versions do not reproduce the Saxongenitive, which obviously can be a characterising trait only in anon-English target text. The Italian translation repeats theinsertion of the Saxon genitive in a foreign language and addsagain the lack of concordance in gender between noun andadjective. Furthermore, Carlo Manzoni uses the explicitrendition of the subject ‘Egli’ as a characterising trait.

Scene Our heroes arrive to the Governor’s palace in Londinium.FR Astérix: ‘Attends-nous là, Jolitorax. Si nous ne sortons pas, tu iras

chercher du renfort’. Jolitorax: ‘Très bon‘.UK Asterix: ‘You wait here for us, Anticlimax. If we don’t come out, go and

get reinforcements’. Anticlimax: ‘Right ho!’.USA Asterix: ‘Wait for us here, Brasstax. If we don’t come out, send for

reinforcements’. Brasstax: ‘Very well’.ITA Asterix: ‘Aspettaci qui, Beltorax. Se non ci vedi uscire, vai a cercare

rinforzi’. Beltorax: ‘Molto buono!’.

The French source text attributes to the Briton character theliteral translation of the English form ‘very good’, instead of thecorrect ‘Très bien’. The Italian translator follows the same path,putting ‘Molto buono’ in the mouth of Asterix’s cousin, insteadof the usual collocation ‘Molto bene’. This cannot be renderedin English, but while the British version connotes the sentence byusing the customary upper class register expressed by ‘Rightho!’, the American version just looses any kind of linguisticdepiction and plainly translates ‘Very well’.

Scene Asterix and his cousin leave the cart to go and help Obelix, who is drunk and isfighting with some Roman soldiers. A thief takes advantage of the situation. Wecan read his thoughts:

FR ‘Une abandonnée charrette! Quel morceaux de chance pour un voleur decharrettes!’.

UK ‘An unattended cart! What a bit of luck for an unattended cart thief!’.USA ‘An untended cart! What a bit of luck for a cart thief! Now I can make a

barrel!’.ITA ‘Uno abbandonato carretta! Quale pezzo di fortuna per uno ladro di

carrette!’.


413

In this example, the characterising trait represented by theinversion of the syntactic order noun-adjective is not substitutedin the two English versions, where the syntagma ‘an unattendedcart’ reproduces the unmarked structure for English readers.The same occurs with the literal translation of the calquedexpression ‘Quel morceaux de chance’, with the inevitable loss ofthe marking trait. On the contrary, Carlo Manzoni not onlyreproduces the characterising features of the French source text,but again adds the lack of concordance in gender between theadjectival syntagma and the noun; furthermore, he uses aninappropriate indefinite article, ‘uno ladro’ instead of ‘un ladro’.Robert Steven Caron creates a wordplay out of the differentmeanings of the noun ‘barrel’: the thief is obviously stealing acart full of barrels, but the word, in an informal register, alsomeans ‘a large quantity’ (thus, he is making a barrel of barrels)or ‘an act or instance of moving rapidly’ (as he has to act quicklyto sneak the cart).

Scene Asterix and his cousin discover that Relax/Dipsomaniax’s pub has been burntdown by the Romans.

FR Astérix: ‘Oh! L’auberge de Relax!!’. Jolitorax: ‘Ma bonté!!!’.UK Asterix: ‘Hey! Look at Dipsomaniax’s place!’. Anticlimax: ‘Oh, I say, my

goodness!’.USA Asterix: ‘Look! That was Relax’s pub!!!’. Brasstax: ‘My goodness!’.ITA Asterix: ‘Ma quello è l’albergo di Relax!’. Beltorax: ‘My goodness!’.

Both English and American versions – ‘My goodness!’ – simplytranslate the intended anglicism of the French original withoutsubstituting its comic effect. The Italian translator’s choice ofputting it directly in English – ‘My goodness!’ – is a novelty.

Scene Asterix and his cousin are informed that the Romans have taken Obelix whilehe was sleeping.

FR Astérix: ‘Mon Obélix prisonnier des Romains!’. Jolitorax: ‘CourageAstérix! Gardez votre lèvre supérieure rigide!’.

UK Asterix: ‘Poor old Obelix, taken prisoner by the Romans!’. Anticlimax: ‘Isay, cheer up, Asterix, old boy! Keep a stiff upper lip, what!’.

USA Asterix: ‘My Obelix, a Roman prisoner!’. Brasstax: ‘Don’t despair,


414

Asterix! Keep a stiff upper lip!.ITA Asterix: ‘Obelix prigioniero dei Romani!’. Beltorax: ‘Coraggio Asterix…

Self-control, vi prego!’.

Both English and American versions – ‘Keep a stiff upper lip’ –simply translate the intended anglicism of the French sourcetext, thus losing the marking effect. The Italian translator againchooses to replace the original calqued expression with anEnglish form – ‘Self-control, vi prego’ – even if this one isnormally used by Italian speakers.

Scene Obelix is in prison, together with another Briton convict.FR Obélix: ‘C’est vrai, j’ai la bouche pâteuse et je me sens un peu faible.

Sortons’. Briton prisoner: ‘Pauvre garçon... Il est devenu absolumentnoix!’.

UK Obelix: ‘I’ve got a mouth like sandpaper, and I feel quite weak. Let’s getout of here’. Briton prisoner: ‘Poor fellow… He’s gone completelybonkers!’.

USA Obelix: ‘I’m feeling faint and my mouth’s like sandpaper. Let’s get out ofhere’. Briton prisoner: ‘Poor chap… He’s gone completely nuts!’.

ITA Obelix: ‘Ho la bocca impastata e mi sento un po’ debole’. Briton prisoner:‘Povero ragazzo! È diventato completamente scemo!’.

Rather than using the expression to which the original Frenchrefers to by using this anglicism (‘he has gone completely nuts’),the English translators prefers to replace ‘nuts’ with the adjective‘bonkers’, which is, if not slang, at least extremely informal. Onthe contrary, Robert Steven Caron simply translates the calquedexpression. In this instance, the Italian translator renounces anykind of wordplay and renders the expression as ‘È diventatocompletamente scemo!’.

Scene Relax/Dipsomaniax takes our three heroes to another publican in order to findthe stolen barrel of the magic potion.

FR Relax: ‘Je vous conduis chez un de mes cousins aubergiste comme moi. Ils’appelle Surtax. Peut-être pourra-t-il nous aider’. Jolitorax: ‘Joyeusebonne idée’.

UK Dipsomaniax: ‘I’m taking you to see a cousin of mine. He keeps a pubtoo. His name’s Surtax. He may be able to help us’. Anticlimax: ‘Jollygood wheeze, what!’.


415

USA Relax: ‘I’m taking you to see my cousin Surtax. He runs a pub like me.Perhaps he can help us’. Brasstax: ‘Jolly good idea’.

ITA Relax: ‘Vi porto da un mio cugino che fa l’oste come me. Si chiamaSupertax. Forse ci potrà aiutare. Beltorax: ‘Felice buona idea: non èbuona?’.

Even if on many occasions the odd-sounding literal translationsof English syntagmas such as ‘Ma bonté’ or ‘Toute cette sortedes choses’ are maintained in the English version (‘My goodness’or ‘All this sort of things’) – thereby losing their comic effect –sometimes Bell and Hockridge substitute them and add anupper-class trait to their English rendition. That is the case withthis example, where the plain translation ‘Jolly good idea’ is putaside and replaced with the use of the more refined ‘Jolly goodwheeze’, followed by the inevitable ‘what!’ (‘wheeze’ is aBriticism meaning a clever or amusing scheme or trick, or anelaborate and systematic plan of action). In the Americanversion, Robert Steven Caron plainly translates ‘Jolly good idea’.Carlo Manzoni not only follows the original French reproducingan anglicism, but he also adds a tag question to make it evenmore English-like: ‘Felice buona idea; non è buona?’.

Scene Surtax receives his Briton cousin, our Gaulish heroes and their Briton friend inhis pub.

FR ‘Relax, mon cousin! Je suis follement heureux de vous voir. J’ai apprisvotre arrestation par les Romains. J’étais en dehors de mes esprits avecl’inquiétude!’.

UK ‘I say, cousin Dipsomaniax, I’m fearfully pleased to see you! I heard aboutthe Romans arresting you. It gave me quite a turn’.

USA ‘Well, if it isn’t cousin Relax. I’m frightfully happy to see you. I heard theRomans had arrested you. I was rather upset, old chap’.

ITA ‘Mio caro cugino Relax! Sono follemente felice di vederti. Ho saputo deltuo arresto ed ero fuori dei miei sentimenti dalla preoccupazione’.

The modified adjective ‘follement heureux’ is another ironicreproduction of an English expression (‘madly happy’), which isrendered in the English version with the quite pompous ‘fearfullypleased’. The intended anglicism of the original expression


416

‘J’étais en dehors de mes esprits avec l’inquietude’ (‘I was out ofmy mind with worry’) is replaced with the more refined, albeitidiomatic, ‘It gave me quite a turn’.

Carlo Manzoni follows the source text but uses the secondperson singular instead of the plural which characterises theaddressing form of the Briton characters.

Scene Surtax says that he had the thief followed and that he knows his address.Asterix’s cousin answers:

FR Jolitorax: ‘Bon garçon!’.UK Anticlimax: ‘Stout feller!’.USA Brasstax: ‘Nice going, old chap!’.ITA Beltorax: ‘Sei un ragazzo in gamba’.

Another example of the English translator’s strategy of notplainly reproducing the expression referred to by the originalanglicism (‘Good boy’), instead substituting it with an upper-class form. Again, the American translator makes use of an old-style briticism. No linguistic characterisation in the Italianversion.

The British edition chooses to introduce an additional factorof linguistic representation in relation to the characters ofMcAnix and O’Veroptimistix70. As mentioned above, the first isScottish while the second is Irish. As a consequence, Anthea Belland Derek Hockridge characterise their language by insertingelements from their respective dialects, especially the Scottishdialect. Quite obviously, both Robert Steven Caron and CarloManzoni cannot be concerned about such a linguisticconnotation, that can be significant only within a British context.As a consequence, the lines uttered by these two characters, aregenerally translated by applying the same strategy chosen for therendition of the Britons’ language as a whole. Let us focus on

70 The names of this two characters change in the other editions: they areoriginally Mac Anoterapix and O’Torinolaringologix and become MacAlomaniax and O’Torhinolaryngologix in the American version, MacAnoterapix (as in French) and O’Torinolaringoiatrix in the Italian one.


417

some specific examples of the (rare) appearances of thesecharacters and their intra-national geographical dialects.

Scene The two characters meet Asterix’s cousin outside the house of the village chief,where they have been summoned.

FR Mac Anoterapix: ‘O’Torinolaringologix et moi même avons étéconvoqués par le chef, Jolitorax’. Jolitorax: ‘Oui, Mac Anoterapix, lasituation est assez sérieuse, plutôt’.

UK McAnix: ‘Och aye, Anticlimax! O’Veroptimistix and myself were biddenhere by yon laird’. Anticlimax: ‘I say, McAnix, we’re in a bit of a fix, oldboy!’.

USA Mac Alomaniax: ‘Both O’Torhinolaryngologix and I have beensummoned by the chief, Brasstax’. Brasstax: ‘Yes, Mac Alomaniax, we’rereally in a stew, what’.

ITA Mac Anoterapix: ‘O’Torinolaringoiatrix ed io siamo stati dal capo,Beltorax’. Beltorax: ‘Sì, Mac Anoterapix, la situazione è piuttosto seria.Preoccupante, direi’.

‘Och aye’ is the Scottish equivalent to ‘Oh yes’. Similarly, ‘yonlaird’ is Scottish for ‘that lord’. As for the remaining trait –‘plutôt’, replaced by Bell and Hockridge with the typical ‘oldboy’ – the American translator decides to characterise the entireutterance by choosing an old-fashioned style of language. TheItalian translation of this dialogue is quite neutral; as a matter offact, the first line seems to be misunderstood by the translator, ashe writes ‘we have visited the chief’, when in fact they haven’tgot to his house yet.

Scene The Britons are gathered inside the house of the chief who, while speaking, offershis guests some tea.

FR Mac Anoterapix: ‘Merci. Pas de sucre. Du lait. Un nuage’.UK McAnix: ‘Nae sugar, mon. Just a wee drappie o’ milk’.USA Mac Alomaniax: ‘Thanks. A spot of milk, please, no sugar’.ITA ‘Grazie. Niente zucchero. Latte: un velo’.

We therefore find here more Scottish traits in the words utteredby McAnix: ‘nae’, for ‘not’; ‘mon’, for ‘man’; ‘a wee’, for ‘alittle’, and ‘drappie o’’ for ‘drop of’.

Scene We are again at the chief’s house, where the Britons, who know that the barrelof the magic potion is lost, are getting ready to face the Romans with Asterix


418

and Obelix’s help.FR Zebigbos: ‘Vous avez donc perdu la magique potion?... Alors, nous

sommes perdus. Apprenant la nouvelle, les romaines legions vont nousenvahir’. Mac Anoterapix: ‘Nous mourrons les armes à la main, je dis!’.O’Torinolaringologix: ‘Joyeuse bonne idée!’.

UK Mykingdomforanos: ‘You’ve lost the magic potion? Then we’re done for!When the Romans hear about it they’ll attack, what!’. McAnix: ‘Dinnafash, we’ll die wi’oor boots on!’. O’Veroptimistix: ‘Sure and begorrah wewill!’.

USA Unionjax: ‘So you lost the magic potion?... Now we’re in for it. Whenthey find out, the Roman legions are going to attack!’. Mac Alomaniax: ‘Isay, we have nothing to fear but fear itself!’. O’Torhinolaryngologix: ‘Giveme liberty or give me death!’.

ITA Zebigbos: ‘Se non avete con voi lo magico pozione, siamo perduti.Apprendendo la notizia, le romane legioni ci invaderanno’. Mac Anoterapix:‘Moriremo con le armi alla mano, dico!’. O’Torinolaringoiatrix: ‘Gioiosabuona idea!’.

In the British edition, we find ‘Dinna fash’ (which is a Scottishexpression meaning ‘Do not worry’), and the idiomatic phrase ‘todie with one’s boots on’ (which means to die from violent asopposed to natural causes, indicated by the expression ‘to die inbed’) – which orthographically reproduces Scottish pronunciation.O’Veroptimistix is Irish, thus he says ‘begorrah’, which is anemphatic exclamation (sometimes spelt as ‘begorra’), used as a mildoath and regarded as typical of Irishmen.

The American translator, who clearly has Bell and Hockridge’sversion as a reference, feels the need to add a particular connotationto both Scottish and Irish characters. Mac Alomaniax’s statementquotes a famous phrase uttered in 1933 by American PresidentFranklin Delano Roosevelt during his first inaugural address to theAmerican people. O’Torhinolaryngologix’s exclamation is a famousquotation attributed to Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia, from aspeech he made to the Virginia Convention on March 23rd, 1775.

The Italian version translates the original French, with all itselements of linguistic depiction generally applied to Britoncharacters, thereby dismissing Scottish and Irish peculiarities. Asper usual, the translator adds the trait of the lack of concordance


419

in gender between the name and the adjective; moreover, thepreceding masculine article ‘lo’ is grammatically incorrect, as itshould have been ‘il’.

As we have already pointed out in former paragraphs,rendering the original puns and cultural references in the targetlanguage is one of the main difficulties for translators. Thiscannot be more evident than in Asterix en Bretagne, a story basedon linguistic humour and cultural stereotypes. We will now takeinto consideration some particularly representative examples.

Scene Asterix meets his Briton cousin who came to Gaul to ask him for help. The guestis introduced to Obelix.


420

UK Asterix: ‘I’m Asterix’. Anticlimax: ‘Oh, I say what a bit of luck! I’mAnticlimax. Let’s shake hands, old boy’. Asterix: ‘Anticlimax! My firstcousin once removed!’. ‘And this is my best friend Obelix!’. Anticlimax:‘Any friend of Asterix is a friend of mine! Sir, I should be very proud ifyou would shake me by the hand!’. Obelix: ‘Right!’. Asterix: ‘Obelix!’.Obelix: ‘But he’s been removed once anyway, and he asked me to...’.Asterix: ‘He’s my first cousin once removed from Britain, and they don’ttalk quite the same as us!’. Anticlimax: ‘Jolly good show, what!’

USA Asterix: ‘Asterix? Why, that’s me’. Brasstax: ‘I say. What a bit of luck! I’mBrasstax! Let’s shake hands!’. Asterix: ‘Brasstax! My cousin!’. Asterix:‘And this is Obelix, my best friend!’. Brasstax: ‘Shake!’. Obelix: ‘Allright!’. Asterix: ‘Obelix!’. Obelix: ‘But he told me to shake...’. Asterix:‘He’s a Briton and they sometimes have a problem expressingthemselves!’. Brasstax: ‘Splendid! Splendid!’.

ITA Asterix: ‘Asterix sono io’. Beltorax: ‘Dico, questo è un pezzo di fortuna!Io sono Beltorax! Scuotiamoci le mani!’. Asterix: ‘Beltorax! Il mio cuginogermano!’. Asterix: ‘Questo è Obelix, il mio migliore amico’. Beltorax:


421

‘Scuotiamoci le mani!’. Obelix: ‘Bene!’. Asterix: ‘Obelix!’. Obelix: ‘Ma èstato questo germanico, a dire…’. Asterix: ‘Non è un germanico: nonparla proprio esattamente come noi. È un britanno!’. Beltorax:‘Fantastico! Fantastico!’.

In order to create the wordplay which appears in the precedingand following panels, English translators change the degree ofrelation between Asterix and Anticlimax. In fact, the originalFrench uses the word ‘germain’, which means first cousin, whilethe expression ‘first cousin once removed’ indicates the child ofone’s first cousin. If we compare the following panel to theoriginal French, we see that Anticlimax is very formal to Obelix,as he even calls him ‘Sir’. It is not by chance that Bell andHockridge choose the extended phrase ‘I should be very proud ifyou would shake me by the hand’, instead of the more informal‘Let’s shake hands’: in fact, Obelix literally shakes Anticlimax bythe hand. Having misunderstood the expression ‘once removed’,Obelix tries to justify his behaviour by saying ‘But he’s beenremoved once anyway’. Translators play with the differentmeanings of the word ‘removed’, while the original French playswith the polysemy of the word ‘germain’, which of course alsomeans ‘german’.

Robert Steve Caron completely renounces the pun related tothe word that indicates relation and reduces the comic effect tothe misunderstanding of the expression ‘Let’s shake hands’.Contrary to the English version, Brasstax’s way of addressingObelix is very concise, and his reaction to Obelix’s violencerepeats the adjective used in the French original.

Contrary to French where, as we mentioned above, the word‘germain’ has a double meaning, in Italian the translator, inorder to convey the second meaning of the French word, mustuse the almost identical adjective ‘germanico’: in this case, themisunderstanding is therefore not direct and presupposesObelix’s flawed reception of the word pronounced by Asterix,which is due more to his ignorance than to a lack of hearing. To


422

explain the misunderstanding, Carlo Manzoni thus feelscompelled to add a footnote that reads ‘gioco di parole tragermano e germanico’ (‘wordplay between ‘germano’ and‘germanico’’).

Scene Obelix asks Asterix’s cousin about his clothes:FR Obélix: ‘C’est cher?’. Jolitorax: ‘Mon tailleur est riche’.UK Obelix: ‘Does it cost a lot to make up?’. Anticlimax: ‘Rather! My tailor

makes a good thing out of it’.USA Obelix: ‘But how do you know what’s in style?’. Brasstax: ‘One must cut

one’s coat according to one’s cloth!’.ITA Obelix: ‘È caro?’. Beltorax: ‘Per te sì. Dipende dalla quantità’.

The English translation slightly differs from the source text, asthe reference to English classes is not significant to Britishreaders (see supra): so, instead of the rather inconsequentresponse of the original French, Bell and Hockridge prefer amore explicit answer.

The American version completely changes the subject of thedialogue, losing the reference to the price of the cloth andreplacing it with a hint to the style of the outfit. Brasstax’sresponse reproduces a British proverb meaning ‘to plan one’saims and activities in line with one’s resources andcircumstances’.

The Italian version respects the general sense of the sourcetext, but does not translate it literally, since the sentence ‘Il miosarto è ricco’ does not have any kind of effect in terms ofwordplay or cultural reference. Anyway, the use of the informal‘tu’ seems incongruent, given that Beltorax always uses thesecond person plural ‘voi’, which is chosen by Goscinny as acharacterising trait of the Briton’s language, being a calque of theEnglish ‘you’ form, which is a second person plural.

Scene Asterix and Obelix are having their first dinner in Britain at a local pub called‘Le rieur sanglier’ (translated as ‘The Jolly Boar’ in the British version). Theyare of course having boar, but Obelix does not seem to appreciate the wayBritons cook it.

FR Obélix: ‘C’est ça le rieur sanglier?... Il n’y a pas de quoi rire!’.


423

UK Obelix: ‘This is a bit of a jolly old bore, what!’.USA Obelix: ‘Now I know why they call this place the laughing boar! These

portions are a joke!’.ITA Obelix: ‘E questo sarebbe il cinghiale che ride?... Non c’è proprio niente

da ridere!’.

English translators create a pun with the almost homophonicwords ‘boar’ and ‘bore’. Obelix alludes to the name of the pubwhere they are having their first Briton meal. In the originalFrench, the name of the pub means ‘The laughing boar’, soObelix’s complaint is, literally, ‘Is this the laughing boar?...There is nothing to laugh about!’. Having opted for the muchrepeated adjective ‘jolly’ to ‘laughing’ for the pub’s name, Belland Hockridge have to create a different kind of pun, based onthe noun, rather than on the adjective. Again, Obelix seems to beinfluenced by the Britons’ language, and ends his utterance withthe marking exclamation ‘what!’.

Robert Steven Caron follows the French source for the nameof the pub but changes Obelix’s remark, whereas the Italianversion appears identical to the original French.

Scene Obelix, Asterix and his Briton cousin are travelling to Londinium on a cart.FR Astérix: ‘Ils ne nous suivent pas! Londinium est encore loin?’. Jolitorax:

‘Nos, quelques pieds... Les Romains mesurent les distances en pas, nousen pieds’. Obélix: ‘En pieds?’. Jolitorax: ‘Il faut six pieds pour faire unpas’. Obélix : ‘Ils sont fous ces Bretons!’.

UK Asterix: ‘They’re not following! Is it far to Londinium?’. Anticlimax: ‘No,only a few hundred thousand feet... You measure distance in metres, wedo it in feet’. Obelix: ‘Feet?’. Anticlimax: ‘Yes, you’ll find it quite easyonce you get your hand in’. Obelix: ‘These Britons are crazy!’.

USA Asterix: ‘They’re not following us! Is Londinium much farther?’. Brasstax:‘No, just a few hundred thousand feet. You measure your steps in meters,we do it in feet’. Obelix: ‘In feet?’. Brasstax: ‘Yes, it might change butwe’re still dragging our feet’. Obelix: ‘These Britons are crazy!’.

ITA Asterix: ‘Non ci seguono più! È ancora lontana Londinium?’. Beltorax:‘No... ancora qualche piede e ci siamo. I Romani misurano le distanze coipassi, noi coi piedi’. Obelix: ‘Coi piedi?’. Beltorax: ‘Ci vogliono sei piediper fare un passo’. Obelix: ‘Sono Pazzi Questi Britanni!’.


424

The English version does not refer to the pace (passus), namelythe ancient Roman unit of measurement, but to the modernmetre (one passus equals 1.48 metres). So, the subject of thesentence is not the third person plural ‘The Romans’, but thesecond person plural ‘You’, meaning ‘you, who are not Briton’.Then, instead of translating the equivalence between feet andmetres, as the French source text does for feet and paces, Belland Hockridge attribute to Anticlimax a generic remark,expressed from a point of view of a Briton (or a modern British,we should say) who is convinced that, sooner or later, everybodywill adopt that system of measurement.

Also the American translator refers to metres (or ‘meters’, asthey spell it) rather than to paces. Still, the point of view ofBrasstax’s final utterance is reversed, and a new pun is added:while in the British version the Briton character is sure that theirsystem of measurement is quite simple for a foreigner, in theAmerican version Brasstax assumes it might actually change andimplicitly recognises British difference as a symptom ofbackwardness. In fact, ‘to drag one’s feet’ means ‘to act or workwith intentional slowness; delay’. Italian version is identical tothe original French.

Scene In order to discover where the magic potion is, Roman soldiers must have a tasteof all the confiscated barrels of wine. They inevitably end up getting drunk andsing in general disorder.

FR ‘ Vive la Rome, vive la Rome, vive l’aroooome du bon vin! ’.UK ‘ Roll out the barrel ’.USA ‘Barrel of wine, fruit of the vine!’.ITA ‘ Viva la Roma, viva la Roma, viva l’aroma del buon vin! ’.

Obviously, the pun introduced in the verses sung by the Romansoldiers (identically reproduced in the Italian translation) doesnot work in English. So, Bell and Hockridge refer to Beer BarrelPolka, also known as Roll Out the Barrel, namely a song whichbecame popular worldwide during World War II. The American


425

version lacks the musical notes in the balloon, so the soldiers arenot presumably singing the rhyme created by the translator.

Scene Our heroes are passing by the streets of Londinium and notice somecharacterising elements of its urban landscape.

UK Asterix: ‘What a funny double-decker chariot’. Anticlimax: ‘It’s a goad-assisted two-ox-power numerous quartus run by Londinium transport’.Asterix: ‘And what are those little portable roofs?’. Anticlimax: ‘They’reto stop the sky falling on our heads!’. Greengrocer: ‘Oh, so this melon’sbad is it?’. Customer: ‘Rather old fruit’.

USA Asterix: ‘These double-decker carts sure look weird’. Brasstax: ‘It’s ourrapid transit system. It’s cheap and clean. No graffiti, lots of seats, safe,rarely a breakdown’. Asterix: ‘And those little portable roofs?’.Anticlimax: ‘That’s to prevent the sky from falling on our heads’.Greengrocer: ‘My melon’s a lemon?’. Customer: ‘Indeed’.

ITA Asterix: ‘Guarda che strani carri... sono a due piani!’. Beltorax: ‘Sono


426

carribus. In omaggio all’Impero Romano li chiamano Imperiali’. Asterix:‘E queste piccole tettoie portatili?’. Beltorax: ‘È per impedire che il cielo cicaschi addosso’. Fruttivendolo: ‘È troppo caro il mio melone?’. Cliente:‘Lo è!’.

In the panel which portrays the double-decker bus, thedescription given in the British version is more accurate than theoriginal one. As far as the following panel is concerned, it is anexample of the strategy of amplification / compensation whichthe translator successfully adopts by adding a good pun to theoriginal: in the scene where a greengrocer argues with a buyer, inthe original French the shopkeeper enquires ‘Il est trop cher monmelon?’ (which means ‘Is my melon too expensive (for you)?’)and the customer answers ‘Il est’ (‘It is’); the dialogue is notcomic in itself and it mostly serves to create a link with Obelix’scomment in the next panel (see infra). The English translationmakes a pun on the quaint English expression ‘old fruit’ which,on this occasion, works both as a form of address and as acomment on the melon itself. Anthea Bell recalls Goscinny’sreaction when he saw their version: ‘A gleam came into his eye.‘Old fruit’, he said. ‘Ah, I wish I’d thought of that. Vieux fruit’. Itis one of our nicest memories of him’.71

As far as the bus description is concerned, the Americantranslation is more modern-oriented and, as to the melon, itcreates another type of wordplay. The Italian version is closer tothe original French with a touch of Latin reminiscence in theword ‘carribus’.

Scene Obelix looks back to the scene involving the greengrocer and the buyer andmakes a comment about it (on the scene represented in the French source text).

FR Obélix: ‘Tu as vu, Astérix? Ce londinien est coiffé d’un melon!’.UK Obelix: ‘I say, Asterix, I think this bridge is falling down’.USA Obelix: ‘That sign says Piccadilly Circus! Can we go to the circus,

Asterix?’.ITA Obelix: ‘Hai sentito Asterix? Quel londinese è innamorato d’un melone!’.

71 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, cit.


427

We have to assume – since it is not shown by the panels – thatthe quarrel between the greengrocer and the customer hasembittered and that the first has put the melon on the buyer’shead, thus motivating Obelix’s comment which creates awordplay: this relies on the fact that the French word for melonis also the name for the traditional bowler hat which has becomean icon of British culture. With no way to convey this in theEnglish translation, in the British edition Obelix makes adifferent remark referring to ‘London bridge is falling down’, awell-known traditional nursery rhyme and singing game. TheAmerican translator faces a similar problem and creates awordplay on the double meaning of ‘circus’. Just like the Frenchtext (and unlike the two Anglophonic versions), the Italianrendition of Obelix’s utterance refers to the melon which is thesubject of the previous panel. Being unable to adapt to theItalian language the pun which in the source text exploits thedouble meaning of the French word ‘melon’, Carlo Manzonimakes Obelix misunderstand the word ‘caro’, which he intendsas ‘loved’ instead of ‘expensive’, therefore being surprised thatsomeone should feel this way about a melon.

Scene Obelix gets drunk and sings loudly, while Asterix and Anticlimax are carryingon the cart all the barrels that the Romans had confiscated.

FR Obélix: ‘ Ils ont des tonneaux ronds, vive la Bretagne... ’. ‘ Ils ontdes tonneaux ronds, vivent les Bretons! ’

UK Obelix: ‘ Ha ha ha, hee hee hee ’. ‘ Little Brown cashk don’t I lovethee ’.

USA ‘ Roll out the barrel... We’ll have a barrel of fun! ’.ITA ‘ Viva le panciute botti della Britannia... Viva le botti dei panciuti

Britanni! ’.

When Obelix gets drunk, in the British translation he sings averse from Little Brown Jug, a well known drinking song writtenby Joseph A. Winner in 1869, while in the French original it wasthe French song Ils ont des chapeaux ronds, vive la Bretagne!,where ‘tonneaux’ (‘barrels’) purposely substitutes the original‘chapeaux’. Of course, the English version also replaces the


428

original ‘jug’ with ‘cask’ (written ‘cashk’ to reproduce the accentof a drunk person), so as to adapt it to the story. The Americanversion makes use here of the above mentioned song Roll out thebarrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun, which Bell and Hockbridge haveput in Roman soldiers’ mouth some panels before. The Italiantranslator creates two new verses sung by Obelix.

Scene Obelix, Asterix and his Briton cousin are visiting every pub in Londinium,looking for the barrel filled with the magic potion. They have seen a lot of wineand Obelix comments about it.

FR Obélix: ‘Voir un petit coup c’est agréable, mais à la longue, c’estmonotone’.

UK Obelix: ‘Drinking only with mine eyes is all very well, but it does get a bittedious!’.

USA Obelix: ‘This is rough. Wine, wine, everywhere, nor any drop to drink’.ITA Obelix: ‘‘Vederne un po’ è piacevole, ma alla lunga stufa’.

Obelix’s utterance in the British version alludes to Drink to meonly with thine eyes, a popular English song, set to the lyrics ofBen Jonson’s 1616 poem Song To Celia. This cultural referencesubstitutes the pun which, in the French text, is created usingthe first line of the song Boire un petit coup (words and music byFélix Boyer, 1915). Similarly, Robert Steven Caron modifies aline from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem The Rhyme ofthe Ancient Mariner (1798), where the word ‘water’ appeared inthe place of the ‘wine’’ we find here. The Italian translationmanages to convey the sense of Obelix’s statement while losingthe cultural reference.

Scene Asterix’s cousin explains the reference made to the Camulodunum team.FR Jolitorax: ‘Une rencontre comptant pour le Tournoi des Cinq Tribus doit

avoir lieu demain, près de Londinium’.UK Anticlimax: ‘There’s a match for the Tribal Crown near Londinium

tomorrow’.USA Brasstax: ‘Tomorrow, near Londinium, there’s a match for the crown in

the Five Tribes’ Tournament’.ITA Beltorax: ‘L’incontro è valevole per il Torneo delle Cinque Tribù e avrà

luogo domani vicino a Londinium’.


429

English translators prefer to replace the original ‘Five Tribes’with the more specifically British ‘Tribal Crown’, a designationwhich is a pun alluding to the existing ‘Triple Crown Trophy’attributed to the British team that defeats all three other Britishcontenders (coming from England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland)in the same Five (now Six) Nations tournament. Robert SteveCaron, who probably had on his desk the English version,renders the original designation of the tournament, but alsomentions the crown. The Italian translation follows the Frenchsource text.

Scene The Romans have sunk our heroes’ boat, hitting it with a big stone thrown by acatapult. The magic potion is wasted in the Thames. The Roman captaincomments on his launch.

FR Roman captain: ‘J’ai fait musca*’. Footnote: ‘*Nom latin de mouche’.UK Roman captain: ‘Oculus tauri!*’. Footnote: ‘*Bull’s eye’.USA Roman captain: ‘Bingo*’. Footnote: ‘*Now the name of a game of

chance’.ITA Roman captain: ‘Ho fatto musca!*’. Footnote: ‘*Nome latino della

mosca’.

Bell and Hockridge perfectly adapt to Latin the expression ‘to hitthe bull’s eye’ which is the English equivalent to the French‘Faire mouche’, meaning ‘to be right on target’. Robert SteveCaron prefers a more modern expression, while Carlo Manzonirepeats the French version even though it has no meaning inItalian.

Scene After the sinking, our heroes swim to the shore. Asterix’s cousin comments onthe Roman’s behaviour.

FR Jolitorax: ‘Ils n’ont pas été franc jeu!’.UK Anticlimax: ‘I say, that’s not cricket!’.USA Brasstax: ‘Rather unsporting of them, what?’.ITA Beltorax: È stato un gioco sleale!’

In the British version, the French original is not replaced withthe equivalent ‘fair play’ but with ‘that’s not cricket’, which is acommon phrase with the same meaning (an anachronism, giventhat cricket wasn’t developed until the 16th century). Both


430

American and Italian translations simply follow the original, butthe American version adds the characterising ‘what?’ while theItalian rendition lacks any kind of marking trait.

To bring this short analysis of the issues related to thetranslation of the album Asterix en Bretagne to a conclusion, it isworth spending a few words on the rendition of the names ofsome specific characters in this story. We have already noticed inthe examples above that there are important differences amongthe various editions. We know that the American editionchanged most of the names because of copyright problems. Forthe main Briton character, we have four different names: theFrench original, Jolitorax, has been adapted to Italian asBeltorax, keeping the same kind of meaning (nice chest); Britishtranslators, being unable to convey the same attributeadequately, choose an existing word, Anticlimax, which has theadvantage of the -ax ending that characterises most Britonnames.

Perhaps, the most interesting case concerns the name of therebel Briton chief, Zebigbos in the French original: this,graphically reproduces the way most French people pronouncethe English syntagma ‘The big boss’, due to their difficulties inarticulating the ‘th’ sound. This is therefore a way of making funof the problems French people have in pronouncing someEnglish words, but at the same time is a typical Frenchexpression of mockery about the English way of speaking. Allthis is hardly understandable by Italian readers, yet CarloManzoni decides to maintain the same name in his version,probably losing a great part of the original effect. Anthea Belland Derek Hockridge obviously decide to change this name,finding a great solution in Mykingdomforanos: this is a referenceto the line ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’ fromShakespeare’s play Richard III, which however reproduces thecockney pronunciation, ‘My Kingdom for an ‘Os’, leaving off the‘h’ sound and thereby having to use ‘an’ before a vowel instead


431

of ‘a’ before an ‘h’. An alternative interpretation for this name is‘my kingdom for a nose’. Interestingly, the British chief is theonly character in the entire book with a small nose. In fact,compared to the nose sizes of every other character (Gauls, Brits,and Romans) his nose is so small that it almost looks like he doesnot have a nose at all72. The choice of the way they shouldtranslate this name was particularly hard, as we can see from aletter Anthea Bell sent to the editor, where she wrote:

The situation is a bit complicated because Zebigbos, on theanalogy of Cassivellaunos [a historical Briton figure who foughtJulius Caesar in 54 BC], of course, is the only British -os endingin the book. So having once decided to alter the name (I stickout for this myself, because that Z is no longer amusing in itselfonce the book’s all in English, and Thebigbos doesn’t look right)do we try for an -os name, or do we use an -ax name, as for allthe other Britons?. We tried various names like Attalos,Neverattalos, Ratherattalos; and I have by me a beer-stainedpiece of paper bearing the contributions Ridakokos andBanberikros, and Mykingdomforanos. I rather feel that if it’s an-os name it should be a -nos ending, just to make the isolatedanalogy clear to all and sundry. And it would be possible to usean English -nous ending, such as we use for Roman names, andspell it -nos. (Fair enough, since Cassivellaunos often ends -ushimself). Which provides us with a few efforts such asSimpliravenos, Indigenos, Verivoluminos. Or then we couldmake the chief an -ax ending, like the other Britons; we have agood many -ax names left over, none of them speciallyapplicable to the chief’s character. Sealingwax, Beeswax,Nervusattax, Biliusattax, Vacuumpax, Unionjax, Hijax andHalfbax are among the -ax compounds we have left.73

72 See Chandrasekharan, Sudhakar Thaths, Dippold, Ron, Asterix

Annotations, English and American Translation, Version 4, available athttp://asterix.openscroll.org/ (last accessed 7th March 2010).

73 Kessler, Peter, op. cit., pp. 63-64.


432

Goscinny himself was involved in the decision. In a letter dated15th July 1969 to Antony Kamm, then Chief Editor atBrockhampton Press, he said: ‘Concerning the name Zebigbos, Idon’t think you should keep the -os ending, which I used to makea pun (even if I like very much Verivoluminos). Any name endingin -ax would be just as good’.74 Eventually, that wasn’t Bell andHockridge’s option.

Other characters that are given different names are theScottish and Irish representatives. The first one is changed in thetwo English editions: the original Mac Anoterapix derives fromthe French word ‘mécanothérapie’, ‘mechanotherapy’ in English,which is the treatment of disorders or injuries by means ofmechanical devices, a name which is maintained in the Italianversion as well. This is transformed by Bell and Hockridge intoMcAnix (from ‘mechanics’) and by Robert Steven Caron intoMac Alomaniax (from ‘megalomaniac’). The name of the Irishcharacter has the same meaning in French, Italian and Americanversions, with little differences in the spelling(O’Torinolaringologix, O’Torinolaringoiatrix and O’Torhino-laryngologix); however, the British translators are more coherentthan their American colleague, in the sense that, havingrenounced the medical reference for the Scottish character (asRobert Steven Caron did), they do the same with his Irishpartner, whose name becomes O’Veroptimistix, meaning overoptimistic, too favourable in prediction.

The Roman Governor is named Caius Roideprus in theFrench source text, the first being a typical Latin name and thesecond deriving from ‘Roi de Prusse’, King of Prussia,presumably referring to the French expression ‘travailler pour leroi de Prusse’, meaning ‘to work for free, without reward’. TheItalian version simply adapts the original name to the targetlanguage, resulting in Caius Rediprus, which loses the possible

74 Idem, p. 64.


433

hint to the motto. In the British translation, the RomanGovernor becomes Encyclopaedicus Britannicus, with anobvious reference to the extremely comprehensive ency-clopaedia.

The Britton landlord of the pub, who hides the barrel ofmagic potion in his cellar, is called Relax in French, Italian andAmerican versions. Once again, however, Bell and Hockridgechange his name into Dipsomaniax, from the word dipsomaniac,which designates someone who drinks too much.

The woman who lives in the house where inadvertentlyAsterix, Obelix and Anticlimax irrupt during their search for thebarrels’ thief, is called Boadicea, instead of the original Petula,which is maintained in both Italian and American translations75.

So many problems, so many challenges to face, in thetranslation of one of the most successful comic series on theEuropean scenario, which focuses so much on linguistic andcultural humour. During this work, we have tried to point outsome of these issues, having almost as much fun in the processas when reading the stories created by the genius of Goscinnyand Uderzo. And, finally, let’s join our Gaulish friends for theusual banquet that ends all their adventures. Yes, Obelix, ‘Ilssont fous, ces traducteurs!’...

75 See footnote 20.

435

Asterix – Bibliography

Internet Articles with no indication of author

Asterix, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix (Lastaccessed 7th March 2010).

Asterix, available at http: // tvtropes.org / pmwiki / pmwiki.php /Main/Asterix (Last accessed 11 th March 2010).

Asterix and his travels around the world, available athttp://www.asterix.co.nz/review/travels/index.html (Lastaccessed 7th March 2010).

Asterix around the world, Asterix speaks English (US), available athttp://www.asterix-obelix.nl/manylanguages/languages.php?lng=us (Last accessed7th March 2010).

Asterix around the world, Dossier: English & American, available athttp://www.asterix-obelix.nl/hjh/dos-engl.html (Last accessed7th March 2010).

Asterix, Articoli dalla stampa americana, available athttp://www.iafol.org/schede/asterix/Dicono_US.html (Lastaccessed 7th March 2010).

Asterix il gallico, available at http: // it.wikipedia.org / wiki /Asterix_il_gallico (Last accessed 7th March 2010).

Asterix in Britain, available at http: // en.wikipedia.org / wiki /Asterix_in_Britain (Last accessed 7th March 2010).

Asterix in Britain (1966), in Alea Jacta Est. Gareth Thomas’Asterix site for grown-ups, available at http: // www. gthomas.pwp. blueyonder.co.uk/main.html (Last accessed 28 th April2010).

Asterix in Britain, the untold story (or How Asterix crossed thechannel and was published in English), available at


436

http://www.asterix.co.nz/review/englishpublishing/index.html(Last accessed 7th March 2010).

Asterix International! Asterix in Germany, available athttp://www.asterix-international.de/asterix/germany.shtml(Last accessed 15th April 2010).

Asterix International! English, available at http://www.asterix-international.de/asterix/languages/english.shtml (Last accessed7th March 2010).

Beric the Briton, A Story of the Roman Invasion, available athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beric_the_Briton,_A_Story_of_the_Roman_Invasion (Last accessed 15th April 2010)

Boudica, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica (Lastaccessed 15 th April 2010).

Comics, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics, Lastaccessed 1st April 2010.

Comics vocabulary, available at http: // en.wikipedia.org / wiki /Comics_vocabulary, Last accessed 1st April 2010.

Cut and Paste Translation, available at http: // tvtropes.org /pmwiki / pmwiki.php / Main / CutAndPasteTranslation(Last accessed 11 th March 2010).

English translations of Asterix available at http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_asterix (Last accessed 7th March2010).

Humour in Asterix, available at http:// en.wikipedia.org / wiki /Humour_in_Asterix (Last accessed 7th March 2010).

Mistakes: Asterix in Britain, available at http:// www.asterix.co.nz/mistakes/britain/index.html (Last accessed 7th March 2010).

Nationalities in the Asterix books, available at http://www.asterix.co.nz/review/cultures/index.htm (Last accessed 7th

March 2010).Ranger (magazine), available at http:// en.wikipedia.org / wiki /

Ranger_(magazine) (Last accessed 7th March 2010).Rule, Britannia!, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Rule,_Britannia! (Last accessed 15th April 2010).

Asterix – Bibliography

437

Authors

Bell, Anthea 1999. Asterix, my love, in Electronic Telegraph,Thursday 25 February 1999, available at http://www.asterix-international.de / asterix / mirror /asterix_my_love.htm (Lastaccessed 7th March 2010).

Bell, Anthea. Asterix, What’s in a Name, available athttp://www.literarytranslation.com/workshops/asterix/ (Lastaccessed 7th March 2010).

Bjørklid, Finn (translated in English by Nicolai Langfeldt). ACeltic Gaul named Asterix available at http:// heim.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/asterix-article.html (Last accessed 7th March 2010).

Chandrasekharan, Sudhakar Thaths and Dippold, Ron. AsterixAnnotations, English and American Translation, Version 4,available at http://asterix.openscroll.org/ (Last accessed 7th

March 2010).Corbetta, Giorgio 1976. La traduzione (from Asterix al Cinema,

Vallecchi Editore, 1976), available at http:// www.iafol.org/schede/asterix/Traduzioni.html (Last accessed 7th March2010).

Driest, Joris 2005. ‘Subjective Narration in Comics’, available athttp://www.secretacres.com/ce/snicthree1.html (Last accessed15th July 2010)

Eisner, Will 1990 (Expanded Edition, reprinted 2001). Comics& Sequential Art, Tamarac, Poorhouse Press.

_____ 1996. Graphic Storytelling, Tamarac, Poorhouse Press.Goscinny, René and Uderzo, Albert 1966. Astérix chez les

Bretons, Paris, Editions Hachette._____ 1969. Asterix e i Britanni, Milano, Arnoldo Mondadori

Editore._____ 1970. Asterix in Britain, London, Hodder Dargaud,._____ 1995. Asterix in Britain, Greenwich, Dargaud Publishing

International Ltd.


438

Hooper, Terry. Who is “Beric the Briton”?, available at http://www.comicbitsonline.com/2007/12/28/1502/ (Last accessed7th March 2010).

Kessler, Peter 1997. The Complete Guide to Asterix, London,Hodder Children's Books.

McCloud , Scott 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,New York, Harper Collins.

Nardin, Giorgia 2008. La traduction italienne d'Astérix: à larecherche d'une possible équivalence, Tesi di Laurea Specialisticain Lingue straniere per la comunicazione internazionale,Università degli Studi di Padova (a.a. 2007-08, Relatore Prof.Geneviève Henrot).

Pauli, Michelle 2009. Asterix and the golden jubilee, in TheGuardian, Thursday 29 October 2009, available athttp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/29/asterix-golden-jubilee (Last accessed 7th March 2010).

Rivière, Stéphane. Astérix chez les Bretons. Étude de l’album,available at http:// www.mage.fst.uha.fr/ asterix/ bretons/etude.html (Last accessed 29th April 2010).

Rivière, Stéphane. Astérix chez les Bretons: dossier. My tailor is rich:l’anglais selon Goscinny available at http:// www.mage.fst.uha.fr/asterix/bretons/anglais.html (Last accessed 29th April 2010).

Spurgeon, Tom et al. 1999. ‘Top 100 (English Language)Comics of the Century’, in The Comics Journal, 210 (February1999).

Varnum, Robin and Gibbons, Christina T. (eds.) 2001. TheLanguage of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, UniversityPress Mississippi.

Yaguello, Marina and Harris, Trevor A. Le V. 1998. Languagethrough the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics,Oxford University Press.

Documents

S.P.Q.T.! (Those Translators Are Fool!)