Comics with "Subtitles"

[mikesheawright]

I picked up the newest Lagon Revue at the printed matter art book fair and have been making my way through it. It's an incredible object and I do find myself spending a good amount of time just browsing through it and soaking in the various art styles and paper stocks/textures/inks. Overall an amazing publishing achievement.

Most of the comics are in French and the book comes with a booklet that has translations for all of the comics inside. This is the first time I've tried to read anything like this and I was excited about this at first but I actually have a SUPER hard time reading anything this way? Looking back and forth between the images and the translation guide kind of completely kills the flow of the stories for me and I actually almost prefer to just stare at the pictures and sort of try to get the gist of what's going on?

I'm wondering if there's another way to do this sort of translation, short of just reprinting books in other languages? Or if this reading process is just easier for some people than others?

[awfulquiet]

I've seen it done where there's translation on the page, usually in the bottom margin. Still not perfect but I prefer that to the separate translation sheet.

[arecomicsevengood]

Yeah, the first time I encountered this was a Jaako Pallasvuo comic where the translated captions are on the same page and that works OK and is sort of fun. Trying to read along with a sheet is really difficult. Trying to think about why this is, maybe it's because most comics are actually pretty minimal in their use of words and they're there to contextualize the images, and being on a separate sheet kinda underlines how thin the narrative is in most comics? It forces you to consider the images and the text separately. And just because of how reading works, you're always sorta pulling ahead, and it's not like the text works like a radio play but your brain keeps on wanting to fit it into that form. That Finnish comic Laski Mooses is one that I would probably like way more as just a translated book.

That said: I still really want an English translation sheet for that Dominique Goblet/Kai Pfeffer comic, because the images and their relationship to each other is so abstract I wonder what the text could be that could make sense of it all, and assume it's deeply poetic.

[manoopuesta]

Translation booklets are for me also a bit inconvenient to read along with the comic. So I prefer this over no translation, but the translation format that I like better is the comics with the subtitles in the lower margin.

I feel the booklet is more like a compromise some small press people do to keep the format the same for the locals, but have the possibility of selling the comic internationally when they go to festivals abroad.

[mikesheawright]

Nov 19, 2022 19:04:11 GMT arecomicsevengood said:

Yeah, the first time I encountered this was a Jaako Pallasvuo comic where the translated captions are on the same page and that works OK and is sort of fun. Trying to read along with a sheet is really difficult. Trying to think about why this is, maybe it's because most comics are actually pretty minimal in their use of words and they're there to contextualize the images, and being on a separate sheet kinda underlines how thin the narrative is in most comics? It forces you to consider the images and the text separately. And just because of how reading works, you're always sorta pulling ahead, and it's not like the text works like a radio play but your brain keeps on wanting to fit it into that form.

I think this is pretty spot on, with the translation guide you don't get that opportunity to read both text and image at once which is part of the magic of comics. Throws the whole flow off.

This would never work with a project as ambitious as Lagon but having some sort of clear mylar overlay between pages would be neat. I guess at some point (maybe already?) iphone translation will be immediate and you could just read it through your phone screen? But who wants to do that.

[whitecomics]

The writer Helen DeWitt has spoken in a number of places about her admirable, completely insane conviction that one should simply learn a bunch of languages to avoid reading in translation. Problem solved.

I was just reading an issue of Dylan Horrocks' Atlas that tries to bring spoken language and translation into the text of the comic in an interesting way. Certainly better than other approaches I've seen, like italics or a "spoken in English" footnote at the bottom of the page. The idea of an imagined, perhaps lazily constructed foreign language hasn't aged that well but it's a neat formal trick.


Here's an example, from a review by Derik Badman:

[teemcgee]

I like this approach that Carson on Living the Line recently reviews; a much smaller black and white copy accompanying the book proper with the panels translated. Much better than the tipped-in booklet of text translation, which I also find leads to a clunky and disjointed read.

[awfulquiet]

Having just put down the new Zine Panique with the translation sheet...some thoughts...It's still clumsy. I found myself thankful for the stories without any or at least very little text. Though the longest, most text-heavy story was my favorite. I found myself reading the whole page's translation and then going back and taking in the actual comic page instead of trying to follow panel-by-panel.

After I finished I experimented a bit with the Google translate function using my phone camera. The translation isn't perfect, but it's amazing how fast it is. And pretty unobtrusive.

[BubblesZine]

the new Geneviève Castrée Complete Works does this in parts but it kinda works well because it's mostly for single pages rather than a long story. The book feels more like an art book than a comic at most parts. I was reading it yesterday and thought of this thread.

[mikesheawright]

Dec 29, 2022 22:21:10 GMT BubblesZine said:

the new Geneviève Castrée Complete Works does this in parts but it kinda works well because it's mostly for single pages rather than a long story. The book feels more like an art book than a comic at most parts. I was reading it yesterday and thought of this thread.

Yeah having the text on the same page sort of adjacent to the artwork works pretty well in that book. It's unobtrusive but close enough that your eyes can make the connection. I'm glad Succeptible is in english though.