Other Voices, Other Rooms*
A guest post by Astrid Mélite

Last summer, I adapted a graphic novel from English into French for the first time. The publisher was quite happy with my work on Gyakushu! Volume 1 and rather naturally approached me to translate the second and third volumes in the trilogy. After having worked my way through Volume 1, Volumes 2 and 3 came to me more easily. As a reader, I found these two books even better than the first, which might have helped as well.

Creative translation, whether it is for brand marketing or literary fiction, is very much about finding the voice of the original and recreating it in your own language. In the case of a graphic novel, the voices are plural. While Volume 1 was heavily dominated by the narrator’s voice and I tried to keep others neutral, Volume 2 sees the emergence of other voices, some of them very unique. Of course, I tried to stay true to the narrator’s voice in all three volumes, as the peculiar form of storytelling is one of the peculiarities of this series, but I also had a lot of fun with more short-lived characters.

When dealing with sequels, consistency is the name of the game. Since Gykaushu! is built around flashbacks, I found that making sure I used the exact same wording in repeated scenes helped create a tale-like atmosphere, without making the book sound childish, something the publisher wanted to avoid. This — discussing what the publisher wanted and getting a good grasp of prospective readers — helped me tremendously. The books are coming out (well, Volume 1 just came out on November 10th, yay!) in a collection of graphic novels dedicated to crime culture. The readership is clearly adult.

The other thing that helped me is my experience in subtitling. I’ve observed three similarities between subtitling and translating a graphic novel. The most obvious is the limited space you have to get your message across, but there is probably more to be said about dealing with the interaction of text and image and about writing spoken language.

On the first point, I’m used to the challenge of being succinct and didn’t feel too much pressure there. Some publishers might work with the lettering and size of the balloons to get the text in, and some won’t. I didn’t receive any comments about my text being too long, so I guess it worked.

The second aspect, the interaction of text and image, is much more subtle. I’m a big believer in trusting your reader and not dumbing things down for them. Quite frankly, in an action-packed comic book, the visuals do most of the job. There is no sense in repeating what the picture says. The text should work harmoniously with the drawings even if that means you don’t get to be clever with a certain sentence or another.

As for writing spoken language, I find this is a fascinating subject. Try transcribing directly spoken language and you will quickly find that it is unreadable. Graphic novel text, just like subtitles, is a representation of spoken language and thus walks a fine line between written and spoken text. In both cases, it’s a hell of a ride.

The author of Gyakushu!, Dan Hipp, was kind enough to let me use some artwork from his blog to illustrate this post and give you an idea of his universe. Thank you, Mr. Hipp! (You can see more of his art at http://mrhipp.blogspot.com/.)

*Other Voices, Other Rooms is the title of a novel by Truman Capote

Astrid Mélite is an English to French and German to French translator. After working ten years as an in-house translator, first for the television industry and then in financial news, she recently started freelancing, specialising in media, marketing and finance. In her spare time, she likes to study for fun, play capoeira and blog in French and in English at http://tongueincheck.wordpress.com.

Her translation of Gyakushu! Volume 1 can be bought here.