Martin Mystère, Poorly Translated

I do not know Italian. I am going to read some Italian comics anyway, using Wiktionary, Google Translate, and occasional guesswork.

[poor-martin]

When I started this project, I thought my translations were going to be hilariously bad. I soon started, instead, to actually care about getting them most-of-the-way right and presenting the story in a readable form. The problem is that a Martin Mystère comic is very long. At about a page a day, it takes months to get through one issue, and the issue I'm in right now is the first issue of a 3-part story. I don't have so much free time that I can sustain my motivation to keep doing things at that pace. I haven't figured out what's going to happen next. Once I know what's going on, writing it in English into the text bubbles is a fast process. The slow part is making sure that I understand the comic well enough to know what's going on, so switching back to text-only mode, or even switching to summaries instead of direct translations, isn't going to make things much faster. I think I will end up returning to this blog, maybe later this month, but I'm not sure in what form.

[poor-martin]

I intend to resume posting later in the month, possibly with a change of format.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 66 Sure is lots of black in this page. Sure is lots of not having many words to translate.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 65 I am glad this page had almost no words on it, because I am time crunched this week.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 64 Continue to enjoy the thrilling adventures of Martin Mystère and the Sea Captain Who Made Bad Financial Decisions.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 63 "We're in the middle of a busy route" is a paraphrase of a guess. If I'm wrong about the sense of it, then it was just an idiom for "we're in trouble". There's nothing special about the "Hopkins..." speech bubble; I just left it alone because it was the same thing that I'd be typing if I edited it.

[poor-martin]

issue 109, page 62 "Like poisoning an aqueduct" doesn't seem to be any more of an an idiom in Italian than in English, but I suppose Italians are more likely to think about aqueducts than English speakers are.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 61 Phone photos continue. In this one I had a bit of shadow on one side, but still much less terrible than the previous phone. Panel 2 was in English in the original. It is a fairly consistent conceit of the comic that American and British characters are speaking and writing English, and that only thoughts and audible dialogue are translated for the reader as opposed to the visible written word. I decided to translate the captain's Italian reaction to the words separately, for fun. "Noccioline" could mean either "peanuts", "hazelnuts", or just "nuts" depending on where I look for a definition.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 60 My scanner broke, but during the time when I had a working scanner, I happened to get a new phone with a much more sensitive camera. I can get decent pictures of pages using ambient light, making the levels much easier to balance than with my previous phone. Of course, this does mean that rectangles are going back to being warped. The white line in the bottom panel is a completely unrelated error I noticed between flattening the image for export and posting it. Palmerston Island exists and is in the Cook Islands.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 59 I could make a joke here about Polynesian chiefs getting an age counter every turn and tapping for X.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 58. The islanders of Samoa have a great and proud tradition of giving detailed plot exposition. The word I translated as "sorceror" is "stregone". Wiktionary also suggested "witch-doctor" but I decided not to go there.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 57 No, Martin, if it were a holiday you would be giving exposition about it already.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 56 I don't believe that tribal chiefs appearing in your dreams reminding you of your adventures in Australia are on the FDA list of known kava side effects, but that could just be poor record keeping on the FDA's part.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 55 I may be wrong here, but it appears that "ia ora na" is roughly "good morning" in Tahitian, and "ivi atua" refers to the religion of Easter Island. Neither of these is Samoan. Since the Italian reader wouldn't be any more familiar with the words than I am, I left them untranslated.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 54 The use of the term "mana" to refer to a quantifiable, consumable resource of magical energy is due to Larry Niven in the 1970s, but the word comes from Polynesian tradition, where its connotations are much less mechanistic.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 53 I hope you weren't expecting Martin to somehow NOT be the special chosen white man. The referenced issues involve Australian aborigines, who are connected both to the mystical world of dreams and to a species of space aliens called the Kundingas. I am not sure that I understand the details, but I will ask my Croatian friend for more information if it becomes necessary. The "Tutto Martin Mystère" series had not yet caught up to these issues of the original series; consequently, the caption on this page actually did refer to the original series and not the same-numbered Tutto issues.

[poor-martin]

Issue 109, page 52 I'm pretty sure this is neither the first time an elderly spiritual leader has quietly sat cross-legged waiting for Martin to come closer, nor the last.