Tuesday 8 July 2014

Quenya translation - Diálogo de Astérix en Quenya: Eleniono Tecië mi i Lambë Eldaiva / Translating Astérix into Quenya


I've been studying Tolkien's Quenya for a while, and one day I decided to translate something. So I ended up translating some frames from one of my fave Astérix comic books: The meeting of Anticlimax and Astérix in Astérix in Britain (Astérix chez les Bretons in the French original). It's nice to be a geeky erudite :) 

 The tricky part about translating Astérix comic books, in my opinion, revolves around all the set phrases, idioms and double-meaning jokes. So I wanted to base my tolkienized translation on at least two different translations. As well as the original French version of the comic book, I used the English and the Spanish translations in order to create the Quenya translation - I like the Spanish translations of Astérix books because they're reasonably literal and quite close to the original; on the other hand, I find that the English translations deviate quite a bit from the original more than once, so that was the version I ended up using the less for my translation. 

 The final study includes the comic panels with the Quenya dialogue superimposed (bigger pic of the panels below as well), the English and Spanish translations, a brief analysis of my own Quenya translation, and a list of the dictionaries/glossaries and the rest of bibliography I used.   I initially published this translation here as a pdf file back in 2014 (the English version is below), but I recently updated it and got it published in the Summer 2019 Estel, the official seasonal magazine of the Spanish Tolkien Society (Sociedad Tolkien Española), so here's the updated version from the magazine :D :



In English (earlier version, not updated):

Closer look at the panels with  my Quenya translation (Open in a new tab for a larger image):
And bonus pics of the newly received magazine with the article :D ^^
  
 
-On the use of my essays and studies: DO NOT use this work without my permission. If you're interested in it and want to share it or expand on this idea, you're allowed to reference it AS LONG AS you credit me and link to this post. It would also be nice if you contacted me beforehand. DO NOT publish as if it were your own work, always quote and link.