Hi all !

Steve Ogden has made available on his website the ten new translated strips of the Luna Ville (Moon Town) saga !  And you can subscribe to the French Moon Town RRS FEED.

Now French readers can read it through, right to the Cliffhanger on strip 20. We’ll be working on the translation of the next ten strips very soon, but in the meantime, let me share with you the kind of discussions we have with Steve during the translation process.

Steve, as readers might have noticed, makes up quite a lot of expressions. People in Moon Town talk about “Beats and Deets” when referring to the latest news, people who’re “all business” are told to “wait a tick”, and most of all, when not following a beacon vector, they “Break Lane”.

Breaking Lane is the title of the fisrt Moon Town chapter, so we had better get it right. Here’s a short excerpt of the kind of discussions we have, late at night :
Cathbad :

Translator alert !* *Sorry, captain, this entry was not programmed into  my database … *;) What does “break lane” *exactly* mean ? To get out of the trajectory (sortie de trajectoire)? To slow down before halting ? Need your help. This one and the next temporarily use a mix of the two but I’ll redo them after you tell me

Steve :

OK. Sorry about this – this is a made-up phrase. It means to leave the route you’re supposed to follow. You know those little satellite things that line the approach vector to Moon Town? You’re supposed to follow that route. Leaving it means you are “breaking lane”.Here is the dictionary entery from the Moon Town comic, oddly -
Breaking Lane – [brey⋅king leyn] (v.). Deviating from the prescribed route; straying from the expected road; going off the beaten path; zigging where others may zag; taking the path less traveled.

“It is TLS airspace entry protocol that all craft adhere to the approach vector lane markings. As manual control has been determined by the TLS to be so unreliable as to be unsafe, breaking lane is not recommended.”
- from the TerraLuna Security Agency field manual.

Cathbad (in logorrhea mode, skip if bored) :

Ok, you know what, first,  I’m a dumb  ass. Second, I’m a melon head. I know what breaking lane means, as it’s the chapter title !!!! Only, I didn’t know how to translate it when used as a verb. One very fundamental point in French : we don’t use gerundive; we have them, but just plainly never use them, cause… they’re supposed to sound bad in French. French teacher scold you in front of the whole school for using gerundive. In English, tough, they’re everywhere. “Breaking Lane” as a title is a  substantive ; in French, it has to be a substantive too, but with nouns or  with an infinitive verb (which guess what, often sound as bad as gerundive). If you want to figure all that, let’s think of what King says about the passive tense or adverbs in English, and you’ll get it. In French substantiv(ized?) Infinitives are clumsy, Gerunds are evil. Now let’s try some noun approach :
to break lane (actively, as in “we are about to break lane right now babe”) could be :

• “on va faire une” (we’re about to do a) Rupture de trajectoire, (lit. breaking trajectory)
• sortie de Trajectoire (lit. getting out of the trajectory)
• Cassure de trajectoire (lit breaking the trajectory)
• brisure de trajectoire (lit same, but “brisure” refers to breaking glass, specifically)
• interruption de trajectoire (lit interruption of trajectory)
• séparation de trajectoire (lit splitting trajectories)

… which all sound ok, but plain as hell.

“on va prendre un chemin de traverse”, lit “lets take a ‘chemin de traverse’” of course, is far better. But “chemin de traverse”, is the name for “the alternate path” you should not take, so the TLS field manual cannot use this term to describe what pilots should do. It has to have a regular term for the path to be followed, “the vector lane” part. Hence, and thanks for my wife for helping me with this one, “le sentier”  (litterally  :  track/path) ; “sentier”  refers to a small track in the wilderness (in a forest, or in the moor), like “chemin” but less frequented than a “chemin”. A “sentier” often disappears if not used for a year or two. In French, “sortir des sentiers battus” (lit leaving the beaten tracks”) is a close synonym of “prendre un chemin de traverse”. So in my opinion, Sentier fits well. And it’s uncommon enough in a space op setting to draw attention. ”

so my suggestion for “tell you what, let’s break lane and go check it out.” would be “tu sais quoi, quittons le  sentier pour aller vérifier de visu”. It draws the attention to the “vector lane” as much to the fact of leaving it, and hence to the beacon lines on the images.

Steve :

(As for) the dictionary entry – you can’t be expected to have memorized all that crap!

Yes, people, this is what it takes to get a title right. But titles are important, eh ? And… Crap ? This is no crap, this is an entry from the official TLS manual,  for Moon’s Sake !

See you soon for more Legend of Bill, Astray3, By Moon Alone, Dead Heaven and Moon Town news !! (in babeltical order

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