Just a quick note to let you know of what’s  happening right now in the BabelComics underground.

Moon Town’s readers must have made out my reuse of Triple Bee’s favorite punch line (© Steve ) in the title. This is what mind contamination looks like. I’ve been spending some time with news-DJ Triple Bee lately, in the translation process, as you will soon see for yourselves. Steve Ogden is about to publish the next 10  Luna Ville French episodes. Steve made it absolutely clear that he wanted the French version to be as true to the original as possible. As you’ve all noticed, Moon Town readers, Steve gives a lot of attention to speech bubbles in his comics. They really blend into the pages, they are part of the Moon Town look’n feel. And as French is more verbose than English, Steve has to rework almost every single one of them !  And by the way, on August the 30st, the temporary Moon Town hiatus will be over and the Moon Town main storyline will resume with a load of new strips !! Can’t wait !

The French version of  Légende de Bill, will be available soon. The forty first episodes have been translated, but David is in the process of switching hosts for Legend Of Bill, moving  to  Th3rdWorldStudio which will also handle the printed versions of LOB. As you can guess, this adds a lot of  additional work on an already over-busied author !! So,  readers, if you please, go check out the pre-orders for The Legend of Bill Collection 1 – Artist Edition ! Grab your copy. There’s unpublished stuff inside you wont find anywhere else on the web.

More news on Astray3, By Moon Alone, and Dead Heaven very soon !

Hi all !

As more and more of what we’ve got in store is about to be released online, I re-designed some parts of this portal. The main addition is the “Strip posts”.
Each time a member of BabelComics posts a new translated strip on his own site, a post is automatically generated here on Babel, to give you another chance to go read it as soon as it becomes available. These posts only consist of a lowres screen capture of the strip, linking directly to the original sites. You won’t read it here, but you’re always one click away from your updated strips !

Of course, you can use the RSS feed (top menu) to be informed of each update, but for those of you who don’t like using them, you now have an alternative : come back here every day. As things get rolling on Babel, there should even be more than one update a day.

This was Cathbad, radio Babel.

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

Not only because Steve Ogden probably has the most sexiest voice in all Maryland’s wine country (says my wife), not only because  Steve speaks of characters as you always wished your literature teachers would (but seldom did), not only because of the excellent music by Tim Larkin in the background, but… because he speaks of us !

Steve gives us a good five minutes of praises, for Mirlikovir’s work on Oghme Comics and mine on Babel, and let’s indulge into some auto-satisfaction here for a minute, that sure feels good. Thank you Steve.

We’ve worked together very closely in order to translate the first ten strips of Moon Town (Luna Ville) to French.  As Frank Herbert wrote somewhere in his Dune masterpiece (or was it only in Lynch’s questionable  adaptation ?), “beginnings are very delicate times”.  As an author, I tend to have strong ideas about what I like, what I don’t, how I would bring something into a story,… etc. But when translating someone else’s works, one really has to change skins. One has to immerse in the universe and become this universe’s voice. Or put in less presumptuous terms, you have to act like a reader. Like a fan.  You become yet another the vessel for the story being told.

On the one hand, translating graphic novels is easier than translating literature, because you have the illustrations to guide you. And when they are well executed (which always is the case with Steve Ogden’s work) chances that you’ll get something wrong are less. At the same time, comics are specific : the narrative space of comic books is closer to that of movies than to that of  books. This is one of the great qualities of Moon Town in my opinion. There’s a movie feel to it. And movies rely a lot on cutting to bring the story along.  Beginnings also are the place where the atmosphere is established. It’s your chance, as a translator, to “tune in” to the song. And the best way to do this properly is by interacting with the author.

I must say here that Steve takes all this very seriously and  I truly believe we’ve succeeded in bringing to French the insufferability of Dabney Flagg, as well as the “sexy in a cold serious sort of way”-ness of  Cassandra Quinn (who said women on a mission aren’t sexy ?).

And this just the beginning, so stay tuned, and by all means, if as I do, you enjoy story talk, character talk, arc talk, listen to every single of Steve’s braincasts on Radio Moon Town ! I mean it. There aren’t that many podcasters doing such a great job.

And we’ll talk more very soon about the three other stories we’re translating, I’ve named (in Xhosa alphabetic order)  “By Moon Alone“, “Legend of Bill” and “Astray3“.

Cathbad

“Here are the first ten Moon Town strips in French! My good friends over at Oghme Comics have done a bang-up job translating these (…)”

Go check it out !

And thanks for your support to BabelComics promotion Steve, you rock

We also did some ‘test drive’ with David Reddick on Legend of Bill (Légende de Bill), and he too wrote some awesome introduction. You can reach the samples here :

“The fine folks at Oghme Comics have done it again!(…)”

“A big hand to Oghme Comics for putting the currect LoB into French! Thanks, guys!!(…)”

Much more to come soon and thank you, David !

Last but nor least, we’re working with Hai on the first 30 pages or so of his excellent By Moon Alone (Par la Lune). We’re honing our practice on the fly, and this collaborative work is getting more and more exciting, as I’m allowed to dwelve into the story to the deepest level.

Check this blog soon for some update.

See you all,

Cathbad

Welcome to Babelcomics !

Yet another webcomic portal ? Yes, yet another. Only this one has its specificities.

Why the French ? Why them ? Why ??

(Napoleon was French, they kiss like snakes and their burgundi wine is outrageously expensive !)

We’re two French webcomicers, bravely hiding behind the pen names of Cathbad and Mirlikovir, authors of the CucuC / Cuchulainn tandem. You might even have heard of it. You might also know that Comics, in France, are huge. They sell as well as novels, and often are to be found on the front displays of general book stores. Only here we don’t call them comics, but “Bandes Dessinées”. Français Oblige

The number of new Bandes Dessinées published every single month in France and Belgium is amazing, by comparison to the number of inhabitants of French speaking countries. Yet, webcomics have not yet become here the phenomenon they are in the UK/US, Australia, New Zealand, and I’m not even talking about online Manga.

Wel like webcomics, and often find ourselves in the following situation. A friend of ours suffers from a Comics addiction and… wants to read more online comics. We can redirect them to an Anonymous Webcomicoholic Therapy Group, ooooor… we can also find ourselves answering :  “go check **my favorite webcomic here**, it totally rocks”.

Just before we add : “ah,… erh… yes, it’s in English”. Then our friend  visits the website,  looks at the art, and comes back to us with statements like “man, now I’m real pissed ! I want to read this, when will it be translated to French ?”. We look at them with mild uncompromising expressions, aaaand…

They join the local Therapy Group.  Help us save them.

It’s all about building bridges…

And that’s the idea behind Babelcomics. A desire to help bridge the gap between French and English audiences. We then contacted two authors we really appreciate and knew a little : David Reddick, author of  Legend of Bill, and Steve Ogden, author of Moon Town. We asked them if they’d like to join our little experiment, and we received two HUGE, ENTHOUSIATIC, IMMEDIATE YES.

From that point on, we discussed the idea of Babelcomics the three of us, Oghme Comics (Cathbad + Mirlikovir) , David Reddick and Steve Ogden. (yes that’s four, really, but webcomically speaking, that’s a three, people). We soon realised we should bring at least two/three other excellent webcomics into the dance, and contacted Honoel A. Ibardolaza, author of By Moon Alone and Eldon Cowgur, author of Astray3.

And they answered with a HUGE,…. YES.

What now?

We’re thrilled to be offered the opportunity to translate the works of such excellent artists, and will try and achieve high quality translations. They deserve it.  So do readers.

Now what’s planned for the near future ?

- first, we’re beginning the task of translating the archives. This will take a while, we have to do it well.

- second, we’ll also try and bring to you, English readers, some great French webcomics for you to read.

So, please, do us a favor, bookmark this page, spread the word to all these lovely French teachers from high school who gave you a F grade, and come back ! There will be news before long.

Cheers,

Cathbad