Co-translator Dipa Chaudhuri tells Saimi Sattar what it took to get the details and nuances of Asterix in Hindi correct
Gaulwasi Asterix. A literal translation of Asterix in Gaul, our favourite comic hero is back in Hindi to draw in fans from a cross-section of society that would naturally warm up to an underdog story and to whom superheroes are all about super achievers and least about human frailty. They are oddballs who fight while having fun and renew us with the comforting warmth of nostalgia. So it is that a city-based publisher decided to get down to the business of taking the franchise to a larger audience. And yesterday, French Ambassador Alexander Ziegler launched the first of the comic books in Delhi.
The series follows the adventures of a village of Gauls as they resist Roman occupation in 50 BC. The comic book that extends beyond the realm of just one meant for children, the series has a fan-following that extends way beyond the borders of where it is based and has now broken one more language frontier with its launch in Hindi.
However, what was the need for a translation? “Most of us speak two or three languages and range from dreadful Hindi speakers to the anglophone to the Hindiphone. Hindi is our official language and there are so many ads in it that we come across in our daily lives. We read all our sarkaari documents in Hindi. We watch our news in the language. So, it’s pretty much part of our day-to-day interaction with people. So, we thought it wouldn’t hurt to pick up the comic and see how would read in Hindi because we do read comics written in the language. And also these are meant for collectors, anthropologists, ethnographers, linguists, translators, and college students. There is a vast variety of audience and readership that we are looking at,” says Dipa Chaudhuri, co-translator of the Asterix Comics in Hindi.
The decision to have an edition in the language, says Chaudhuri, originated from “a lot of mad ideas that take place in publishing houses. During one of the international book fairs, the publisher Ajay Mago, made a blind call and walked inside the stand of Hachette Livre, the publisher of the comic in French. He had recently acquired the publishing rights of The Adventures of Tintin comics for its translation in Hindi from Casterman (in 2009). So he was almost convinced that the logical thing after Tintin ought to be Asterix. Then he negotiated with them for at least five years.”
One of the important component of their demands was that it had to be translated from French and not from English. “I suggested Ajay that he should bring Puneet Gupta on board who had translated Tintin from English to Hindi. And since, I knew French, Ajay Mago told me to step in. It just took me 24 hours to sign the project,” she says.
But the idea, feels Chaudhuri, originate in Ajay’s head much before. “Like most Indians we have grown up listening to mad comedies and reading comics and we have had serialised comics in newspapers and in single-frame as well. So Ajay, in his childhood, nurtured this dream and imagined what would it be like to read Asterix comics in Hindi.”
However, getting the project was the first of the many steps that they had to undergo. “There were several rounds of translation because there is a huge play of words. There are a lot of cultural inputs in Asterix in French so you don’t convey the narrative, you communicate it.”
No, the purists need not worry for the publishers never had the intention of Indianising the narrative. “Every language has its own kind of rhymes and phrases that hail from its deep-rooted cultures which were kept intact.”
Moreover, while putting it in Hindi, the visuals which had a very important presence in the comic, had to match the text. “There is no way in which you can pass off a wild boar as chicken,” she says. For getting it right, there were various drafts of translations — at least six to seven of them before they went to Hachette Livre in France. “First they asked for a sample translation and we sent them 10 pages of the first book. After a month or so, they got back with a very good feedback and they were convinced that it’s headed in the right direction. We sent them about two rounds of final translation so that they could come up with final changes and feedback,” she says. However, this was not the end as laying out Asterix in a different language, in the comic frames, was another ballgame altogether because Hindi is much longer than French.
In French, all the accents are on top, whereas in Hindi, all the maatras are on the side. All of us had to be very careful about what we were writing so that we didn’t exceed the speech blurb,” says Chaudhuri while talking about the challenges that came her and her co-translator Pankaj Gupta’s way while translating the first four comics of Asterix and Obelix. So minute details to the extent of not changing the sizes of the blurbs were taken into account.
However, it was not easy. “Every language has got its own sound system. So a simple thing like a water splash would be written plouf in French and splash in English. The Hindi equivalent is chapaak! Even though it is obvious with the visual of splashing water, but again the text needs to match with the language. So we translated a tremendous amount of word play too in the dialogues.”
Moreover, any one who has read the comics can recall that it is peppered with frames which had only battle cries or sounds (without speech blurbs) so those frames had to be redrawn. “The original French or English text is transcribed by hand (manually), but we did not do that. We looked for a font which was close to the original one and the text was entered by a keyboard,” she says.
Asterix often had run-ins with the Goths, who spoke in a dramatic French accent. This is depicted by harsher sounds in Hindi. “We had to look for fonts that were dramatic, bold and hard-hitting. People say, ‘God lies in detail’ and even while being an atheist, I have to confess that it did lie in detail and in the way we were trying to convey each and every detail through translation,” she says.
The comics have an abundance of songs and Chaudhuri uses those to illustrate the nitty gritty that they went into. “There is a song where it says that the slaves do not know how to row a boat which is taken from a French nursery rhyme which is actually cruel and indicates that at the end, a boy would be cooked and eaten. So while translating, we had to take both into account to get the context right. It wasn’t just the question of translating the dialogues but about taking the background in account, making sure that nothing gets lost in translation or goes out of context or becomes too odd since they are speaking in Hindi,” she says. That is also the reason why even though Asterix speaks in Hindi, he still has the French connect intact. “We can’t do away with it because of the visuals since the story is also French as are the battles,” she says. The only thing that has been changed are the names of the Romans except for Julius Caesar, for the sake of easy identification.
Chaudhuri insists that Asterix comics in Hindi has got the same production values and quality as the French and English ones.
Chaudhuri believes that it is a wrong notion to think that Asterix is for children. “These relate not only the medieval history of France, there are some expressions in Latin like, de facto, ad nauseum that we continue to use that makes them very contemporary. There are interesting, lesser-known facts that have multiple interpretations and connotations. A child would interpret it very differently and is likely to love all his antics and all the fighting. The adolescent might react to all the fighting very differently because of the raging hormones. The adult might want to go beyond the surface and look at the constructs — the social hierarchy, implications of these songs and sounds and dialogues as the meaning keeps slipping through your fingers and you have to catch it. And then you might get a different meaning the next time you read it.”
So what is stopping you from picking up the Hindi translation of the Asterix?
Photo: Pankaj Kumar
