Hindi ‘Asterix’ released
LAUNCHED in 1959, the classic French comic series Asterix boasts having sold an unmatched 370 million copies in more than 100 languages.
The series is now available for Hindi readers – after five years of painstaking translation.
The Hindi translation of the first four books of the series was released recently by French ambassador Alexandre Ziegler, who called the comics’ total of 33 books “a monument of French pop culture” and an “opportunity to learn not French, but about the French (people)”.
The series follows the adventures of a group of Gallic villagers as they resist Roman occupation in 50 BCE.
It was originally written by Rene Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo.
Published by Om Books International, the books were co-translated by Dipa Chaudhuri and Puneet Gupta from 2014.
Translating each album took at least six to eight months.
“There are so many cultural references. You have to find equivalent Hindi words, terminology, proverbs, jokes and songs,” said Gupta, who also translated The Adventures of Tintin.
French-speaking co-translator Chaudhuri said: “Besides finding the right word, we had to find the right length, because there were speech bubbles.”
The translators shared an interesting anecdote.
“They’ve used the (military) terms decurion and centurion. We couldn’t have used ‘major’ or ‘colonel’. So we had to come up with dashpati and shatpati for commanders of 10 and 100 soldiers,” Gupta said.
The first four books are priced at Rs 295 (R59) and are available at Amazon and Flipkart.