Yet another thread about localisation (spun from Disney Solicits Jan '19 thread)

[caballero]

No new William Van Horn.

Oct 21, 2018 2:10:28 GMT Matilda said:

Other than the one-shots/seasonal books, U$ 41 will be the last issue (as far as we now know) with a story done by one of the dialoguers we have come to appreciate so over the last few years. Thad Komorowski did the English dialogue for "The Vortex of Time." Magica, Goldie and Thad! I'll be there with bells on.

I'm looking forward to the Carpi Disney Masters volume, too.

I still cannot believe those Italian stories are not simply translated to English. This dialoguing practice is tantamount to destroying art!

[jumbojr]

Oct 21, 2018 8:51:50 GMT caballero said:

No new William Van Horn.

Oct 21, 2018 2:10:28 GMT Matilda said:

Other than the one-shots/seasonal books, U$ 41 will be the last issue (as far as we now know) with a story done by one of the dialoguers we have come to appreciate so over the last few years. Thad Komorowski did the English dialogue for "The Vortex of Time." Magica, Goldie and Thad! I'll be there with bells on.

I'm looking forward to the Carpi Disney Masters volume, too.

I still cannot believe those Italian stories are not simply translated to English. This dialoguing practice is tantamount to destroying art!

I agree 100% and I'm glad that the "dialoguers" were replaced.

[drleevezan]

Oct 21, 2018 14:38:24 GMT jumbojr said:

Oct 21, 2018 8:51:50 GMT caballero said:

No new William Van Horn.


I still cannot believe those Italian stories are not simply translated to English. This dialoguing practice is tantamount to destroying art!

I agree 100% and I'm glad that the "dialoguers" were replaced.

Really, now, let's not start that discussion again. I'm sure we all remember what happened the last time.

[deb]

Oct 21, 2018 14:42:37 GMT drleevezan said:

Oct 21, 2018 14:38:24 GMT jumbojr said:

I agree 100% and I'm glad that the "dialoguers" were replaced.

Really, now, let's not start that discussion again. I'm sure we all remember what happened the last time.

We sure do:


As someone who reads IDW's comics for entertainment and not the preservation of "Art", I preferred the old scripters. 

[rodsterrific]

Oct 21, 2018 14:38:24 GMT jumbojr said:

Oct 21, 2018 8:51:50 GMT caballero said:

No new William Van Horn.


I still cannot believe those Italian stories are not simply translated to English. This dialoguing practice is tantamount to destroying art!

I agree 100% and I'm glad that the "dialoguers" were replaced.

They still aren't being strictly translated. They're just being scripted in a way that is void of any humor or wit. A strict translation into English would be unbearably dull and bland.

It's not like IDW did something new by having scripters create new dialogue.  This practice has been done in the US since 1986...

[Scrooge MacDuck]

What bothers me with the Fresh And New translation is that they're so bad. I have always been on the fence on the matter of localization, and I'd be quite prepared to accept more direct translations from IDW — but "more direct" shouldn't equal "stilted and unnatural".

For example, for the panel you quoted, the Core Four way of handling this would have been to make up a new witty statement from Scrooge. And that's fine. But it would also have been fine, if you wanted a straighter translation, to go with something that has the same meaning as what quoted above, except in a way that sounds like something a human being might actually say. Such as: 



It's not particularly clever or interesting, but it doesn't jump out at you and take you out of the story like the Brady version did.

[jumbojr]

Oct 21, 2018 16:16:30 GMT deb said:

Oct 21, 2018 14:42:37 GMT drleevezan said:

Really, now, let's not start that discussion again. I'm sure we all remember what happened the last time.

We sure do:


As someone who reads IDW's comics for entertainment and not the preservation of "Art", I preferred the old scripters. 

That's a good translation. Blame the original writer, or ask them to pick better stories. 

[deb]

In this case, the story itself does share a lot of the blame, as traditionally, Scrooge doesn’t believe in luck, and attributes his fortune to hard work. While the translation is stiff and humorless, the story is also pretty contrived and shoehorns Scrooge’s personality to fit it.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Oct 22, 2018 15:58:26 GMT jumbojr said:

Oct 21, 2018 16:16:30 GMT deb said:

We sure do:


As someone who reads IDW's comics for entertainment and not the preservation of "Art", I preferred the old scripters. 

That's a good translation. Blame the original writer, or ask them to pick better stories. 

See my example above of how the dialogue might have been written to mean the same thing, but actually flow as something a native English speaker might actually say. Which the Brady version simply doesn't. Without even going into whether the line makes sense in Italian (which it actually doesn't, really, for the reasons Deb points out), it's simply false to call the Brady version a good translation. 

Oct 22, 2018 17:00:06 GMT deb said:

In this case, the story itself does share a lot of the blame, as traditionally, Scrooge doesn’t believe in luck, and attributes his fortune to hard work. While the translation is stiff and humorless, the story is also pretty contrived and shoehorns Scrooge’s personality to fit it.

True, and the story is itself none too great, but see my version above for a take on the line that captures what might have been the original spirit a little better.

What Scrooge is saying here isn't that he attributes his fortune to being lucky, as you might derive from the Brady wordsalad, but instead that he does believe in bad luck and tries to avoid it. Which is consistent with Scrooge: with people like "Big" Jinx (and, later, Gladstone and Magica) in his life, Scrooge can but acknowledge the existence of luck (good and bad) in his universe. And it would simply be daft to delibrate walk into a jinx-giving situation when such things clearly exist. Yet he won't actively seek out good luck either, but just preserve himself from the bad kind. 

[rodsterrific]

Oct 22, 2018 15:58:26 GMT jumbojr said:

Oct 21, 2018 16:16:30 GMT deb said:

We sure do:


As someone who reads IDW's comics for entertainment and not the preservation of "Art", I preferred the old scripters. 

That's a good translation. Blame the original writer, or ask them to pick better stories. 

But, that doesn't really make sense. A joke that may be very funny in Italian may not make any sense to an English speaking American audience. I know that American artists have changes to their scripts when their stories are published in Europe, why not the other way around?

Not all of us want to read these recent "fresh and modern" takes from IDW. You may want to buy extra copies to make up for the rest of us.

[The KKM]

Are American artists even consulted about it?

Scrooge MacDuck's the one talking sense, here. Yes, these new translations are too literal, stilted, and most importantly, "simple english"-y out of corporate mandates to appeal to toddlers. But, much as Torcivia hates that we keep bringing it up especially since it relates to another corporate decision, the previous attitude at its extreme brings us things like "Captain Retro-Duck", which is also just as condescending of children (kids can't know what a walkie-talkie is!!) and also alters the intent of the story without the input of the author.

Be angry all you want at the new stuff, I certainly am, although from a different angle since from where I'm sitting it's just one symptom of a wider corporate takeover, but I'm not happy seeing the response devolve into the heightened praise for localisations that honestly just feel really, really, really utterly "Americans can't handle foreign things" to me and always have- "we can't read this Mickey comic unless there's ten jokes added per page, five of them relating to the Disney Afternoon cartoons", regardless of how it actually fits (a good example, Torcivia's joke about the Phantom Blot being caught because he was transfixed looking at victorian blots. Worked great when he came up with it at age 5 or so, and added it to a drawing he made, showing the Blot transfixed. Doesn't work great when it's awkwardly shoved into a word balloon about a visibly angry Blot, where the art very obviously betrays THIS WASN'T HERE THIS WASN'T INTENDED AHOOGA AHOOGA".)

[jumbojr]

Oct 22, 2018 19:45:01 GMT rodsterrific said:

Oct 22, 2018 15:58:26 GMT jumbojr said:

That's a good translation. Blame the original writer, or ask them to pick better stories. 

But, that doesn't really make sense. A joke that may be very funny in Italian may not make any sense to an English speaking American audience. I know that American artists have changes to their scripts when their stories are published in Europe, why not the other way around?

Not all of us want to read these recent "fresh and modern" takes from IDW. You may want to buy extra copies to make up for the rest of us.

That's ok. And obviously not all of us appreciate unnecessary changes to the original dialogues.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Oct 22, 2018 20:22:05 GMT The KKM said:

Are American artists even consulted about it?

Nope (usually). In fact, Don Rosa has been known to be quite distressed by it, especially as there were a few changes that very heavily altered the meaning of scenes in his stories. 

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Oct 22, 2018 20:24:04 GMT jumbojr said:

That's ok. And obviously not all of us appreciate unnecessary changes to the original dialogues.

Again, Jumbo, the problem here is that some of the changes in the Core Four localizations were probably "unnecessary". Some people like them, some people don't. But you're the only one here, I think, who doesn't admit that the Fresh And New translations lack many necessary changes in just basic wording.

Let me give you a practical example of what's going with Ms Brady. No one has ever argued that Around the World in 80 Days is not a fair translation of the title of Jules Verne's Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours. If the English publishers had called it, say, The Amazing Adventures of Phileas Fogg because they thought it'd sell better, you'd have a point, but Around the World in 80 Days is fine. However, a literal word-for-word translation would have been The Tour of the World in the Span of 80 Days, which is just obviously terrible. You may not want The Amazing Adventures of Phileas Fogg (e.g. Core Four localization), but I cannot conceive why you would think that The Tour of the World in the Span of 80 Days is acceptable. 

[The KKM]

There you go.

I know the argument Debbie put forwards of "but this is entertainment, not art", and so any change is acceptable if it makes it more entertaining.

I really hate this argument, but I can swallow it when it comes to the floppies, meant to be sold in stores for kids, etc etc. Sure, whatever. Rewrite the stories entirely, add 10 kung-fu jokes per page and Scrooge singing Ducktales whoo-hoo.

But the Fantagraphics stuff, or the Dark Horse stuff? The hard-covers clearly intended for an older audience, where the appeal IS artistic since the whole point is exploring authors' repertoires rather than "here's another Donald Duck story"?

I'm not gonna judge whether the "dialoguers" have done a good job since I haven't read it, but I DO hope they were more respectful of the material than previous times' attitudes of "I'm here to improve on this crap stuff" that were often displayed. Even if it IS crap stuff. It deserves to be crap on its own.

To be clear, though. For the floppies, I'd rather have the dialoguing over bland simple english. I'd cheer if the Gerstein team returned to IDW. But I'd cheer even more if they returned AND were less heavy-handed in adding LOL SO MUCH HUMOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HERE'S ANOTHER BARKS REFERENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to it.

EDIT: In fact, hey, Disney Executive WAKers! If you're reading this, instead of finding other cheap ways to exploit this IP worldwide that's older than you but you just discovered because there's a new cartoon out, if you're bored from WAKing things over at Disney Italy and raising the price of licenses so nearly-century-old publication countries get canned and decided to check here, consider this- switch the teams! Get the current IDW people doing the hardcovers, and let them use more elaborate words, since the audience isn't kids- and bring back the other guys into here, and if anything, tell them to add MORE jokes to appeal to the kids since that's clearly what you want! Just have Scrooge McDuck playing Fowlnite and doing the Floss!

EDIT EDIT: I'm sorry if this post seems oddly harsh out of nowhere, but I've been seeing how the worldwide state of these comics has been going for a while, and I've no love left to even pretend to have any care or respect for Disney, here, which by extension also gets me in a mood where I've not much care left for the attitudes some of the IDW team showed in the past to the material they were "dialoguing". I'd much rather see them make new comics, than the "well we were saddled with this crap but at least I improved this crap because I added more jokes to it regardless of whether it actually gels in context". You guys are complaining "To be lucky just avoid bad luck" takes you out of the experience? Every single joke IDW added where the pacing and posing of the art made it clear it wasn't there initially did the same to me, "entertainment" be damned. And hey, if it's open season on repeatedly crapping on the current IDW team, I'm not going to save myself regarding the previous one either.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: In case anyone's wondering what on earth I'm going on about, and before I cool myself enough to decide it's probably best to move this discussion to a new thread, in the past couple of years:

New Ducktales comes out. It alters the comics significantly despite promising to be more like the comics. While some of it seems to spark from the team genuinely not getting the material (like new Gyro), some of it is clearly corporate mandates, like the focus on the nephews and, I'm willing to bet, the repeated stunt casting.
Writers/artists start complaining, in Italy, that editorial's getting more heavy handed. Artibani complains Disney didn't let him do a Della Duck story, while Ducktales got to do so.
Disney Italy has to clean up their stories for selling to kids, such as Casey losing his cigar.
We stop seeing any new art, even on covers, from IDW. Despite being written in the US, the new Ducktales comic is drawn by Italy. Covers are all drawn in Italy. Very openly, a cover has to be redrawn outright from Jon Gray's work to an Italian artist's.
Abril Control-Jornal, the publisher that'd spent the last near 70 years publishing Disney Comics and producing new stories in Brazil, loses the license. No new licensee yet.
I'm told by the staff of Portuguese publications that they're forced to license everything from Italy by Disney Iberia, or however they called the local Disney branch. This is noticeable when even Brazillian or American stories are finally reprinted here but come with Italian colours and new scripts.
IDW's Disney team is gone and replaced by a new team, mandated to use simpler wording to be able to appeal to kids. Additionally, the art in the comics is no longer even touched up to fit tradition in the region- everything gets Italian colours now, hence Grandma Duck with bright yellow hair.
Disney keeps pushing Ducktales as a big hit, multiple new seasons, merchandise, the works.
The editor of Topolino is fired. No reason is given, other than vague notions of "difficulties".

Call me tinfoil-hat-wearing, but this all spells to me "Disney saw $$$$$ on Ducktales, through Ducktales saw $$$$$ on the worldwide Disney comics that only got to thrive exactly because Disney rarely touched them, is forcing a new worldwide hierarchy where everything has to be done like Italy, and Italy has to be done like Disney orders". And I'm going to guess we're going to see a lot go wrong in the near future. Keep in mind through it all, it's not the fault of the "fresh and modern" team at IDW. It's the Disney suits.