An Interview with Erin Brady

[Scrooge MacDuck]

If it's of interest to anyone, I have dug up an interview with the Bird-Bothered Hero of Translation herself, Erin Brady (who also has a Twitter account, albeit vacant, and an Instagram profile). 

Incidentally, her linkedin profile suggests she did translation work for Disney as early as 2013 — who knows on what.

[xanderares]

It's really interesting, thanks

[Deleted]

I guess that she may be the one who did the ComiXology translations, since they were released in 2013 too.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Dec 17, 2018 15:56:08 GMT @ringoduckfan said:

I guess that she may be the one who did the ComiXology translations, since they were released in 2013 too.

Me;

A ton of bricks;

BANG;

OOWWWWWW!!!

[Spectrus]

Dec 14, 2018 11:27:29 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

If it's of interest to anyone, I have dug up an interview with the Bird-Bothered Hero of Translation herself, Erin Brady (who also has a Twitter account, albeit vacant, and an Instagram profile). 

Incidentally, her linkedin profile suggests she did translation work for Disney as early as 2013 — who knows on what.

Interesting, but of course it's more about translating normal books and not about comics. Yet, it seems (as I can gather from comments like yours and others on here, as you know I haven't bought any of these issues!) the problem is that she doesn't seem to know the differences in approach between the two.

It's also telling that she's of British origin, which (as we know) has dropped off the Disney "map" years ago, so she likely won't be aware of the US localisation tradition and definitely won't write American slang/vernacular. As I said elsewhere, the latter might not be the worst thing, especially internationally speaking (though not being able to buy these issues outside the US does make it look a bit odd) - unfortunately there seem to be too many other problems with these new issues though.

Edit: Looking at her twitter profile and seeing that she's following twitter.com/IDWPublishing - the latter has thousands of followers and tweets a lot, but exactly how much is about their Disney releases? I have a nagging feeling the constant flopping of Disney comics in the US may also be down to awful/lacking advertising, and not so much due to the translators!

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Dec 18, 2018 21:11:48 GMT Spectrus said:

and definitely won't write American slang/vernacular.

Why so? I mean obviously she isn't doing it, but if an American writer can give Scrooge Scottish speech patterns and slang, why couldn't a Briton set out to, and succeed in, making her Donald or Goofy sound American?

Indeed, we've seen this very thing happened. The great Sarah Jolley's Duck comics absolutely sound like the characters involved as Americans have always known them — and yet Jolley is a woman whose public email adress is literally “[e-mail]”. 

I approve of the general spirit of steelmanning and its milder cousin of making excuse for people. But as excuses for incompetence goes, there is great empirical evidence that "I'm British" is no reason to have as little idea how to write Americans as Brady seems to have.