Balthazar:
I honestly don't think it was worth the translators confusing readers like us just for the sake of maintaining the pretence that they were bringing out the English translations in chronological order.
While I see where you are coming from, I don't really agree. I see that fans of many stripes -
Doctor Who and
Trek for example - are now slaves to the notion of
chronology, it never seems to have mattered much to the creators of such franchises.
I think if asked, MT&LL-C wouldn't say that they were maintaining a pretence, as you put it; they were just dealing with the books in the order that they came to them, in a practical fashion, and allowing for the fact that each book they did might be the last.
They were also probably working to the notion (at the time) that
Soviets,
Congo and
Lotus wouldn't appear in English; add in that
Black Island in English existed only in a highly anachronistic state, art wise, as indeed did
Cigars, and the original chronology would have been virtually irrelevant.
I doubt many people realized, nor worried, that the books listed on the bill-board were not in the same list order as the French books.
In Primary One I read
Prisoners; I didn't find out it was the second part of a story until I finally read
Crystal Balls in Primary Six (
thanks, schools library service!).
The first time I even heard of the existence of
Soviets was in 1975, around the publicity for
Picaros; the first time I saw a list of the original release dates of the stories was in a French encyclopædia on holiday in 1985 (I've still got the info I copied out somewhere).
I still keep my books in English release order on the shelf (when they are in any order at all), because it is sort of wired into me.
I agree entirely that the series could now be re-vamped and made uniform, and why not, but it is as much to pull things like currency into order (all decimal) as to make the books follow the original story order, which largely isn't important.
I've a feeling that this won't reduce reader confusion, it will just introduce new questions for them (why is the art in
Broken Ear "so old", when it is "so modern" in
Black Island?, etc.).