Tintin Forums

Hi
Does anyone have a French copy of Red Rackham's Treasure as, in the English version, on page 23, first frame, Haddock mentions Westminister Abbey. This is in London, so does the French version name a differant cathedral or church?

As far as I remember, it's: 'la basilique de St-Pierre, à Rome'.

Well, in the Turkish translation, based on 1989, Casterman, English I suppose, it reads cathedral of St. Pierre, Roma.

Give me a break, are the British publishers so up themselves that everything had to be British?

From a modern perspective, I agree it seems surprising that a British publisher would feel its young readers were so parochial that they'd be fazed by a reference to St Peter's in Rome and need it to be changed to a familiar London church. Similarly, the whole decision to Anglicise the locations of Tintin's home, with that Marlinshire, England address in The Secret of the Unicorn, seems oddly little-Englandish from today's perspective. These days, children's books being translated into English by UK publishers always seem to maintain the foreign locations and character nationalities of the original books, and quite rightly so. And if the Tintin books were being translated into English for the first time today, I'm sure that would be the case with them too.

However, you have to remember that Methuen were first publishing these books in the late 1950s, attempting to launch them into a market where many adults (parents, teachers, librarians, etc) regarded all comics as worthless pulp, and where many comic-loving children would have found the idea of a Belgian hero unfamiliar. Whilst it's quite possible that Methuen were underestimating children even back then and that maintaining more of the Belgian flavour might have gone down fine, the translators were doing everything they could to maximise the chances of what was seen as a risky venture. (Previous attempts to launch the books in English by the Belgian publisher Casterman had failed.)

Maybe not all the Anglicisations were necessary, but I think the general policy of the translators, Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner, of prioritising a natural-sounding English text over a strict word-for-word translation was a big factor in the books' success in the UK. You only have to read some of the recent Blake and Mortimer English translations, or some of Michael Farr's translations of Phillipe Goddin's books about Hergé, to see how clunky a word-for word translation of French syntax can be.

In any case, Hergé apparently wholeheartedly approved of the English translators' approach.

In this particular instance, I guess that the translators felt that having Haddock saying "according to your calculations we're now standing inside Westminster Abbey" better maintained Hergé's intention of an understated and instantly gettable gag than a more faithful translation would have done, in that Westminster Abbey would be as instantly familiar and obvious to most British kids as St Peter's would be to most Catholic Belgian or French kids.

Not to mention the simple hostility of English Protestants towards the Church of Rome - my own mother being a good example!
Also, I believe that the American publishers did the same thing, relocation the church to New York.

That's a bit of a leap there – and an unwarranted and erronious generalization based on a single source!
There's nothing to say that MT&LL-C, Methuen or anybody else held any such a repugnant view in regard to the translation - a truly virulent anti-Catholic, one driven to remove a reference to St. Peter's on sectarian grounds, would have found it hard to work on a comic from a Catholic source, surely?
There's nothing to say what the translator's religious beliefs are (if any); in fact, as the home of the works of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, Methuen has a history of publishing Catholic writing, so it is unlikely to have been at the behest of the company.
I think Balthazar hit the nail on the head with the fact that the joke requires an obvious, parochial quality, familiar to readers.
Another factor may be the arithmetic which LL-C carried out as an important part of the translation: you chose words carefully, based on the number of characters in the French, so that the text in English would fill the same space. It could be no more than a question of letter count.

It's good they don't these days. I don't see why British children wouldn't be familiar with the most famous church in the world.
Also, they're not just the translators for England, it's for the English speaking world, like here who would be more familiar with the original locations and don't want Tintin decipted as British. The fact that they keep the originals now is a step in the right direction. Hopefully the next "Secret of the Unicorn" edition will not have the Union Jack (urgh) on the ship.

It’s not saying that, necessarily: Hergé chose a church which his mainly Catholic, Belgian readers would be most aware of; using Westminster Abbey fulfills the same brief.


That’s what they became, but rest assured, they were originally being done in Britain, for a British audience, not for a pan-global release – having failed to take off in English once before, there was no guarantee of them even lasting in Britain. That these translations were later used in this way isn’t relevant, really, to Hergé and MT&LL-C. Other local publishers could have changed them if they had felt there was a problem (which presumably they didn’t in the Australian and New Zealand markets), and for other languages the local companies also undertook changes to the text, to give them local colour.


Printing issues apart, which have given several variations of flags, the text would have to be altered throughout the series to re-locate them to make much of a dent in the “Britishness”, or more specifically, “Englishness” of the translation (and speaking as a non-English person, this has never ever bothered me).

Bearing in mind that Hergé approved of the changes, and arranged for the art to be altered, while I can see some reason for doing it, I’d think it would be a shame to lose the “authorized version” of the current books.

Also this is veering off-topic, as the question posed has a definite answer, and we are getting into supposition and issues which have been discussed at length elsewhere before.

Granted, I'm an Australian but I'm much more familiar with Westminster Abbey than St Peter's in Rome. I think the English translators did an excellent job in general and because they had Herge's blessing, they're very true to the spirit of the books and what he intended.