Tintin Forums

I hope this thread section is ok with the kindly Moderators for my post and question, as it seems maybe unnecessary to start a new thread for one question, unless i'm told otherwise.

I'm interested to know from my English edition Castafiore Emerald, on page.11 panel.6, where Bianca Castafiore says to Nestor in her bedroom at Marlinspike, "It's... er... Henry the Tenth, is it not?".
Then Nestor answers "Charles the First, Signora".

I'd love to know please if other Forum members could inform me, what do the various other translation editions say for this panel here, in the original French particularly, and in the Swedish, Dutch, German, or other language editions?

Is it just the English version that has an alternative translation and historical Royal's, compared to the original French, or do other translations have their own historical Royal context and reference to their own national King's?

I'm intrigued to know how this differs in the various translations and language editions, in reference to the King's mentioned in this panel.

Moderator Note: No, a new thread is what is wanted - if you look through the forums you’ll see how it works. When you have a question to ask, first port of call should be a forum search to see if there is already an answer; if you can’t find one, it’s better to start a new thread than to just divert a thread on a different topic.
That way, someone else doing a search will be able to find the subject that much more easily than if it’s buried within another topic.
The Tidy-minded Tintinologist Team

In the Spanish version, Castafiore asks, "It's Henry the Fifteenth, right?" Nestor answers that the picture is of Louis XIII. Louis XIII was king of France, so I assume that the Spanish version is true to the French. Since Henry X of England and Henry XV of France don't exist, Herge is showing Castafiore's lack of historical knowledge. :D The change to British royalty, then, makes the joke more easily caught by British readers.

Similarly, in the English version of Red Rackham's Treasure (p. 23, frame 1 in the Spanish), the translators changed the church from St. Peter's Basilica in Rome to Westminster Abbey. The Spanish version, however, remains true to the French. Any ideas why the English translators changed the French references and whether they are the only ones to have done so?

Linda UK
Yes, in the original French Castafiore does refer to Henry XV and Nestor corrects her by stating that it is actually Louis XIII.

In a similar way, in the original French edition of "Secret of the Unicorn", François de Hadoque serves Louis XIV of France, but in the English version he serves Charles II of England.


Some translators appear to think that local kids would not be interested in foreign monarchs and therefore need to identify with kings and queens that they would have heard of at school. The logic is that having references to foreign monarchs might affect sales.

Nice to know that Spanish translators put more credit in their readers than British ones.

Has the head not been picked off this scab often enough...?

With respect, I think you're missing the specific point of this bit of translation. Whilst the general tendency of the English translators to Anglicise Moulinsart's Belgian setting and Haddock's French naval ancestory was indeed done out of concern for making the books more accessible to UK readers when the books were first translated (and given the much-discussed difficulties of launching an unknown comic book series in Britain back then, it arguably made sense at the time even if it seems unnecessarily parochial now), in this particular case, surely the main reason for going with British monarchs is to make this specific joke work for UK readers.

Whilst I wouldn't have been fazed by or uninterested in a reference to French monarchs as a British child reading this Tintin book, there's no way that I (nor any average British child) would have realised that Henry XV of France wasn't an actual monarch, whereas many British kids would know that Henry X of England didn't exist and are thus able to enjoy the joke.

So in being less faithful to Hergé's historical reference, the English translators are surely being more faithful to Hergé's gag of having Castafiore not only guessing the wrong monarch in her attempt to seem knowledgable, but naming a non-existent monarch. I can't help feeling that this would have been Hergé's preferred priority, and an example of why he had such a high regard for (and friendship with) his English translators.

So I doubt it's a case of the Spanish translators putting more credit in their readers as you suggest. Unless all Spanish children have a full knowledge of French Kings and Queens (which frankly seems unlikely) they probably miss the joke altogether. It's possibly just a case of the Spanish translators feeling less inclined or less free to translate the spirit of the work as much as the literal content. Or maybe they missed the gag themselves.


You're right. Sorry for rising to the challenge! I just wanted to point out that this particular translation decision doesn't really belong in the general "Should-the-UK-translators have-Anglicised-Tintin?" argument, which as you say has probably been picked over often enough.

Balthazar

I agree with much of the points made regarding the reasons for English translations of the Kings names in Castafiore Emerald.

Although i certainly did not intend this thread, or my original question, to be a criticism of the English translations of the original French books, in fact far from it in this instance, i do not always think every translation was always ideal or in my opinion an asset to the English books.
But in this case i agree that the reference to these English Kings names (both real and fictitious) completely made the point of the joke and Castafiores ignorance clear to a younger English readership.

As a child if i'd read the original references to King's Henri and Louis, i may have assumed they were French, but would have completely missed the emphasis and point that King Henry XV didn't actually exist, where as i understood this clearly with the English "King Henry X".

My interest is how this is dealt with in other translated language editions, particularly in Northern Europe (Swedish, Dutch, German).
I may be wrong here but it seems to me that in some of the Southern European translations less changes were made, such as the Spanish and Portuguese, i'm less familiar with any Italian?

Certainly from the Spanish edition it does seem these translations often depend on the discretion of the translators, so therefore my answer to "The Kings" references in Castafiore Emerald really could vary completely or maybe not at all from country to country.

It would seem to me the very good reasons for changing this reference in translation in the English book for an English readership less familiar with French Kings, would equally apply to Kingdoms with their own Monarchs and historical contexts like Sweden, Norway, Holland, Germany, and Denmark.
Although having said that, this was not an issue for Spanish translators, who may have thought the "Henri and Louis" less unknown linguistically to a Spanish reader?

You're assuming it was an intentional move on their part - perhaps they just missed the joke?

They may have done, but to be fair to them, I suppose if they'd already remained faithfiul to Hergé's original backstory of Sir Francis being given the mansion by Louis XIV in their translation of The Secret of the Unicorn (unlike the English translators), then they may have felt that they had to be consistent in also using a French King's era to date the furniture in the mansion. (I think I'm right in recalling that Castafiore is attempting to date the four-poster bed, or possibly the whole building, by royal era, rather than attempting to identify a royal portrait as De Insula Nigra remembers it.) Referencing Spanish kings in the context of what had already been identified as a mansion bequeathed by French royalty situated in a French speaking country (if that's the case in the Spanish Unicorn translation) might have seemed too inconsistent.

They are Henrik XV and Ludvig XIII in Finnish editions. I'm pretty, pretty, pretty sure that young Finnish readers miss the gag. And adults as well. Too many countries, monarchs and way too many numbers to keep in mind. From our point of view it doesn't matter whether the kings were from France, England or Spain. Kings of Sweden we know better and Russian Zars. Nikolai IV and Aleksanteri II would do better. ;-)

That's interesting, Tuhatkauno. On first reading your post, I thought maybe Henrik and Ludwig were Finnish monarchs, and that the Finnish translators maybe had their own Finnish naval ancestory for Haddock and Finnish location for Marlinspike, but I see from googling that Ludwig is the Germanic version of Louis (and used when referring to King Louis in German), and is presumably written that way in Finnish too. Ditto Henrik for Henry.