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Step one of 120
Jun. 22nd, 2009 02:12 amI ran into ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
metahacker at a party on Saturday. He mentioned that it's a good idea to do something.. shit, I'm going to get this wrong -- fun and concrete? I'd better ask him to clarify it -- while I'm between jobs. This way I'd have something specific I could point to as output during this time.
I got the idea to translate something from French into English.lightcastle mentioned that it's always a much better idea to translate from the language you are learning and into the language you know better, since you'll miss a lot doing it the other way around. I chose something I'd wanted to show other anglophones, something that could be popular in English if I could make it available.
Graphic novels are huge in France. They get published in hardcover and make lots of money. They catch my eye and my dough in ways that American comic books never have. The art is fresh, the stories are in a variety of genres and the chance to improve my pedestrian French is immense. The fan translations of Japanese manga have become immensely popular in America and Europe, and I haven't found a reason the French equivalent (complete with nudity and violence) couldn't be popular as well.
One in particular that I've wanted to show people is 120 Station Street, a bédé (a word made from the pronunciation of the initials B.D., bande desinée, the term for comic strip) by one of my favorite artists, Tardi. Tardi's renderings are the only ones ever authorized by crime novelist Leo Malet, author of the Nestor Burma series. Tardi is known for his hang-up with Paris in the time from the Belle Epoque to the mid-1950s, although occasionally he will draw modern material.
I did a test run when I got home. I grabbed a new spiral notebook and a pen, since I wanted to be able to translate while I'm on the subway or in coffee shops. Then I started translating as many pages as I could before bed.
After an hour, I had only progressed a couple pages. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I could no longer skip sections that I had inferred from the art. I had to look up lots of words that I already knew separately but made no sense in context. "L'avant-veille", for example, is the day before yesterday. While 'avant' is before, 'la veille' is a night watch or an all-nighter, coming from a Latin word for insomnia. I had to think out some extra meanings and really poke at some sentence structure.
Nevertheless, that hour flew by. I was working hard and getting a far better understanding of the story than I'd had before. I have a better idea of the scope of my work, but I also have an even stronger desire to do the work. I can't wait to get the smaller details I had missed in my previous attempts to read this. I can't wait to learn more vocabulary. I can't wait to feel the ending hit me harder now that the story has more meat.
I paid $23 Canadian for this book when I bought it in Montreal back in 1999. Add taxes and the sad rate for the Loonie at the time and I paid $16 American. Had I bought it at the foreign-language bookstore in Harvard Square, it would've been $42. I didn't just get a bargain then -- I got an infection.
metahacker at a party on Saturday. He mentioned that it's a good idea to do something.. shit, I'm going to get this wrong -- fun and concrete? I'd better ask him to clarify it -- while I'm between jobs. This way I'd have something specific I could point to as output during this time.I got the idea to translate something from French into English.
lightcastle mentioned that it's always a much better idea to translate from the language you are learning and into the language you know better, since you'll miss a lot doing it the other way around. I chose something I'd wanted to show other anglophones, something that could be popular in English if I could make it available.Graphic novels are huge in France. They get published in hardcover and make lots of money. They catch my eye and my dough in ways that American comic books never have. The art is fresh, the stories are in a variety of genres and the chance to improve my pedestrian French is immense. The fan translations of Japanese manga have become immensely popular in America and Europe, and I haven't found a reason the French equivalent (complete with nudity and violence) couldn't be popular as well.
One in particular that I've wanted to show people is 120 Station Street, a bédé (a word made from the pronunciation of the initials B.D., bande desinée, the term for comic strip) by one of my favorite artists, Tardi. Tardi's renderings are the only ones ever authorized by crime novelist Leo Malet, author of the Nestor Burma series. Tardi is known for his hang-up with Paris in the time from the Belle Epoque to the mid-1950s, although occasionally he will draw modern material.
I did a test run when I got home. I grabbed a new spiral notebook and a pen, since I wanted to be able to translate while I'm on the subway or in coffee shops. Then I started translating as many pages as I could before bed.
After an hour, I had only progressed a couple pages. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I could no longer skip sections that I had inferred from the art. I had to look up lots of words that I already knew separately but made no sense in context. "L'avant-veille", for example, is the day before yesterday. While 'avant' is before, 'la veille' is a night watch or an all-nighter, coming from a Latin word for insomnia. I had to think out some extra meanings and really poke at some sentence structure.
Nevertheless, that hour flew by. I was working hard and getting a far better understanding of the story than I'd had before. I have a better idea of the scope of my work, but I also have an even stronger desire to do the work. I can't wait to get the smaller details I had missed in my previous attempts to read this. I can't wait to learn more vocabulary. I can't wait to feel the ending hit me harder now that the story has more meat.
I paid $23 Canadian for this book when I bought it in Montreal back in 1999. Add taxes and the sad rate for the Loonie at the time and I paid $16 American. Had I bought it at the foreign-language bookstore in Harvard Square, it would've been $42. I didn't just get a bargain then -- I got an infection.
