Go, Read: Twin Obituaries For Longtime Tintin Translator Michael Turner



Michael Turner, a member of the longtime translation team for the English-language versions of the Tintin series, died in early July at age 80. There are two fine obituaries for Turner at Bear Alley and at the Telegraph that would fairly dwarf anything I could put together independently of the information featured there. If you have the time and even half the inclination I encourage you to read one of them.

It's a great story. If I have it correctly, he and partner-in-translation Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper were junior employees at Methuen who offered their services for free in order to get Tintin into English through a proper book publisher as opposed to abortive attempts to push the feature through youth-oriented comics magazine. Getting the first couple of works into print allowed for a gushing review of the kind that used to occasionally change popular arts history. What's even more fascinating is the leeway they were given to make the subsequent translation friendlier to the British cultural experience, while at the same time there were hard and fast rules around certain phrases. Anyway, text translation is a severely undervalued skill when it comes to comics, and Turner was clearly one of the more important players in that sub-field in comics history.
 
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