Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Lucky you! Last Kiss is now available in German. Every Monday and Thursday, newly translated Last Kiss comics will appear at: http://wvh.barksbase.de/de/topics/lastkiss/
My thanks to Gerd Syllwasschy and Peter Kowalewski who had the crazy (in a good way) idea to run Last Kiss in German on their site. They along with Constanze Maier and Richard Meyer are doing the difficult work of translating my silly English dialog into no doubt even sillier (in a good way) German dialog.
Danke schön! Danke!
Yeah, thanks to those four. Danke schön. Der “Teaser” hier macht mich neugierig auf Eure Übersetzungen. Ich schaue gleich mal vorbei!
Krulle, despite my German last name, I don’t speak much German. But I’m guessing that you’re asking to see the English version of the teaser comic. That’s not currently online, but I’ll be posting it when Gerd and Peter post the full German version that episode.
(By the way, I only used a small portion of the comic panel for the teaser. There are two speakers in the full version of the comic.)
However, here’s a link to the English version of the first Last Kiss comic posted on the new German site: http://bit.ly/75ezcb
John,
its no problem, actually if you would understand my german, it would be obvious I was writing to the four germans who started translating your work into german. I just wrote that this “Teaser” you published makes me curious to see more of their work. I promised them to pass by and have a look (which I did yesterday).
For the rest, I’ll see what comes… 🙂
@Gerd: Das werde ich tun. (I shall do so!)
Or I shall propose a better translation.
But I like the freedom some translators use to adapt to the culture. I know some things where the translations are better than the original. “Ein Käfig voller Narren” is the second german translation of “Hogans Heroes”. It is much better than the first translation, and has some humour points the original does not have. i like the second german version of the series better than the original.
Thanks for clearing that up, Krulle. This is why I need translators. I don’t know enough German to know what I don’t know!
Ich beinvise vowzer nich!
So if you don’t speak German…then could it be that they are doing to your comic what you did to the original comics? Then maybe we can “translate” their German versions to Vietnamese…and then to Mandarin…and then Russian…etc…etc…and then back to English.
Married, anything is possible. But I’ve given Gerd, Peter, Constanze, and Richard permission to do whatever they want. I know they’re going to try to approximate what I’ve written in English. But I use a fair amount of word play and somethings just don’t translate.
My Disney stories are translated into a lot of different languages. (In fact, Gerd works as a translator for the German Disney licensee and just translated one of my Donald Duck stories recently.) I’ve learned to trust my translators for my Disney stories. And it seems like a good policy for my Last Kiss ones too.
I appreciate John–both as a writer and as a person–much too much than that I would dream of tinkering with his stuff. Of course we are rephrasing things and occasionally we may even give his gags a different twist. There are linguistic as well as cultural reasons to do so, and I feel John fully understands this. But our goal is always to keep in spirit with the original text.
And remember, we are doing this openly on the Internet, much better to follow than some printed magazine in Faroffstan. If we ever drift too far off the road, I expect John’s German-speaking readers (Krulle obviously being one of them) to holler out loudly.
I love this!
I was never really thinking anyone was pulling German wool over your eyes. I was just pointing out the slight irony that each picture has already had it’s words replaced once, it only makes sense to do it again and again. It really is fun to come up with new words for each picture. I can imagine it is fun and challenging to take these humorous thoughts into another language. Thanks for doing this Gerd and friends. If we can’t always spread the love around the world we can at least spread some fun.
In fact, I like your idea of translating Last Kiss back into English around seven or eight corners. Once John has the merry-go-round up and running, he’ll just have to lean back and count the money. Heh! Who says there’s no such thing as a perpetuum mobile?