Since my early years as a translator, I’ve been working on concurrent projects. It’s normal for me as a full-time translator: I don’t work on one project at a time, and some days are devoted to other concurrent projects. Didn’t find anything about it on initial research. Didn’t translate a military command: “Hupp, two, hey!”.

Today I translated 28 pages, typed 15,745 valid keystrokes. (I’ll get back to this interview in future entries.) I keep thinking about the interview in which BWS says he does not like to draw. Snowflakes get heavier and more pervasive over eight pages, contrasting with the (many) speech balloons. BWS depicts one of these talks, the longest one – two characters talking from page 114 to 121 – during a slowly intensifying blizzard. Long, intersecting, cut-up dialogues, people talking over one another. But I’m betting they are all drawn on the actual page…įrom the car chase scene we jump to some quiet scenes and then intense conversation. I hope I have this information on digital-or-drawn by then. I’ll make most of the decisions regarding sound effects during the second draft stage. Screams, for instance, are “EEEEE”, which a Brazilian reader reads as “EHHHH” or the “e” in “error” so it “sounds” better if it’s translated as “AHHHH” or some equivalent. But then, some of those are incomprehensible for the Brazilian reader. It’s always better to let onomatopoeia be as it is, because many artists – and BWS is surely one of them – layout their page using this special text as a composition element. There are technical issues involved: I still don’t know if these effects were applied digitally to the comics page and, if so, can be easily edited or if they were drawn along with the rest of the page, which will be a severe hindrance to the translation letterer. A lot of floating sound effects (we use the term “onomatopoeia” in Brazil) and the often hard translator’s decisions about which of these effects I should translate, which of these I can translate, and which of these I should leave as is. I started on a high-speed car chase scene – military jeeps, actually – with machine gun fire roaring. Maybe I’ll also go back to that first week on it.Īs I was saying, today I’ve started on page 93 and went up to 121. I’ll talk about all of them over the course of this journal. It’s a 370-page graphic novel, dialogue-thick, and it’s got some other intricacies. It’s still early in the process, since it’s a (pardon the pun) monstruous book. Yesterday I got the green light from TOLEDO to start on this diary.Īctually, I started this translation last week. This is my first journaling day for this translation project: Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monsters 1, which I’m translating into the Portuguese for the Brazilian publisher Todavia.

Monstros barry windsor smith