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Comic book translation "The Green Man"

Project Image: Green Man

A new and extremely pleasant challenge was the translation of a very unusual comic book, which has a brilliant, gripping storyline and consists of cleverly and artistically produced photographs of Playmobil toys in either real landscapes or imaginatively created settings: THE GREEN MAN.

It was lovely to work with the author, Nick Foulger, who not only wrote the story but also designed every single detail of each picture before he photographed it. And it was a lot of fun to witness how gradually the draft pictures of the book, which I needed for my translation, were skilfully transformed by the author to be used as the final pictures in The Green Man comic book. Prior to this project I had absolutely no idea how much work is involved just to get the shadow right that one of the little Playmobil toys cast in a realistic landscape setting! This kind of picture design is really creative work that requires a good eye for detail and a lot of skill and patience on the part of the author.

If you have a book that you would like to be translated or proofread then please get in touch.

One of our mutual challenges was that I had to come up with a good translation in as few words as possible since this translation had to fit into the speech bubbles. And the author then had to accommodate the bigger German speech bubbles into his pictures. Everyone knows that where the German language requires a whole sentence the English language is brilliantly suited to say a lot with only a few words or even a single word. One example for this “speech bubble stretching” is the following: In an extremely dangerous situation a Viking shouts to his mates “Run!” and all his fellow Vikings leave in panic. In order to express what was implied in the prompt “Run!” in German we needed “Bloß weg hier!” (which translated back into English would be: “Let’s get out of here – NOW”). But we managed one way or another and I am very glad that I had a chance to contribute with my translation to the German version of this lovely comic book THE GREEN MAN.

After the completion of the translation of THE GREEN MAN comic the author Nick Foulger made the following comment:

“Many thanks for all the enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to translating my comic book “The Green Man” into German. It was a great pleasure to work with you, and I know from the questions you asked and feedback you gave that you did a wonderful job in making the book as enjoyable to read in German as it is in English, and I’m looking forward to working with you again on the sequel.”

If you want to see this unique comic book in English click here: The Green Man or visit the author’s website that I also translated into German.