Sunday, July 21, 2013

"Confie mas confira, como dizia meu pai." Private Eye em Português

Continued from yesterday...

When I began studying Portuguese last year I made an effort to seek out comic books printed in Portuguese which might help me... but the internet failed to turn up many leads. To my immense pleasure, Brian K. Vaughan & Marcos Martin's Private Eye is sold in a variety of languages - even the ever-elusive Portuguese!

Of all the languages I would choose to learn, it had to be one seldom used in North America, sim? Print resources on Portuguese are lacking, especially in the European dialect I'm trying to favour. Although the internet has been very useful to me, very few online comic books offer Portuguese translations - and those Portuguese comics I have located were series I'd never heard of before (they probably originated in Brazil).

Having seen how Private Eye manages their translations, one wonders why every major publisher doesn't offer multiple language versions of their work? Surely the big companies are better able to afford these services than a little creator-owned digital book with a "pay what you like" donation box? As seen above, the finished project doesn't go to the trouble of translating advertisements, book covers and other English-language background details - it's just a matter of finding a decent translator for the dialogue balloons.

Best of all, thanks to the DRM-free nature of Private Eye I can read the English and Portuguese versions at the same time on my computer, running samples side-by-side. I'm certain to be back for more of Vaughan & Martin's series... if only to aid my pitifully poor vocabulário.

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