translation in the time of covid:

a collaborative project to translate a topical French comic strip

Comic panel from Fiamma Luzzati's third comic, published in Le Monde on 9 April 2020.

Over the last year, translation has had to do its fair share of adapting. Each country affected by the pandemic has developed new words and phrases which reflect both how its language behaves and the approach the government has taken to the crisis. In the UK, phrases such as ‘lockdown’ and ‘social distancing’ may have originated amongst the general population but have since become integral to the way the government has organised the UK’s pandemic response.

English is very flexible with the relationship between nouns and verbs. Simply by adding an -ing, speakers can turn an abstract concept such as ‘social distance’ into something far more active, almost a reminder to be vigilant. But what about languages which cannot chop and change the endings of its words so liberally? Exactly how easy is it to equate the various COVID phrases in different languages, and apply them in translation? These are questions the Queen’s Translation Exchange’s L’Avventura project has set out to discuss.

Fiamma Luzzati’s French comic strip L’Avventura has documented life during the COVID crisis in France and Italy from a number of perspectives. The comics themselves have been published in Le Monde as well as in the book Ressusciter n’est pas une mince affaire. We were therefore very excited to have been given permission to translate ten of these comic strips into English for the first time. Each comic covers characters in different social roles and with different stories to tell, all with the consistent goal of addressing social and scientific phenomena which have arisen during the pandemic. The project to translate Fiamma Luzzati’s work has become a space both for discussing literary translation more generally, but also for addressing and documenting the changes in the world of translation in recent times. A graduating modern linguist from Queen’s myself, I have been lucky enough to help coordinate the project, headed by Dr Holly Langstaff.

The focus of the project was, in many ways, discussion. Each comic was tackled by two teams of roughly six translators who met online to discuss the challenges of each translation and to produce an English version of their own. At the same time, project contributors wrote a weekly blog about the project, detailing their own impressions of the material and how they drew on their own experiences to translate it.

The virtual nature of the project meant that contributors were welcomed from near and far: alongside 40 students from the Oxford MML (Medieval and Modern Languages) Faculty, participants joined in from across Europe, as well as from Australia and the USA. For myself, it provided an excellent first step into maintaining contact with Queen’s and Oxford as an alumnus. This has been especially valuable after being away from the University for such a long time during my final year. In many ways, leaving university feels, at the moment, less like leaving university behind.

Sam Davis, Modern Languages (2016) 

The translation project was initiated by Dr Charlotte Ryland and Prof Seth Whidden, and is run by the Queen’s Translation Exchange.