Friday, January 24, 2014

"Donaldus Faustus," version 2.0

So way back in the murky depths of the past (August 0f 2012--was it really that recently?), as you may or may not recall, I presented to the world my first effort at a fan translation of a comic story. Specifically, it was a translation of a Faust story, "Il Dottor Paperus." And for a while I was quite taken with my work, but time passed, I gained a bit more experience, and I came to realize what you all were too polite to tell me, which is that it was actually pretty darned shoddy work. Specifically, there were three big problems with it:

1. The font was really, really ugly-looking. I'm not saying that just because it's plain text; I think my other translations that use plain text look pretty much fine. But there's SOMETHING about the size and spacing here that just makes it look, to my current sensibilities, really unpleasant and not very readable.

2. The writing itself--actually, overall I don't think it was terrible, but there were more than a few parts that needed a bit of polish and others that were kind of egregiously overwritten. "ALL your scripts are overwritten," you say. Okay, but this, I think, is qualitatively different--I'm talking about things like this:


Yes, that certainly spells that out in laborious fashion.

3. Entirely too many of the pages had that hideous green'n'magenta color scheme around the edges that you get with badly-scanned images. I'm talking about things like this:


 Most of them weren't quite THAT egregious, but it still ain't right. Why did I think this kind of thing was GOOD enough? I can only assume that I was so impressed that I was capable of translating a story at ALL that quality-control issues went on the back burner.

So ANYWAY, as you've surely guessed by now, what this is leading up to is that I've made a top-to-bottom revised version, which is way the fuck better, and which you can download here. I used a proper font, did some rewriting (the majority of the script is the same, but there are a fair few alterations large and small--also, I slipped in a few extra Marlowe references), and rescanned most of the pages (when I first conceived of doing this, one of the attractions was that I already had all the text-less pages, and so wouldn't need to do any scanning/deleting text--so much for THAT). 

COMPARISON TIME:


 I think the new version really pops, don't you?

Anyway, perhaps you've already read my translation, but you'd still like to read a massively-improved version. Or perhaps you haven't, in which case it's high time to experience this story for the first time. It's not the first Bottaro story to appear in English, but it is the first to appear in good English. Recommended. AND HEY! I figured out how to ROTATE TEXT:


Okay, so granted, it only comes up that one time, but LOOK HOW GOOD IT LOOKS! OMG!

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