Nikos Kampouropoulos

We’d like to thank you for being with us today and for your time.

I thank you.

First of all, we’d like to know how translation came into your life.

It came up quite easily, I would say, because regarding comics there are always so many books about which you say, –if you have knowledge of and you’re into foreign languages– that I’d like to see what that looks like in another language, because it’s not just letters, it’s also the balloons and it’s also the picture around the balloons, so it’s a bit different from the translation of a book. So you say, I’d like to see how this looks in Greek and how, when you read it, it’s imprinted in your mind along with the picture. When I was given the opportunity to do my first comic book translation, even though it was a relatively difficult book, it was given to me easily, I grabbed the chance, and that’s how I started translating.

What was the first book?

It was Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which is considered one of the basic textbooks for someone who wants to go into comics whether professionally or as an amateur.

And what were the particularities of that book?

It had a lot of technical terminology related mainly to art, to painting, and some terminology related to cinema… but in general there were no particular problems in translating it. I’d say that, when you’re not from the comic book world or painting or art in general, some of the terms might not be totally accurate so we had to improve it a bit through editing.

Right. What would you say the term “translate” means to you in general?

For me, since comics are a little different from books, I think it means “I render better in my language what is combined with the image in the background”. That’s the ease of translation in comics, but that’s a pitfall at the same time. While we need to do a freer rendering, we need to be careful so that it matches to the rest of the image. I think “translate” in comics means “render better”, or rather “make what the reader sees more understandable”.

Do you have any kind of relationship or interaction with the writers of the texts you translate?

So far I’ve had the pleasure of having relatively good contact with them. I was in contact with Scott McCloud in particular –who is considered quite a distant figure, so to speak. When I needed some clarification on certain parts, it was quite easy to communicate with him. I haven’t had any problems with other writers I’ve worked with either.

Do you consider editing necessary?

100%. Especially when you sometimes realize that if there was no editing, it would be a text that somehow makes no sense simply because you’ve completely missed a sentence, a paragraph, a whole page sometimes. I believe this work cannot be done without proper editing.

So what’s your relationship with your editors?

Also very good, unless they ask me to change a lot of things. In that case, we might have a fight. Generally, I work with a particular editor on all the translations I do. She’s pretty good and we have great communication. She explains the corrections that are needed –where they are needed– and I can more easily understand what something really means. Sometimes, of course, it happens the other way round, she makes a correction and I have to explain that that doesn’t exactly fit there, because the meaning is a bit different and stuff like that. I imagine most editors work with the translators in this way.

And what’s a general picture you have about comics translation in Greece?

There are two categories of translators in Greece regarding comics. There are translators who collaborate with a publishing house on one project at a time, in which case we usually get great results, and then there are translators who work for a publishing house, who usually get too many books to translate and translations start to look like they’re all the same. One may translate two completely different kinds of books but you come to think you’re reading the exact same thing.

And, regarding comics specifically, what are the translation particularities of the genre?

What I said before, the rendering. You have to pay a lot of attention to what’s around the balloon. You have to pay attention to how the image flows, so that you can get the reader to keep looking further without getting stuck somewhere and having to go back, because in this case, the story doesn’t flow.

Do you remember a specific difficulty you encountered in a particular text?

Yes. The Sculptor had too many expressions of New York slang. So when you try to translate slang that doesn’t exist somewhere in writing, you can’t say, “Great, I’ll find the words and expressions of New York slang”. There was a little bit of an issue there, which, okay, was overcome by finding other texts or some films that had to do with New York and the New York art scene.

So how was that dealt with in translation?

With research, mainly. By looking for other texts that were related to the same subject.

I see. And a closing interview question. What advice would you give to someone who might want to get involved in comic book translation? What would you say to them?

They should start with more difficult books, so that translating comic books will seem like a piece of cake. It’s a great profession and a great category of translation, but you have to love it. It shouldn’t be done perfunctorily. If you do it with a true love for comics, then a very beautiful result can come out.

Thank you very much.

I thank you, too.