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Kim Thompson On The Apocryphal "Eisner-Nominee Translations Story" And Its Underlying Truth
posted January 2, 2013

Diana Schutz (and now Tom) was lovely to spread the "Kim Thompson got Eisner nominations for books translated from three different languages" story, but she didn't realize that Jason no longer writes his original work in Norwegian but in French (and in any event that particular book, ISLE OF 100,000 GRAVES, was written by a French author)... so my score was actually a paltry two: French for Tardi and Jason, and Italian for Manara.

That said, I've gone over my plans and it looks like I'll be translating from seven languages in 2013. There was one year where I peaked at eight, but it's tough to line up all three Scandinavian languages (which are really just dialects of each other, particularly Norwegian which for the most part is just Danish spelled funny -- so I always feel like I'm cheating a little to count them as separate languages) in the same year.

I must credit my parents: If they'd wanted to breed a super race of comics translators, like Eric Bana raising Saoirse Ronan to be a ninja assassin in HANNA,
they couldn't have done any better. By the time I was in high school I'd been exposed to nearly all of those languages to one degree or another, having lived in
France, Denmark, Holland, and Germany, and I was speaking three of them (plus English) literally on a daily basis. (Sadly, the Thai from my year in Bangkok never