Posts

Publishing moving at the pace it does, it’s been a while since I’ve last had a new release to announce. I am thus very happy to tell that the French translation of Evan Winter’s The rage of dragons, first fantasy book in the Rivages/Imaginaire imprint, was published yesterday. And I’m all the happier since it’s a novel I’ve loved translating. First book in what is going to be a fantasy tetralogy, The rage of dragons takes place in an Africa-inspired world (Winter grew up in Zambia, where his Xhosa ancestors lived). It tells the life of Tau, a young fighter apprentice of the Omehi, a people embroiled in a perpetual war against their Hedeni neighbours, whose land they invaded nearly two centuries before. ...

As I promised in my previous post, here is my new website, new and shiny, spick and span. Beware, the paint is still wet in places. There are no major content addition compared to the previous version, but this one I built entirely with my own two hands (along with hugo, a static site generator, and PaperMod, a hugo theme). Why take all this time to learn these tools and update my website by myself? Because I find it very fun, first. Also because I found wordpress utterly clunky. Finally, and above all, because it stems from the idea of technological reappropriation, which I find myself giving more and more importance to (I talked about it here). In short, I really like tending to my own plot of virtual garden. ...

It’s been a while since I’ve last written on this website. It should be over shortly! Very soon (read: before 2026), I should normally have a brand new website, made with my own two hands. It shouldn’t be much longer. Meanwhile, and because you never have enough projects at the same time, I’ve decided to take part in the Bradbury challenge organized by Nouvelles corail: writing one short story per week for a whole year (so fifty-two of those). The aim: to write more. ...

This is the question I always get when I say I’m a translator. Sometimes, those asking are implying “Is it good? Do you use it?”; at other times, it rather means “Unemployed already?” But it’s a legitimate question! I’m quite a technophile (I mean, I’ve had a custom keyboard made!); why, as a translator, shouldn’t I use yet another translation tool? For many reasons (and because I have the option not to; not everybody can, I’ll come back to it). Before I list them, I need to make something clear: I say “AI” (=artificial intelligence) because it’s the word used most frequently these days to designate the large language models (generative artificial intelligence tools, the most famous of which is OpenAI’s ChatGPT) and, to a lesser extent, neural machine translation (like DeepL). These are the “tools” I oppose. I have nothing against AI when it decodes the human genome, when it detects upcoming natural disasters, or when it makes me think I’m very clever in video games. I’m no technophobe, and I have a precise target in mind when I talk about AI. This point being settled, here’s why I’m against AI in translation. ...

A few weeks back, I told you about social networks and how I wanted to get rid of them so that my self-promotion wouldn’t rely on the whims of a few company heads. In the same spirit of, say, de-google-ification writ large, I thought I would try to extend this idea to the rest of the tools I use everyday. In this short post, I’ll take stock and look at what I used before, and what I use now. ...

As a freelancer at the beginning of their career, you always sort of have to do self-promotion, to make sure you’re visible, etc. Social networks seem to be a good tool for that. For instance, among all the scribblers and ink slingers I am now a part of, a microblogging network such as X (formerly Twitter) has long felt unavoidable. But as every other tool, it is not neutral, and its recent evolution is extremely alarming. Indeed, early this week, on January 20, the inauguration of Donald Trump happened, and the 47th President of the United States brought to the government far-right billionaire Elon Musk (who supports the AfD in Germany and does nazi salutes to “throw his heart to the crowd”). That’s why the HelloQuitX initiative, launched by members of the CNRS, has picked this very day to incite everyone to leave X, which Musk acquired in 2022. Now he’s part of the United States government, the billionaire answers even less to their justice department, and can freely manipulate the network’s algorithm to suit his sordid political ends. Indeed, under the guise of “freedom of speech”, X has been flooded by extreme speech and fake accounts that make it more or less unusable. Besides, for some people, remaining on X also means refusing to oppose Musk’s fascist turn. That is the reason why many famous media outlets decided to quit it. Quitting X, then. Why not? But to go where? ...

My third year as a translator is (already!) coming to an end, and it was rife with interesting projects and promising prospects. In no particular order: ...

Today, I’d like to say a few words about a translation I’m quite proud of, because it’s my small contribution to the bountiful world of indie role-playing games (RPGs). But before telling you all about it, a quick word about context. If you’re roughly my age (almost forty, God how time flies), you probably remember a time when this hobby was reviled and the object of media scares that were as justified as they were rational (i.e. not at all). But today, geek culture has become cool (and is a huge market) and thus playing role-playing games, which you could describe as telling more or less structured collaborative stories around a table (or over the internet), is no longer taboo. Spearheading this new-found popularity is a household name owned by financial mammoth Hasbro, Dungeons & Dragons, which has become synonymous with role-playing games for many (thanks to that Stranger Things episode amongst other things). Stranger Things, season 1, episode 1. Aren’t nerds cool? ...

While you wait for juicier posts, I tell you as much as I can on about what I’ve been up to for the past months: I’ve translated my first comic book! Book 3 of Jordan Mechner and Mario Alberti’s Monte Cristo trilogy. It was very interesting to work on it because of the visual context and space constraints it entails, both of which reminded me of my daily video games localization jobs. ...

As a translator, I will usually say that I see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist. And if something defines a good craftsman, it’s using the right tools. But what are the tools of the translator? Let’s think: Word-processing software Dictionaries (monolingual, bilingual, technical, synonyms, slang, swear words, onomatopoeia… ALL the dictionaries) Spellchecking software Reference books (glossaries, manuals, etc.) An online encyclopedia CAT tools? Generative artificial intelligence (Why not? Read this.) I already have all this and use it regularly. Is that everything, though? No! I’m forgetting the most fundamental of them all, and eagle-eyed readers who appreciate my subtle talent for image editing have already guessed what it is: the keyboard. (Because I’m indeed not translating with a pen, finding it dangerously deprived of any backup function.) The keyboard, then. But not just any keyboard. ...