Fantôme du Klondike

Indyfan!91

Indyfan!91

Member
Icybro said:
Mostly as an exercise, I spent the past couple weeks(!) translating Jérôme Jacobs' Indiana Jones Jr et le Fantôme du Klondike into English. It's not a professional job (I don't even speak French, for one thing; thankfully, those online translation tools are getting pretty good), but for the most part it turned out pretty readable.

If anybody wants to check it out, here's the link:

Young Indiana Jones and the Phantom of the Klondike

(Note that I'm only making this available because no English language version has ever been released, and even the French version is long out of print. If you download it and then Lucasfilm later decides to release an official translation, obviously you should go out and buy it. The translation will be a lot better, anyway.)

Fantôme du Klondike was the first original French-language novel in Hachette Livre's "Indiana Jones Jr" series. The story is notable in that it takes place immediately following the opening of Last Crusade, and brings together characters from that movie (namely, Herman), and characters from YIJC (Miss Seymour).
Click to expand...
I can download it for some reason
 
ProfessorSchneider

ProfessorSchneider

New member
In the original "Radioactive Ampoule" book Indiana Jones' father makes fun of him for his dog dying. That is kind of nuts to me, and it also is not with the wider story. He says the dog is alive in the TV show after this book. So I changed it to he is joking that he thought the dog was dead. Makes more character sense, fixes the error. Otherwise the story is the dad making fun of Indiana for using the dogs name as his own shortly after his mother and the dog have died.

I also changed the name, the English novels that were translated into French have different names too.

The other one is his mother's death date. The Indiana Jones journal has a funeral card from March 3rd. Historically that is better evidence than the May date listed in some places. I added a thing explaining why the date was confused.

Also the opening is the father trying to get Indiana Jones to eat Tripe (intestines). In the very previous story just a couple weeks before this, guy ties Indiana up and shoots his horse in front of him. Vultures eat the horse right in front of Indiana Jones. Vultures pull out the intestine.

That seemed relevant to include!

Nothing new added in, it just seemed like an opportunity to fix small canon errors. It seemed like something that would happen if the book was actually translated.

Unlike Star Wars lore, the issues with Indiana Jones lore are tiny and generally can be fixed with a few small clarifying statements. Anyone can use Google Translate and go to Archive.org and just read a straight translation. I have read all the surrounding material, adding some of it makes the book better to me.

For those interested in the Mother's death date, the Titanic book only says she was alive when the trip was booked. It does not say she is still alive.

He does not mention his mother at any other time in the book. Seems like he would think about her on his return home, etc. The Titanic book lends itself to the March 3rd death date.
 
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ProfessorSchneider

ProfessorSchneider

New member
There are so many variations of Star Wars lore, original Marvel Comic books retconned, Dark Horse Comics retconned. Video games retconned.

Indiana Jones lore is quite tight, only a few discrepancies that could be fixed in English translations of works that have never been translated. I’m a professor who is fairly French literate and I had many friends born 1900-1915.

The historical aspects of Indiana Jones made me think the canon should be resolved the way a historian would. Look at the record and explain using historical context.

For example there is a date problem with “Phantom of the Klondike. It says it’s in July when The standard is that The Last Crusade is in August. Easy. Russia was still on a different calendar system at that time. Add a footnote that some records say July but the actual date is August. The error has been attributed to a mistranslation of dates from the Russian calendar.

Soviet calendar - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org

Using language translation and weaving history in to fix errors is true to the franchise to me.

(With these translation and historical adjustments noted in the endnotes)
 
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