In Asterix: La Grande Traversée (translated into English as Asterix and the Great Crossing), language and mutual incomprehension play a central comedic role. During their accidental voyage across the Atlantic, Asterix and Obelix encounter a group of Vikings or proto-Scandinavians. This presents a challenge: how do you depict foreign languages in a visual medium like a comic?
Goscinny and Uderzo often used typography to tackle this problem. Goths speak with a Gothic font, Greeks with a Greek font and Egyptians with hieroglyphs. How about Norwegians, Swedes and Danes?
Scandinavian Speech
The album starts brilliantly with a page that is a good as white, but just a few speech bubbles. You immediately know that this scene takes place some place where it is foggy.
In the original French edition, but also the English and many other translations, the Scandinavian characters speak in a way that is typographically distinct. Their speech is filled with extra diacritics—accent marks like umlauts (¨), rings (˚), and slashes (ø)—evoking the visual impression of Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian. This is not an accurate representation of any one language, but rather a visual shorthand meant to signal to readers that these characters are speaking a foreign, northern tongue.
Translation Challenges in Norwegian
When the comic was translated into Norwegian, this visual joke no longer worked. Norwegian readers are already familiar with their own language and its diacritics, so the original visual gimmick would not register as “foreign” or confusing. The translator had to find another way to preserve the humor of incomprehension.
The solution was ingenious: instead of using diacritics, the speech of the Vikings is rendered in a font resembling Norse runes.
The change also preserves the comic’s internal logic. While the Gauls still struggle to understand their Viking hosts, the dogs—like Idéfix (Dogmatix)—seem to communicate effortlessly, implying that animal language transcends national borders. One of the more whimsical details in The Great Crossing is that, although the human characters are mired in linguistic confusion, the dogs have no such problem. In the scene where a large Viking dog and Idéfix meet, they instantly understand each other.
Swedish
In the Swedish albums the Vikings (Normans) don’t speak with a rune type script in their speech bubbles. In my opinion this makes the Norwegian albums a little bit funnier.
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