It is often said that Asterix and the Banquet is the most difficult album to translate. Asterix and Obelix travel around Gaul to win a bet they have made with the Romans. Their goal is to collect a local specialty from every town they visit. This already makes the album challenging for translators, as many readers are not familiar with French regional cuisine.

In some countries, this album was released much later, which added another complication: Dogmatix is introduced in this story. Readers in those countries were already familiar with him and were then “introduced” to him again for the first time in this album.

To demonstrate how difficult translating can be, take your copy of this album and turn to page 43.

36 Candles

In the final panels, we see that the menhir merchant comes up one menhir short. Presumably, Obelix delivers it in an unorthodox manner, and in the French album the merchant counts: “… 35, 36. Le compte y est !” Above his head, 36 candles swirl in a perfect visual match to the words.

Although the manner of delivery is funny in itself, the joke only fully lands if you know the French expression « voir trente-six chandelles », literally “to see 36 candles,” which means to be stunned or to see stars after a blow to the head. The panel neatly combines language and image: the merchant both counts to 36 and sees them.

To translate or not to translate?

The English translation cannot reproduce this expression, as English lacks an equivalent idiom. Instead, it takes a different approach and builds a new joke around English wordplay. The merchant complains that he is still three menhirs short and adds that he is “foreshortened,” a term that works both visually—he has literally been compressed by the impact—and linguistically, as a clever choice of wording rather than a neutral description. He then concludes that the whole affair is “not worth the candle,” an old English idiom meaning that something is not worth the effort. While the original reference to candles has been lost, the translators subtly reintroduce the concept through this expression.

Rather than translating the French joke directly, the English version compensates for the loss by piling up idioms and verbal tricks of its own. The humor no longer lies in a single visual metaphor but in the density of language, creating a different joke that acknowledges what cannot be translated while still delivering a satisfying comic effect.

The German and Dutch translations do not attempt such compensation. In those versions, the merchant simply counts to 36 and states that the number is now correct, leaving the visual of the swirling candles without an accompanying linguistic joke.