High school students translate France's best-selling children's comic into Breton.

ParisIt is difficult to find a child in France who does not know The Terrible AdeleThe comic created by Mr. Tan—a pseudonym for the Frenchman Antoine Dole—and illustrated by Miss Prickly and Diane Le Feyer is a publishing phenomenon, with more than 20 million books sold since 2012 in France. In Catalonia, more and more children are also following the life of this outspoken, rebellious heroine.

The Adèle comics have been available in Catalan for some years now, but until recently they had not been translated into another language spoken in France, Breton. The first two volumes of the comic are now available in this Celtic tongue thanks to the initiative of an editor, Arnaud Elégoët, and the work of 12- and 14-year-olds from a Diwan secondary school.The name given to the educational centers of the Breton language immersion network.

Fourth and sixth grade students (the equivalent of 6th grade primary school and 2nd grade secondary school in Catalonia) from the Jakez Riou Secondary School in Kemper, a city in Brittany, have been working for an entire term on translating the two volumes of the comic into Breton, a language spoken by just over 0,000 people. The translation was commissioned at the beginning of the year by the Brittany government. This has been carried out during Breton language classes and under the supervision of Breton teacher Marine Gloaguen.

Motivated students

"The vast majority of my students know The Terrible Adele, they've read it and they love it. They were very motivated by the project," explains Gloaguen in a conversation with the Creatures"I'm delighted with how everything went and very proud of them," she says. The translation had to be done in a short time, always in class and in small groups working page by page.

Her 12-year-old son, Erwen, is one of the students who participated in the project. "We had a great time. It was the first time I translated a book and it was a good experience," she says. The boy admits that "sometimes it wasn't easy," especially if the sentence couldn't be translated literally and you had to look up Breton expressions to find the same meaning as the French sentence.

In Breton, Adèle's name is Aelez, her cat Ajax is called Jaks, Geoffroy is Jafrez, Jennifer appears as Gwenivar and Jade is called Jadenn. "I find it strange to read the characters' names in Breton," says Erwen, who is used to reading the comics of The Terrible Adele in French.

Breton publishing house

He has read other comics, such as Tintin, in Breton. They are published by a small publishing house in Kemper, Bannoù-Heol, created and directed by Arnaud Elégoët. In a country like France, which marginalizes languages considered regional, the fact that books can be read in Breton is almost a miracle. Elégoët is the driving force behind the translation of The Terrible Adele in Breton. The editor regularly gives talks in Breton schools and colleges to explain his work, and one day he asked the students which book they'd like to read in Breton. The response, he says, was unanimous. She accepted without a second thought., He was surprised to see that there were few books in Breton in the center's library and called the publishing house Ticket and Bill, a comic book series created by Belgian cartoonist Jean Roba that was very successful in France starting in the 1960s, to ask if he could translate it into Breton. "Surprisingly, they said yes. A year later, the first one came out." Ticket and Bill in Breton. If they hadn't said yes to me that day, I would never have started the publishing house."

Breton, increasingly less spoken

Since then, Elégoët has published many other comics in Breton, such as Titeuf either Tintin, children's books, classics like The Little Prince and even board games. "Breton is spoken less and less, it's a fact. But at the same time, more and more children are learning it in school. If children don't read in Breton, it will be difficult for them to master it and find it natural to speak a language that is an ultra-minority," notes the editor. There are almost 4,000 students in total. The courses are free and subsidized by the state, but only those students who choose to be taught in Breton are enrolled. For decades, it was considered inferior and marginalized from public life and education.

The institutional mistreatment of the Breton language has had its consequences. In Brittany, in many homes where grandparents or great-grandparents had always spoken Breton, their children and grandchildren speak French. "When I was a child and we had family meals, the language used was Breton. But at the time, it wasn't a language that interested me at all. I had heard many times that to be modern, you had to speak French. And that was the idea that had sunk into my head. The idea was that there were languages that you had," Elégoët.

Although Breton was the mother tongue of Elégoët's four grandparents, his parents have always spoken to him in French. "The surprising thing was that my father was a history and Breton language teacher," explains the editor. As a young man, Arnaud Elégoët began to take an interest in Breton and learned it well, to the point of becoming the owner of a Breton publishing house and a staunch defender of the language. However, in Marine Gloaguen's home, the same thing happened as in Elégoët's: she is a Breton teacher, but she speaks to her children in French.