Here is my collection of ‘King Ottokar’s Sceptre’ Tintin books with the addition of the Chinese language version (came out only in 2007).
Recognize the languages? Clockwise : German, Slovak, Chinese and Afrikaans. So where is the English one? I made a mistake up on my last trip to South Africa and bought a second Afrikaans one (Tintin books are generally not sold in book stores in the USA, so I will order one from Amazon).
So .. is this just for the novelty, or am I serious to learn some written Chinese? Let me get back to you on that. It’s just so hard to figure out a written phrase because I cannot reproduce the characters easily. I have to tease out the meaning of the Chinese characters from the English side. What I have so far on the title panel of the book (never mind the 62 pages of cartoon strips with text inside! oof), is :
王 wáng king or monarch / best or strongest of its type / grand / great (interestingly this is also used for the ubiquitous surname Wang in Chinese)
The last two characters 權 + 杖 = quán authority / power / right / temporary + zhang crutches / crutch / walking stick, together makes for ‘scepter’
