Quote from: Iason Taiwos on Today at 04:31:06 PM(I wanted to add, tho, that the depictions of black people in these early Asterix books are pretty...well, racist. Hopefully they moved away from that as the series went on. These new American editions have a disclaimer that just says they are presenting it as originally drawn, but not mentioning why there's a need to even state that.)
Unfortunately, the broad racial caricatures remained at least until the mid-80s (and don't get me started about the Jewish caricatures in _Asterix in the land of black gold_). At least in the English translations, though, black characters eventually started talking normally rather than in what Frank Zappa would have called "comedy negrocious dialect". What can you say, it's France.
I didn't know they got a new translation, though, among professional translators the Bell/Hockridge translations are renowned for being examples of top-quality cross-cultural translations of humour; will have to check that out. But you can get weird about "accessibility for the kids". There is a French film called La Haine (1995) about kids from a deprived suburb getting up to mischief in Paris. They go to the house of a drug dealer who is a small skinny guy they call "Asterix". In the original American dub, they changed that to "Charlie Brown" because they didn't think US kids would get the reference.
(I have no idea what modern translations would do with, for example, references to The Beatles in _Asterix in Britain_, or the way that the main antagonist in _Obelix & Co_ is a caricature of Jacques Chirac.)