Michael Turner was chief executive of Associated Book Publishers (ABP), the company that owned the Methuen and Sweet & Maxwell imprints among others. Turner also helped to translate the cartoon adventures of Tintin, the Belgian cub reporter, written and drawn in the original by Hergé.

Turner undertook the translation of tales including The Secret of the Unicorn, Destination Moon and The Castiafiore Emerald, in collaboration with Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper. Lonsdale-Cooper did the initial draftings which Turner amended. The two then adjusted the copy together to ensure that the narrative, jokes and wordplays were appropriately anglicised.

In their hands Milou, Tintin’s intuitive and ingenious dog, became Snowy, and Professor Tournesol became Professor Calculus.

Turner and Lonsdale-Cooper were not the first to translate the Tintin adventures: earlier efforts had been made by compilers of the Eagle comic. (It was from the Eagle that Turner and Lonsdale-Cooper found the Thomson and Thompson identities for the bowler-hatted Dupont and Dupond in Hergé’s French.) But Turner and Lonsdale-Cooper were responsible for presenting a larger part of the Belgian artist’s work for consumption in English.

The task, said Lonsdale-Cooper, who went on to be publishing director at the Open University, was to make the translations equivalent but not necessarily the same. The Crab with the Golden Claws and King Ottokar’s Sceptre were the first two worked on by Turner. In all, he helped to adapt 23 tales for English readers. The duo were given a free hand by Hergé, since straight translation was often linguistically impossible. The translation task was complicated, but also made more entertaining, by the need to adapt. Hergé wrote some of the original in Belgian patois, for example, which had to be turned into appropriate English.

The challenge was all the greater because the British writers were obliged to fit their translations into speech bubbles that were usually drawn unaltered from the original. Conversations between Thomson and Thompson, the detectives, were among the episodes which Turner and Lonsdale-Cooper changed most, concluding that the French banter between Dupont and Dupond would be lost on English readers. Turner was also sensitive to material by Hergé which had been overtaken by events or changing tastes. Posterity, given Belgium’s colonial history, was not kind to Tintin in the Congo, for instance. References to the British Mandate of Palestine in The Land of Black Gold had to be finessed too.

Although most of the illustrations were left unaltered, Hergé was persuaded to redraw sections of The Black Island which, Turner felt, would strike British readers as awkwardly stereotypical. “We felt working together on this, the best thing was to read it aloud, and I think that was one of our most sensible decisions,” Turner recalled. “We would go through the text and repeat it out loud, and it was then that quite a number of the names were coined, as well as things like Captain Haddock’s foul language.”

Among the more memorable of Haddock’s exclamations in the English editions were: “Blistering barnacles!”, “Slubberdegullions!” and “Odd-toed ungulate!”

It took Casterman, the original Belgian publisher, much effort to persuade foreign publishers that there was a market for Tintin books in English since comic-strip books were looked down on by the literary establishment. So keen were Turner and Lonsdale-Cooper, however, that they completed a trial translation for nothing, and eventually Methuen, which happened to employ Turner in its marketing department and Lonsdale-Cooper as an editor, took up the project. Initial sales were slow but an enthusiastic review in The Times Literary Supplement, and an accompanying cover illustration, gave the stories the respectability they needed. The TLS review described Tintin as “unique in its kind, it is a really first-rate comic strip”.

Michael Ralph Turner was born in 1929 and attended Newport School, Essex. He did his National Service in the RAF, and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study English. Entering publishing as an editor, he soon moved on to advertising, publicity and marketing. He worked for J M Dent & Sons before joining Methuen as a junior editor in 1953. Methuen later became a part of Associated Book Publishers. While working on the Tintin translations, he rose up the corporate ladder until, in 1982, he became ABP’s deputy chairman and chief executive.

Methuen was strong in children’s books and fiction (in the 1970s and 1980s, humour, with Monty Python and Adrian Mole was also successful), but as Turner progressed and ABP developed, his publishing concerns were much enlarged. In 1969 ABP brought together Methuen, Eyre & Spottiswoode, Sweet & Maxwell, Chapman & Hall, Tavistock, Stevens, Spon and Green so that the group’s focus expanded to scientific, technical, professional, academic and — particularly — legal books. In the 1980s Turner organised further acquisitions, notably that of Routledge & Kegan Paul with its notable academic lists. He held senior executive positions at ABP until it was taken over by the Thomson Corporation in 1987.

A one-company man, hard-working, able, meticulous and attentive, Turner with Peter Allsop was substantially responsible for having built ABP into an international group so profitable that Thomson thought that it worth a hostile bid of £215 million.

Turner found the new accounting-led business methods unsettling, but he remained as chairman of ABP, and was appointed a senior vice-president of the Thomson Organisation after the purchase. He also remained on good terms with the controlling Thomson family, sharing a fondness of antique toys with Kenneth Thomson. He made acquisitions for Thomson at auctions while pursuing his own hobbies, which included the collection of paddleboat memorabilia.Turner also served as president of the Publishers Association, the trade body.

He retired from ABP in 1989, aged 60, but his book trade interests continued after stepping aside. In the early 1990s he was chairman of the Book Trust and of the Society of Bookmen and a member of the British Library advisory council.

Turner’s wide interests in music and theatre were reflected in the books he wrote or co-wrote. They included the Bluffer’s Guide to the Theatre, Parlour Song Book, Edwardian Song Book and Just a Song at Twilight. He also edited Victorian Parlour Poetry, and compiled Gluttony, Pride and Lust and Other Sins from the World of Books. He retired to Boscastle, Cornwall, and each year he directed a musical or opera with amateur musicians.

Socially and professionally, Turner was lively and witty. He knew everybody and everything in the book world, and was a splendid gossip, although like all the best gossips he was not always entirely accurate. The cheerfulness that he generated was enhanced by his appearance; pale and slightly protuberant blue eyes behind spectacles and surmounted by a shock of red-gold hair so that he resembled a benign mad scientist. For many years the double-act spoof of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, played by Turner and his colleague, Desmond Elliott, enlivened sober book trade occasions.Turner’s wife, Ruth Baylis, whom he married in 1954, predeceased him. He is survived by two adopted sons and two adopted daughters.

Michael Turner, Tintin translator and publisher, was born on January 26, 1929. He died on July 10, 2009, aged 80