Comics in translation studies. An overview and suggestions for research Federico Zanettin Comics enjoy a prominent space in the translation world. In Italy as well as in other countries the majority of comics titles are translations (see e.g. Rota 2003, Kaindl 1999). However, research on comics translation is not as well represented. As a result of a quite extensive bibliographic research1 I was able to find only a few passing mentions of comics in general books on translation (e.g. Hatim & Mason 1990, Mounin 1965), a handful of monographic publications, and about 30 articles, mostly published in the last few years (cf. bibliographic references). A quick review of these works reveals first of all what could be called a (multi) linguistic if not a (multi) cultural bias: a) most texts are written in languages other than English, b) even those which are written in English are usually written by scholars operating in non English speaking countries, and c) English is rarely the target language in the comics examined. Languages involved include French, Spanish, Italian, German, Danish, Polish, Finnish, Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese. This may be due to a number of factors, most conspicuously perhaps to the low status accorded to comics in anglophone cultures, where they are generally perceived as mass products for poorly educated people or at best for children. A second consideration concerns the terminology used to refer to comics. In other words, what exactly is meant by “comics”? They have been referred to as a publication format, a medium, a genre and a semiotic system, depending on the approach taken in the analysis. All these labels seem however to be non-exhaustive. Many different words are sometimes used to refer to comics in the same as well as in different languages. For instance, the English words “comic strips”, “cartoons”, “vignettes”, “graphic novels” or “the funnies”, may refer to the format and/or to the medium of transmission (book form, periodical, illustrations, moving pictures, etc.). Interlingually, the words “comics”, “fumetti”, “bande desinnée”, “manga”, “tebeos”, “banda desenhada” and so on point to different aspects of comics. The English word “comics” originates from the strips of mostly humorous relief which began to be published about a century ago in American newspapers (e.g. in the “funnies” section of Sunday newspapers) (see Sabin 1993). The Italian “fumetti” refers to the speech balloons (as well as perhaps to the projected “lightness” of the subjects treated) which were introduced by Italian publishers with the translation of American comics in the 1930s (see Laura 1997). “Bande desinnée” refers to a modality of production and consumption, the sequential reading of scrolls of drawings. “Manga” is used in the West to refer to Japanese–style comics (while in Japan the word may also refer to “animated pictures” or “anime”). And so on for Spanish and Portuguese terms. Each lingua/culture also has its preferred publishing format, i.e. comic book in the USA, album in France, tonkabon in Japan, etc. (Rota 2004). Two core characteristics are that comics are (usually) printed paper objects and that “it takes at least two” panels for it to be comics. Indeed, McCloud (1993) suggests that meaning in comics is to be found in the blank spaces between panels. It is the reader who fills in those interstices with expectations and world knowledge, and makes sense of sometimes seemingly incoherent images and words. Comics are not a medium in the same sense as print, films, tv, radio etc. are media. Rather, they use print as a medium, and could better be defined as a type of media discourse, which however cuts across the borders of media types. The link between cartoons and comics is obvious and is reflected in the overlap of meaning between the two words. “Electronic” comics and cartoons, exploiting features of digital texts such as hypertextuality, scroll-down capability, animation, etc. can also be found on the WWW (see e.g. www.scottmccloud.com, www.comix.it). Rather than being a genre comics have genres, much like prose writing. A major distinction is that 1

I used among other sources the TSA/BTS Online database (http://www.stjerome.co.uk/tsaonline/) which contains more than 6,000 full entries about individual articles, printed volumes, online publications and PhD dissertations, mostly since 1998.

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between children’s and adult’s comics, although more fine-grained categories could also be identified. Within children’s comics we can for instance distinguish between educational comics and leisure comics, including the “funny animals” genre which made the fortune of Walt Disney. Within adult comics we can distinguish among a variety of fictional genres, such as adventure, humour, horror, romance, science fiction, sex/eros/pornography, “serious fiction”, etc. and we also find a variety of non-fictional genres, such as essayism, (auto)biography, journalism, etc. In Europe and especially in the USA, where children and male teenagers seem to be the preferred target audience, some of these genres are more widespread or known than others. However, in Japan which has the largest comic books market in the world (about ¼ of all printed materials in the country are comics, for a business volume about 50 times as large as that of the USA, the second largest market)2 comics cater for all ages and tastes, the target audience is equally split between males and females and a much greater variety of genres can be found, both fictional and non fictional. Comics could be viewed as a semiotic system. Various definitions and conceptual representations of translation from the point of view of semiotics have been proposed, starting with Jakobson’s (1971) tripartite distinction between interlinguistic, endolinguistic and intersemiotic translation. On the basis of Eco’s (2001, 2003) more recent and elaborated models (see also Toury 1986, Torop 2002, 2003) we could discern (at least) the following types of inter- and intrasemiotic “comics translation”: a) the change of reading direction often involved in Western translations of Japanese comics, or in Arabic translations of Western comics, the first consequence being the creation of many left-handed people (see e.g. Jüngst 2004); b) the reproduction in black & white of a comic book in color or viceversa. Figure 1 provides an example of three different Italian translations of a Flash Gordon story, the first in black and white, the other two colored and otherwise changed (notice e.g. the length of dialogues).

Figure 1: Flash Gordon (1936) Types of intersystemic translation are a) interlinguistic translation (what Jakobson terms “translation proper”); b) rewriting (consider, for example, the first story with the origins of Spiderman by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko published in 1962, and the 2000 version by Brian Bendis and Mark Bagley); and c) “intersemiotic translation proper” or adaptation (comics to film, novel to comics, etc., and viceversa). I would like to suggest that comics translation should be seen ultimately as intercultural translation between semiotic environments which are culturally determined, along dimensions of space and time. By semiotic environment I mean a multiplicity and heterogeneity of semiotic systems which encompasses texts, media and discourses, what Barbieri (1991) has called the “languages of comics”, i.e. visual systems (such as illustration, caricature, painting, photography and graphics), temporality systems (comprising written narratives, poetry and music) and mixed systems of images and temporality, i.e. cinema and theatre. Perhaps the definition of comics as “sequential art” by author and critic Will Eisner (1985) - the ninth art to be precise – sounds even better than “semiotic environment”, after all. 2

Cf. Schodt 1997:4 and Persson online

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Being too few to deserve a separate category, articles and other works on comics translation included in Translation Studies Abstracts & The Bibliography of Translation Studies have been classified3 as relevant to one or more of the following categories: Literary translation, Translation policies, Audiovisual and multimedia translation, Translation and cultural identity, Intercultural studies, Contrastive and comparative studies and Translation theory. Generally speaking, we can distinguish between linguistic and semiotic oriented approaches. A number of studies, especially earlier ones, use comics mostly as a source of examples to discuss the translation of puns, proper names, onomatopoeias, citations, allusions and other features of language which are often found in comics but are not specific to them. Humorous and children’s comics are generally the genres investigated, seemingly with a predilection for translations of Astérix stories from French. While in linguistic oriented approaches the focus is on the verbal component, with hardly any reference to features which are specific to the semiotic environment, more semiotic-oriented approaches take into consideration the relationship between symbolic and iconic components, i.e. between written text and pictures. This relationship can be seen as one of dependency, with an emphasis on “technical” constraints. For instance, space limitations of balloons can be compared to time limitations of film subtitles or synchronization problems in dubbing. However, the relationship between visual and written elements can also be seen as one of complementarity, whereas the interplay between images, verbal signs, as well as “art form” specific “grammatical devices” such as frame transitions, motion lines, lettering, pictograms and visual metaphors contribute to creating meaning and developing narratives. One example which illustrates the interplay between words and images comes from Watchmen, a “graphic novel” written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons. The first chapter of the story begins with two detectives investigating the violent death of some Edward Blake, who has been killed by being thrown out of a window from a tall building. The detectives are on the crime scene and are discussing what course to give to the investigations. The reconstruction of the events in the dialogues between the two investigators is accompanied by a visual flashback which shows the fight and the fall or the victim. This second “narrative track” is seen as under a purple filter, its panels alternating with those of the main narrative track which happens in “real time”. In page 4, among a number of intra and intertextual references, both verbal and visual, which would be too long to comment on here, we follow the fall of Edward Blake from ouside the window and down to the street below. The point of view is that of a fixed camera, and starting from the middle of the top row in the page, we see the body disappearing from sight. In the first frame of the second row we can read a comment made by one of the detectives, who is suggesting not to publicize too much the investigation. The sentence in the balloon, “Well, what say we let this one drop out of sight?” thus acts also as a verbal commentary to the sequence shown in purple. In fact, “this one” may be taken to refer both to the investigation and to the body falling down the building. If a target language, like Italian, lacks a straightforward equivalent for the metaphorical expression “to fall out of sight”, it becomes difficult to keep the visual reference. It is sometimes assumed that written text inside speech balloons and boxes is the only component of comics which may change in translation, but this is not the case, since visual components may be translated as well. A systematic attempt to account for features of translated comics vis-à-vis the originals has been put forward by Kaindl (1999), who proposes a translation-relevant anatomy of comics, that is, a taxonomy of aspects of comics which may be modified during the translation process. These include typographical signs (font type and size, layout, format), pictorial signs (colors, action lines, vignettes, perspective), and linguistic signs (titles, inscriptions, dialogues, onomatopoeias, narration). Each of these aspects may be subjected to strategies of change such as replacement (the standard option for linguistic signs), deletion, addition etc.

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By myself and other editors and contributors to the jounal and online database.

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Within an approach which considers all the different semiotic components of comics, various models could be tested and applied to comics translation, both from the point of view of translation criticism (with a view to evaluating and expressing judgments on individual translations) and from a more descriptive stance, looking at how cultural, literary and linguistic norms influence the translation of individual works, authors, series and genres. Toury (1980) draws a distinction between “preliminary norms”, which have to do with translation policies and decisions about what get and what gets not translated, and “operational norms”, which "direct actual decisions made during the translation process" (Toury 1980: 54). Among preliminary norms, censorship and selfcensorship play often a very important role. For example, during the Fascist regime American comics were banned in Italy, Disney comics later than all others because of Mussolini’s liking for them (De Giacomo 1995). Zitawi (2004) analyzes the potential of Arabic translations of Disney comics as face-threatening acts in a sizable corpus of originals and translations. Disney comics contain features such as written and visual references to “sensitive” subjects like romance and sex, God and magic, Christian and Jewish imagery, as well as human nakedness, characters represented as pigs, and stereotypical depictions of Arabs as untrustworthy and evil people which are perceived as offensive to religious and ethical values, linguistic practices and cultural identities. Zitawi describes the different policies and norms operating in Egypt and in the Arabic peninsula. Publishers in Qwait and Dubai have adopted a strict set of internal guidelines to prevent censorship from the ministerial body which has to approve all published material. These may result in avoiding the publication of whole stories initially considered, or in marked modifications to both visual and written components. For instance, in a Donald Duck story the content of an entire page is changed, so that instead of reading from love letters Donald Duck reads about an imaginary adventure in Africa. Images can also be retouched or replaced, for instance the top part of Santa Klaus’ hat is removed in a Christmas scene, as is Uncle Scrooge’s top hat in another (the top hat is associated in the Arab world to Jewish imagery). A panel showing a kiss between Clarabelle Cow and a monkey has been replaced by one created ad hoc by merging images taken from different panels and involving no kiss. Potentially offensive features undergo in other case a process of mitigation. For example semi-naked bodies are coated in black and evil-looking Scheiks are verbally identified and referred to as Indian Marajas. In Egyptian translations such features are instead often reproduced without noticeable alterations. As Zitawi points out, censorship regulations in the Arab peninsula have much in common with the still active Comics Code Authority guidelines followed by publishers in the USA since the 1950s, the main difference being that the latter code is self-imposed and not adhered to by all publishers and for all publications, thus functioning as a form of rating. Self-censorship on part of the publishers may indeed be a powerful factor in enacting translation policies in many different target cultures. For instance, in one Scandinavian translation of the The Adventures of Tin Tin, a panel with the image of a rhinoceros exploding to pieces was deleted. The Hebrew translation of Maus, the Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman which narrates the story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America, portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, was never published because it was felt that the depiction of the character of a kapò in Auschwitz, who was based on a real person, might have been perceived as offensive by his living relatives, even though Spiegelman had offered to mitigate the face-threatening potential of the episode by adding a few panels to the Israeli edition to provide further contextualization (Spiegelman 1994). More recently, Spiegelman’s story (In the shade of no towers, 2004) recounting the New York in the days after the terrorists attacks of September 11 2001, had wider circulation in its European translations than in the USA. The perceived potential threat to the then very strong nationalist feelings of the general reading public resulted in its publication for a minor imprint rather than in the New Yorker magazine of which Spiegelman used to be a regular collaborator. Operational, that is, textual norms, may differ in different countries and change over time. For example, when in the late 1980s Japanese comics started to be translated first in the USA and then 4

in Europe, the pages were reproduced as mirror images in order to change the reading direction from right to left to left to right, i.e. according to Western conventions. Publishers seemed to think that a change in reading habits would not have been received well by the audience, even if reversing the comics books implied additional costs. After a few years Japanese comics retaining the original reading direction started to appear, and within 15 years the norm, at least in countries like Germany and Italy seems to have shifted to reproduction of this original feature. In the USA publishers have begun printing some Japanese comics in the original right to left reading direction only more recently (see http://www.viz.com/about/faq/#09), a fact which suggests that domestication rather than foreignization strategies prevail in that culture. Looking at translated comics from the point of view of the target culture may lead to comparisons of features of translated and original comics in the same language, such as onomatopoeic inscriptions or it may lead to contrastive and comparative studies of different translations of the same source text for different audiences, either in different or in the same target language. A large part of all comics published are in fact reprints or retranslations. Consider, for instance, two different Italian translations of Charlier and Giraud’s Blueberry, the first published in the 1970s and directed to children, the second published in the 1990s and directed to an adult readership (more like the original French readership). At a first inspection it is apparent the difference in colors and text length between the two. In the 1970s Italian edition half-colors and shades (which can be found both in the French original and 1990s Italian edition) have been shifted to brighter and more uniform ones, while dialogues are much simpler in terms of lexis and syntactical complexity as well as much shorter. One last observation I would like to make is that comics translation is a process which bears distinctive analogies with that of software localization. For once, comics are often collective enterprises and translated comics even more so. Two examples: In the American translations of popular Italian series like Dylan Dog and Martin Mystére, translation, dialogue adaptation, editing, additional cover art, lettering and retouching are all credited to different people as distinct components of the overall translation process. Two main phases, internationalization and localization proper are usually involved. In the first phase the product is prepared at the source end. In the case of Dylan Dog, first the Italian publisher (Sergio Bonelli Editore) chose the most suitable episodes for the international market. Some pages where also partially redrawn and some intertextual references changed. The literary agent for Bonelli then provided the American publisher, Dark Horse, with a first English translation. The stories were finally localized at the target end, by editing the dialogues, lettering, retouching inscriptions and drawings and adding new covers by well known American comics artists (see D’Arcangelo & Zanettin 2004 for more details). Most Disney comics could also be described as the product of an internationalization/localization process. Disney comic books are marginal products in the USA, and they are mostly produced in Europe, in particular in Italy which accounts for about 70% of all Disney comics production (Castelli 1999). Some of them are only created for international distribution, and target culture publishers are provided with English translations, which thus operates as a lingua franca. For example, Zitawi (2004: 306) discusses a panel from the Donald Duck story “Jelly troubles”. The story was first published in Sweden in 1997, written by a Finnish author (Per Erik Hedman) and drawn by a Spanish draughtsman (Francisco Rodriguez Peinado). The Arabic translation of 1997 as well as the American edition of 1998 are based on dialogues written by an American writer (Gary Gabner) (INDUCKS online).4 The jungle story with Clarabelle Cow was produced in Denmark by a team of international authors and first published in Germany (INDUCKS online). As a way of concluding, I hope to have shown that there is still much room for research on comics translation. While I do not see a need for a comics-specific theory of translation, I think that the 4 Story no. D 95027 - Jelly troubles. Idea: Per Erik Hedman , Storyboard: Per Erik Hedman , Art: Francisco Rodriguez Peinado. Published on 1997-01-24. [Gary Gabner wrote the American dialogue used by Egmont and Gladstone accordingly].

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study of translated comics may provide useful insights into an understanding of translation as a complex process of intercultural communication, involving quite a few people and much more than simply the replacement of written text in speech balloons. References • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Barbieri, Daniele (1991) I linguaggi del fumetto. Milano: Bompiani. Castelli, Alfredo (1999) America on my mind. Italian Comics and the Industry of Imagination. A short history of comics in Italy (online) http://www.bvzm.com/english/eng_set.html D'Arcangelo, Adele & Federico Zanettin (2004) “Dylan Dog Goes to the Usa: A NorthAmerican Translation of an Italian Comic Book Series”, Across Languages and Cultures, 5:2, 187-210. De Giacomo, Francesco (1995) “Quando il duce salvò Topolino”, If. Immagini e fumetti, 4, Epierre publishing. Eco, Umberto (2001) Experiences in Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Eco, Umberto (2003) Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione. Milano: RCS Libri. Eisner, Will (1985) Comics and sequential art. Tamarac, Florica: Poorhouse Press. Hatim, Basil & Ian Mason (1990) Discourse and the Translator. London & New York: Longman. Hopkins, Drew (2000) "The Dilberting of Taiwan.". Connect Fall 2000: 151-160. Jakobson, Roman 1971 Jüngst, Heike Elisabeth (2004) "Japanese comics in Germany". Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 12(2): 83-105. Kaindl, Klaus (1999) "Thump, Whizz, Poom: A Framework for the Study of Comics under Translation". Target 11(2): 263-288. Laura, Ernesto G. 1997. Gli anni de L’AVVENTUROSO. Firenze: Nerbini. McCloud, Scott (1993) Understanding comics. Northampton, Ma : Tundra Publishing. Monti, Alessandro (1992) "Il senso nascosto: tradurre la lingua dei fumetti". Quaderni di Libri e Riviste D’Italia 28: 153-167. Mounin, Georges (1965) Teoria e storia della traduzione. Milano: Einaudi. Papersera.net (2004) INDUCKS search, “D 95027 – Jelly Troubles” [Online] http://www.papersera.net/search/searchcode.php?p_codice=D+95027&sr=Y Persson, Jonas (s.d.) “The epitome of Manga”. Inanime.com (online) http://www.inanime.com/manga.html Rota, Valerio. 2003. “I fumetti. Traduzione e adattamento”. Testo a Fronte 28: 155-172 Rota, Valerio (2004) La marca dello straniero. Fumetti tradotti e alterità. Mottola: Lilliput. Sabin, Roger (1993) Adult comics, London & New York: Routledge. Schodt, Frederik L. (1997) Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo, New York and London: Kodansha International. Spiegelman, Art (1994) The complete Maus on CD-ROM. Voyager Company. Torop, Peeter (2002). "Translation as translating as culture". Sign Systems Studies 30(2): 593-605. Torop, Peeter (2003). "Intersemiosis and Intersemiotic Translation". In Petrilli, Susan (ed.) Translation Translation, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 271-282. Toury, Gideon (1980) In search of a theory of translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. 6

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Toury, Gideon (1986) "Translation". In: Sebeok, Thomas (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, vol. 2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1107–1124. Zitawi, Jehan (2004) The Translation of Disney Comics in the Arab World: A Pragmatic Perspective. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Manchester.

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