Altenberg, Tilmann

Owen, Ruth J.

New Readings (E-Journal - School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University)

Comics and Translation: Introduction
Tilmann Altenberg
Ruth J. Owen
Comics are extremely culturally mobile: since their rise to popularity in the early
twentieth century, comics have travelled extensively and with increasing ease across
linguistic and cultural borders. This themed issue of New Readings examines the
translation practices that have facilitated this cultural mobility. Some comics char-
acters are part of a cultural heritage that has never been confined to a specific lan-
guage. Some comics have found their primary audience in a country or language
that is not their makers’ own. For the disciplines of comics studies and transla-
tion studies, the prevalence of translated comics demands consideration of all the
facets relevant to text-only translation, plus the unique facets raised by comics’
multimodality, the “co-deployment and interplay” (Zanfei 60) of language and im-
ages. Meaning in comics is created at the conjunction of written text, drawings
and blank space, with the readers and the culture. Undertaking to translate that
meaning can entail: rewriting text with no redrawing, rewriting text with partial
redrawing, rewriting text with complete redrawing, or retaining the text with com-
plete redrawing.
Frequently, comics are produced by a creative team, involving at least one
writer and one graphic artist but often larger teams, in which a translator becomes
one of several collaborators in an industrial production process (Duncan, Smith
and Levitz 268). As articles in this journal issue point out, Lawrence Venuti’s
concept of the translator’s invisibility in the US-American context is instructive
for comics translation globally, where the “practice of reading and evaluating” (1)
has concealed the status of comics as translations. This invisibility seems to apply
more markedly because “the combination of image and text in comics is contested
ground from the point of view of definitions” (Postema 101). Translating comics
affects, in principle, the entire repertoire of expressive means in both verbal and
visual modes, as well as the ways in which they interact. Even the linguistic trans-
lation of comics has some distinct practical issues: spatial issues akin to those
in subtitling, to do with fitting the new language into the extant text boxes and
speech balloons. But modifying or replacing the drawn artwork can also be con-
sidered comics translation, if “All the ‘languages’ used by comics can be ‘trans-
lated’ within and/or between semiotic systems” (Zanettin, “Comics in Translation”
12). In a workflow where the decisions taken and tasks carried out involve a range
of specialists, each focusing on a specific step in the translation process (widely
understood), the linguistic translator may well be only one of several agents of a
i
T. Altenberg & R. J. Owen, Comics and Translation: Introduction
collaborative effort to recast a given comic for a new audience (cf. O’Sullivan 7)
and not even legitimately termed the ‘translator proper’.
The articles in this themed issue are indicative not only of the complexity of
the medium and the myriad issues involved in translating comics, but also of the
diversity of angles from which comics translation can be studied. In an overview of
comics translation as an academic focus, Federico Zanettin compares it to software
localisation. He ends his essay by asserting,
the study of translated comics may provide useful insights into an under-
standing 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. (“Comics in Translation Studies” 98)
Articles here seek to tease out for analysis aspects making up that complex pro-
cess. There is, after all, no sense in which we would normally consider translat-
ing a painting or drawing (although its title be silently translated in displays and
reference books), despite the fact that visual art continuously constructs, clips, re-
deploys and refashions extant images and motifs. Will Eisner’s classic definition
of comics form as “sequential art” alerts us to the difference, namely the comics’
narrative or plotting. Complete re-drawing might then be akin to the adaptation
of a play, and translation in drama close to translation in comics, because of the
interplay between a translated speech-based script and a visual performance. Two
articles in this journal issue focus on the translating of the visual in comics, the
graphics and the typefaces, respectively; four on the translation of the verbal in the
processes of adapting, abridging and localising text. All, especially in conjunc-
tion, raise the issue of who the comics translator is: a graphic artist, an editor, or a
letterer, rather than an author, or some combination of all these.
Complete redrawing is addressed, the graphic artist as translator, in the opening
article by Rachel Weissbrod and Ayelet Kohn on two serialised comics from the
1930s and 1940s, which were republished in book format with new artwork in
2013. Weissbrod and Kohn examine the complex relations that emerge between
the new versions and the sources, the visual and the verbal modes, and the newly
illustrated comics and their visual intertexts. Although in both cases the verbal text
in Hebrew has been carried over from the serialised comics, the balance between
what has been transferred, on the one hand, and the shifts created by the books’
new illustrations, on the other, differ significantly in each case. The article assesses
how the translator-illustrators instil new life into preserved, but otherwise forgotten
texts by a highly regarded poet.
Highlighting the visual effect of text in comics and the translation issues that
can arise involves highlighting the letterer as translator. The article by William
Spencer Armour and Yuki Takeyama examines the use of Japanese-language type-
faces and their translation into English, by taking as an example a double page from
popular sho¯nen manga Bleach by Tite Kubo. In a meticulously documented discus-
sion, the article points out the different semiotic reach of typefaces in the languages
New Readings 15 (2015): i–iv. ii
T. Altenberg & R. J. Owen, Comics and Translation: Introduction
and cultures concerned. The case study suggests that, although the Japanese lan-
guage offers a smaller reservoir of fonts for manga creators to choose from than
languages written in the modern Latin alphabet, in Japanese manga the use of spe-
cific fonts is codified more clearly and exploited more systematically than in their
English translations.
Japan, the largest and most varied comic book market in the world, is repre-
sented in three discussions in this themed issue. The second of these discusses ma-
terial at the intersection of Shakespeare adaptation with English-language manga—
translating the translation so to speak, in an ongoing chain, undertaken by a trans-
lation team. The British Manga Shakespeare series and its Brazilian translation is
the focus of Márcia do Amaral Peixoto Martins’s article. Taking the example of
Romeo and Juliet, the article examines how Shakespeare’s tragedy has been trans-
lated twice on its transition from English-language drama to Portuguese-language
manga. The article shows the translational function of shifting the setting from Re-
naissance Italy to contemporary Japan, reproducing key lines from Shakespeare’s
play, translating for a young readership more familiar with comics conventions
than with classical drama, and framing the text with the Brazilian paratexts.
Similar in many ways to the Manga Shakespeare series, which continues a
long-standing tradition of popularising literary classics by adapting them to the
comics medium, the titles published in a series like Books for Beginners aim to
make canonical thinkers and their principal works accessible to a wider audience.
Nayelli Castro’s article here, written in Spanish, examines the 2013 Spanish trans-
lation of a Japanese manga adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract
(1762), paying due regard to its complex relationship with the philosopher’s re-
ception in Japan and in the Spanish-speaking world. After retracing the history
of the source text’s translations, rewritings and appropriations into Japanese and
Spanish, the article considers this intersemiotic version of Rousseau’s classic work
as a refraction of an ‘original’ and ‘canonical’ Rousseau. The article argues that
the Spanish manga can be read as a complex translation, which synthesises and
rewrites Rousseau’s work both visually and linguistically.
Highlighting the identity of the narrative voice in a translated comic corre-
sponds to the translation being the result not only of a translator’s work in a target
language but of the workings of a receiving culture. Sarah Viren embarks on a
critical reading of the way in which the gendered “we” in Maitena Burundarena’s
comic Women on the Edge (Sp. Mujeres alteradas) has been rendered for readers
in the United States and Spain, respectively. Viren’s article shows that the English
translation for the US market and the version published in Spain coincide in their
emphasis on Burundarena’s gender, while downplaying her country of origin and
the comic strip’s rootedness in Argentine culture. However, the myth of a universal
female experience suggested in the translations of Mujeres alteradas, rests on the
false assumption of a common language shared by all women and neutralises cul-
tural differences. Deploying the concept of localisation, the article contends that
both translations examined bend narratives of gender to fit local markets in a global
world where gender is increasingly exportable and commodified.
New Readings 15 (2015): i–iv. iii
T. Altenberg & R. J. Owen, Comics and Translation: Introduction
Approaching comics translation through the practice of an individual text trans-
lator of a corpus of comics, the final article is built around an interview. Taking
selected statements from that interview as a starting point and prompt, Isabelle
Guillaume illuminates Lili Sztajn’s practice as a comics translator from English
into French and the implications of her practice for translation issues more widely.
The article provides insight into working conditions in French comics translation
from the 1970s to the present, many of which also have a bearing on other con-
texts. The examples of specific linguistic challenges encountered—among them
multilingualism, intertextuality, profanity, slang and censorship—are taken from
Sztajn’s translations of works by acclaimed comics artists Robert Crumb, Alison
Bechdel and Posy Simmonds. The article concludes with a brief discussion of
Sztajn’s advocacy of foreignisation and some of the implications of this strategy in
a professional context that subscribes predominantly to the opposite view.
There is no single history of comics translation, but rather many national and
formal and thematic histories. Rather than being lured into thinking that infinite
generalisations can be made, we actually need to begin with small clusters of in-
dividual translations and that is what these articles do. The contributions here are
case studies of specific acts of comics translation within clearly circumscribed cul-
tural contexts. Together they examine the comics translator’s practices as a graphic
artist, a letterer, an author, an editor, a team. Many more case studies such as these
are needed—from as wide a range of languages and comics genres as possible—in
order to theorise the varied, versatile and dynamic practice of comics translation.
Works Cited
Duncan, Randy, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz. The Power of Comics: History,
Form, and Culture. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac: Poorhouse, 1985. Print.
O’Sullivan, Carol. “Introduction: Multimodality as Challenge and Resource for
Translation.” Translating Multimodalities. Ed. Carol O’Sullivan and Caterina
Jeffcote. Spec. issue of JoSTrans 20 (2013): 2–14. Web. 10 July 2015.
Postema, Barbara. Narrative Structure in Comics. Rochester: RIT Press, 2013.
Print.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed.
New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Zanettin, Federico. “Comics in Translation: An Overview.” Comics in Translation.
London: Routledge, 2008. 1–32. Print.
—. “Comics in Translation Studies: An Overview and Suggestions for Research.”
Actas do VII Seminário de Tradução Científica e Técnica em Língua Por-
tuguesa – 2004: Tradução e Interculturalismo. Lisbon: União Latina, 2005.
93–98. Print.
Zanfei, Anna. “Defining Webcomics and Graphic Novels.” International Journal
of Comic Art 10.1 (2008): 55–61. Print.
New Readings 15 (2015): i–iv. iv


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