Analysing the Persian translation of sound effects in comic books by Celotti’s strategies

Abstract

ABSTRACT As multimodal texts profiting from a combination of words and pictures, studying the translation of comic books has not received the due attention, which is why the discipline of Translation Studies will always welcome more explorations of comic books. This study examined the employment of Celotti’s strategies for translating sound effects from English to Persian, set forth as translation, translation and insertion of a footnote in the gutter, cultural adaptation, leaving untranslated, deletion, and finally, a mix of (some of) the above. In comic books, sound effects are those onomatopoeic expressions that are drawn inside the pictures. Since original Persian comic books are not very common in Iran, translators may not perfectly know how to translate sound effects into Persian. Therefore, Celotti’s approach was examined in order to present comic book translators with the most frequent strategies. Seventeen English comics and their Persian translations were carefully studied to discover sound effects and their equivalents; then, Celotti’s proposed strategies were applied to the data. As the results presented, there were some strategies in use that the chosen approach did not cover. In addition, source-oriented strategies were adopted in scanlations while target-oriented strategies were found more in published translations.