Comics and Translation: Introduction

Abstract

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 characters are part of a cultural heritage that has never been confined to a specific language. 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 translation 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 images. 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 complete 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 translation 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 considered comics translation, if “All the ‘languages’ used by comics can be ‘translated’ 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