The Translation of Visual Literature

Thesis Plan
Last updated September 2009

Chapter One: What comics can teach us about translation

I will begin by arguing that the comics medium represents an appropriate topic for academic scholarship. Drawing on the example of previous academic rejection of film studies, I will suggest that, far from being an unsuitable subject for scholarly attention, comics has been marginalised by casual elitism and by the natural resistance of the form to analysis in purely literary terms.

Though a precise definition of comics remains a matter of ongoing critical debate, I argue that a central feature is the interrelationship of words and images. Considering this, as well as the fact that comics represent some of the most translated texts in the world, I suggest that comics present an ideal medium for considering a key theoretical question in translation studies, namely the complexity of what Frederic Chaume Varela calls ‘the semiotic interaction that is produced in the simultaneous emission of text and image’.

Chapter Two: Is there a language of comics?

In this chapter, I set out a provisional semiotics of the comics medium. I argue that the iconoclastic, playful nature of comics makes it fundamentally resistant as a medium to a formal, text-bound structuralist semiotics. Instead, using a range of examples of the medium, I will argue that comics share a culturally constructed grammar, a library of techniques through which (or by conscious, often explicitly signalled manipulation and subversion of which) each comics text moves to construct its own sign system.

I go on to explore in detail the ways in which the interactions in comics between word and image are realised in semiotic terms, setting out the linguistic and pictorial signs and combinations of signs by which the verbal/visual language of comics operates, and demonstrating its interrelationship with the verbal/visual language of other polysemiotic texts such as film and theatre.

Chapter Three: Eco’s Rat, Monterroso’s Dinosaur and the dynamics of fidelity, equivalence and transparency in Sin City, 300 and Persepolis

In this chapter, I consider the argument, advanced among others by Umberto Eco, that interlingual translation is a different kind of process from intersemiotic translation. Borrowing from Eco the example of Augusto Monterroso’s short story The Dinosaur, I will consider a corpus of adaptations of the text made by a selection of comics and webcomics creators. I will then use the examples of three film adaptations of comic books, Sin City (dir. Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez, 2005) 300 (dir. Zack Snyder, 2006) and Persepolis (dir. Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, 2007), to show that intersemiotic translations are, in fact, analysed in much the same way, and using much the same critical language, as interlingual translations. Finally, I will draw these strands together to argue that not only is it possible to use translation theory to consider intersemiotic translations, it is actively useful.

Chapter Four: Translation problems in comics

In this chapter, I address the translation problems occasioned by the comics medium. Some of these are specific to comics: translating or compensating for non-pictorial iconic signs, for instance, ranging from speech and thought bubbles to culturally-specific icons for conveying emotion; or the translation of onomatopoeic or iconic ‘sound words’ such as ‘boom’ and ‘bang’. Others have a more general application and often a direct link to similar issues in other media: translation constraints such as the limited space available to translate speech in word balloons (a familiar problem to audiovisual translators, who face a similar issue of restricted time); compensating for or explaining culturally-specific visual phenomena (that cannot simply be removed from the text or glossed, as they can be in purely verbal translation); the translation of humour.

I examine and address these translation issues by drawing on practical examples from widely translated comics. Arguing that translation is a practical activity that needs to be analysed not solely theoretically but in the contexts of its practice, I will also address the social and industrial environments of comics production and consumption and consider how they impact on the translator’s work.

Chapter Five: The science of comics and the art of translation

In this concluding chapter, I will draw together the varying strands developed in the previous sections to complete my argument that approaches to the translation of comics can offer much to the theory of polysemiotic translation.