This paper focuses on the translation of Manner-of-motion in comics, a genre in which information is conveyed in both verbal and visual language. The study draws on Slobin’s Thinking-for-translating hypothesis, according to which translators tend to distance themselves from the source text in order to conform to the rhetorical style of the target language. Special attention is devoted to the role of visual language within this framework, with the ultimate aim of identifying translation techniques adapted to the issue of translating Manner-of-motion in comics, in both inter- and intratypological translation scenarios. This paper analyses a corpus that includes a selection from the Belgian comic series Les aventures de Tintin and its translation into two satellite-framed languages (English and German) and two verb-framed languages (Spanish and Catalan). Overall, the results highlight the key role of visual language in the translation of Manner-of-motion in comics, since this can compensate for alterations in the verbal code of target texts, by comparison with originals, and thus minimize the consequences of Thinking-for-translating. Moreover, the (limited) space in the balloons and the respective stylistic conventions of comic books in each language are shown to constrain translation to some extent.
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Cited by (8)
Cited by eight other publications
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. Metaphor and Symbol 39:1 ► pp. 10 ff.
Spring, Ryan & Naoyuki Ono
2024. Creating an automated tool to assist with event-conflation studies: An explanation and argument for its importance. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 3:1 ► pp. 100054 ff.
Valdeón, Roberto A.
2024. The translation of multimodal texts: challenges and theoretical approaches. Perspectives 32:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
2020. Manner salience and translation: A case study based on a multilingual corpus of graphic novels. Lebende Sprachen 65:2 ► pp. 346 ff.
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