What is it about?
This paper examines the salience of Manner-of-motion and its translation in a multilingual corpus of graphic novels, with the dual aim of further investigating the role of visual language in Slobin’s Thinking-for-translating hypothesis and identifying the relevant translation techniques.
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Why is it important?
Despite the wealth of research on the translation of motion in narrative texts, both in inter- and intratypological scenarios, the Thinking-for-translating hypothesis remains virtually unexplored for illustrated narratives.The corpus studied allows both inter- and intratypological analyses: it is composed of two graphic novels by the Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust and their corresponding translations into Spanish, French and English. The paper concludes that, although visual language minimizes the consequences of Thinking-for-translating, the conventions and restrictions of graphic novels deserve greater attention within this framework.
Perspectives
Although this particular study observed no problems involving space in the balloons, this and other restrictions and conventions of graphic novels deserve greater attention within this framework. Since the corpus examined was limited in size, further analyses are necessary employing cognitive research using the Thinking-for Translating hypothesis adapted to the genre of comics: focusing, for instance, on other graphic novels and comic books or linguistic combinations. An interesting immediate step would be to analyse comics originally depicted/written in Spanish and/or English and their translations into languages belonging to the same and different typologies, with the aim of identifying stylistic conventions typical of these languages in this genre.
Teresa Moles Cases
Universitat Politecnica de Valencia
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This page is a summary of: Manner salience and translation: A case study based on a multilingual corpus of graphic novels, Lebende Sprachen, October 2020, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/les-2020-0020.
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Resources
On the translation of Manner-of-motion in comics. Evidence from an inter- and intratypological corpus-based study
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
La traducción de los eventos de movimiento en un corpus paralelo alemán-español de literatura infantil y juvenil
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