1 Comics in Translation: An Overview

FEDERICO ZANETTIN
University of Perugia, Italy

This article provides an introduction to comics, the translation of comics and the
contents of the volume. It begins by ofering a brief historical overview of comics,
highlighting those aspects which may be especially interesting from a translation
perspective, and an overview of diferent types of comics translation, from an inter-
and an intra-semiotic perspective. This is followed by a discussion of the speciicity
of comics as an art form (the ninth art) and as a means of communication, and of its
bearing on translation. The article ends with an overview of the literature on comics
in translation, and of the contributions to the present volume.

I
n a socio-historical perspective comics have a precise time and place of birth:
the end of the nineteenth-century, in the USA. While in many respects comics
are not diferent from other forms of ‘sequential art’ (Eisner 1985) such as pre-
historic graiti, carved Roman columns, painted glass windows of medieval churches,
eighteenth-century prints, or twenty-irst century Web pages, “the history of comics is
closely related to the emergence of mass-media, due to new means of mass repro-
duction and an increasing readership of the printed media” (Mey 1998:136). More
specifically, comics ‘as we know them’, began to appear in Sunday pull-out supplements
in large print-run newspapers. This is in fact where the word comics itself originated:
“Because of their exclusively humorous content, [the Sunday pull-out] supplements
came to be known as ‘the Sunday funnies’, and thus in America the term ‘comics’ came
to mean an integral part of a newspaper. […] Later the word would encompass the
whole range of graphic narrative expressions, from newspaper strips to comic books”
(Sabin 1993:5). The birth date of comics is usually made to coincide with that of Yellow
Kid, a character created by Richard F. Outcalt whose strips irst appeared on the pages
of New York newspapers in 1894 (see Figure 1.1, centre fold); this was not only one of
the irst comics to be printed in full colour and to contain dialogues within balloons in
the pictures, but most of all “the irst to demonstrate that a comic strip character could
be merchandised proitably” (Olson, n.d.: online).
Within a few years ‘the funnies’ were joined by daily strips in black and white, and
since the Sunday pages and daily strips created by early masters of American comics
such as Winsor McCay and George Harriman (see e.g. Carlin et al. 2005), the history of
comics in the world has evolved within diferent cultural traditions, but often bearing
the mark of translation.
American comics rapidly travelled across the world and merged with other traditions
of ‘drawn stories’. The most famous European ‘proto-comics’ are perhaps those created
by the Swiss teacher and painter Rodolphe Töpfer (1799-1846) (see Groensteen 1999,
2005a), who in 1837 published the irst of a series of illustrated comedies in the form of
booklets, and the German Wilhem Busch’s (1832-1908) Max und Moritz illustrated stories
 Comics in Translation: An Overview

in verse, which were published in 1865 and which directly inspired the American comic
strip Katzenjammer Kids. However, most if not all European countries had a tradition of
printed visual art (see Martín 2000 on Spanish protocomics, Pilcher and Brooks 2005 and
Sabin 1993 on British protocomics, Bona n.d. and Gadducci 2004 on Italian protocomics),
and drawn stories started to appear consistently in print at the beginning of the twentieth
century, published mostly in magazines for children.
In the US, comic strips were not exclusively directed at children. Newspapers included
both series which were read by the whole family, usually in Sunday pull-out sections, and
others which were speciically targeted at adults, usually daily strips. In contrast, European
drawn stories were perceived exclusively as children’s literature and often produced for
educational purposes rather than for entertainment. They were mostly meant to provide
young readers with an introduction to the written world, and images were given a strictly
subordinate role in the narration. Drawings were merely meant to illustrate written stories,
as was seen it in a conception of education which strongly underlined the primacy of
the written word (Detti 1984). Accordingly, the register of the language used was that
of written rather than spoken communication and, in contrast with American comics, at
irst (proto)comics in the rest of the world did not contain balloons, but only narrations
written underneath the pictures.
Speech balloons began to appear only later in the twentieth century outside the
United States, and can thus be considered a distinguishing feature of comics as an Ameri-
can form of visual narrative. In Japan balloons were irst used in 1923 in the Adventures
of Shōchan by Oda Shōsei and Kabashima Katsuichi (Orsi 1998:28); in France in 1925 in
Zig et Puce by Alain Saint-Ogan (Fresnault-Deruelle 1990:30); in Italy from 1932, most
notably in the translations of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse and in those of Alex Raymond’s
Flash Gordon (Laura 1997).
In the 1930s the United States witnessed an explosion of comic strips, which also
featured adventure themes drawn in a realistic style, and the rise of the comic book form:
cheap publications in a format smaller than newspapers and containing usually 16 to
32 pages in colours. Comic books irst appeared as collections of daily strips and then
as periodical publications containing original materials, most notably the new super-
hero genre featuring costumed people with super powers, heralded by Joe Siegel and
Simon Shuster’s Superman (1938). For most of this and the following decade, translated
American comics constituted the lion’s share of comics published in European, South
American and Asian countries, and spurred the growth of the art form, so that American
conventions for comics gave a primary contribution to forging national comics traditions
and industries.
The ‘Golden Age’ of American comics drew to a close in the 1950s when, after the
highlights of the 1930s and 1940s, comic strips and books began to wane in quality if
not in quantity. Comic book readers became less interested in the superheroes that had
accompanied them during the war efort and turned their attention to comics dealing
with crime, romance, exotic adventures featuring scantily dressed heroines, and horror.
A moral campaign directed at protecting the population, and the youth in particular,
against the bad inluence of comics, as most notably depicted in the book Seduction of
Federico Zanettin 

the Innocent by the American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham (1954), produced consider-
able social alarm (on horror comics and the anti-comics crusade see D’Arcangelo, this
volume). Fearing and anticipating legislative measures, American publishers established
their own ‘Comics Code Authority’, which enforced a very strict policy of self-censorship
on contents. As a result, the lourishing production of comic books in the US was curbed;
it began to regain ground only in the 1960s, though mostly restricted to syndicated hu-
morous strips and superhero comic books targeting male adolescents.1 Whereas rules
and legislation controlling comics were similarly enforced elsewhere in the world in the
1950s,2 the outcomes were diferent. Many European countries reacted to the dimin-
ishing stream of American comics with a surge in the publication of works by national
authors. For instance, new national comic strips and books for children lanked those
created under the Disney imprint, whose production moved almost entirely outside
of the US, most notably to Italy and the Nordic countries.3 European comic books and
magazines contained not only the translations of American comics, but also stories by
native authors which partly continued American adventure themes and genres and partly
introduced new ones. In France, Belgium and Italy, which were perhaps the European
countries where comics reached the widest readership as well as cultural recognition,
comic books and magazines contained stories whose content and treatment of themes
were not conined to child or adolescent imagery. In Italy in the 1960s, for instance, pock-
etbooks whose contents were crime, horror and explicit pornography became popular
publications, joining classical adventure comic books, especially of the Western genre,
on news-stands. Original comics, especially those in French, were also translated into
other European languages, rivalling American ones.
The 1960s and 1970s witnessed also the establishment of a new type of comics ad-
dressed to educated adults rather than to a popular readership. This new type, most
notably by Franco-Belgian, Italian and Argentinian authors, were usually irst serialized
in comic magazines and then collected in books. Such publications were characterized
by a more pronounced authorial stance and the lack of periodicity, i.e. they were often
complete stories rather than regular series, and the accent was on individual creators
rather than standardized characters and plots. In the United States, underground comics
(or commix) re-introduced adult contents (sex, drugs and politics being the main subject
matters) in the late 1960s and 1970s, but comics fully resurfaced as a product for literate

1
The 1960s are known as the ‘Silver Age’ of comics in the US, when a ‘second generation’ of superheroes, such
as Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four (published by Marvel) joined ranks with ‘irst generation’ characters such
as Superman and Batman (published by DC).
2
Comics have been the frequent target of censorship, which has particularly afected foreign comics, to the
extent that, for example, American comics were banned by totalitarian regimes in Europe in the irst half of the
twentieth century, but also from the UK in 1955 under the Harmful Publications Act (Gravett 2006:3). Explicit
censorship on the part of governmental bodies still dictates which comics are published in some countries
(Zitawi, this volume), and mechanisms of self-censorship similarly operate a process of pre-selection in other
countries (Baccolini and Zanettin, this volume).
3
The Milan-based Disney Italy has been responsible since 2001 for managing the world market of Disney maga-
zines (Occorsio 2006:9), and today Disney comics are produced for the most part in Italy: around 70% according
to Castelli (1999: online) and Restaino (2004:145), while Occorsio has the Italian production at 50%, or 11,000
pages a year. Other main Disney comics-producing countries are Denmark, France, Spain and Brazil.
 Comics in Translation: An Overview

adults only in the 1980s. Since then, American mainstream publishers (DC and Marvel
comics), together with a growing number of ‘independent’ publishers, began to produce
new lines of ‘graphic novels’, a term adopted to create a new public image for comics and
to signal that they had achieved ‘grown-up status’.4
Meanwhile, in Japan the comics industry had been growing exponentially since the
period following World War II into the single largest comics industry in the world. Today
the business volume of comics in Japan is 50 times as big as that of the United States (the
second largest) and takes up about 40% of all the printed material published in the coun-
try – as opposed to approximately 3% in the US (Pilcher and Brooks 2005:90). While the
inluence of translated American comics was clearly felt in the earliest period, Japanese
comics, or manga, have developed into their own variety, which comprises a vast range
of diverse genres targeted at specialized readerships. Japanese comics currently fall into
ive main categories, shonen (‘boys’), shojo (‘girls’) redisu or redikomi (‘ladies’), seijin (‘adult
erotica’) and seinen (‘young men’), subdivided into a myriad of sub-genres and covering
just about every subject matter, from cooking to parenting for young hip mums, from
table and computer games to business and sports, from religion to martial arts (Pilcher
and Brooks 2005:93). Japanese comics have been translated in Asian countries since the
1960s, but remained practically unknown in the West until the 1980s. From the 1990s on
they inundated Western markets. Currently manga represent around 50% of all comics
published in translation in Western countries (Jüngst, this volume).
By and large we can distinguish between importing countries, where the production
of native titles is paralleled by a sometimes even higher number of comics in translation,
and exporting countries, where the market is covered mostly by internal production
(Kaindl 1999:264). Superhero comics are distributed across the entire English speaking
world, and they feature pre-eminently within comic books production not only in the
US and Canada, but also in the UK, Ireland, Australia and India, among others (ToutenBD
2004), as well as in most of Europe and South America in translation. European comics
are a small percentage of those published in the US, and usually belong to the ‘graphic
novel’ category, whereas American comics are translated in large numbers in Europe and
Asia, as well as elsewhere in the world.
American comics have exerted a lasting inluence on world comics, not only be-
cause they have been and still are translated (or republished in other English speaking
countries) in large numbers, but also because they have introduced genres and models
(themes, drawing styles, visual conventions) which have been incorporated and de-
veloped within other national traditions. Japanese comics currently play a similar role.
In Asian countries ‘manga’ have replaced ‘comics’ as a dominating cultural model and
source of reference and inspiration (Ng 2003, Mahamood 2003), and both in Europe and
America not only are original manga (in Japanese) sold in comic book stores, but native
manga-style stories have started to appear along with translated publications (e.g. ‘le

4
The term ‘graphic novel’ irst appeared in the 1960s, but it began to gain currency only after the publication
of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God in 1978 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel). British authors
such as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, together with the Americans Art Spiegelman and Frank Miller, have been
instrumental in this new development.
Federico Zanettin 

nouvelle manga’ movement in France, ‘spaghetti manga’ in Italy and ‘Amerimanga’ pro-
ductions in the US; see Pellitteri 2006, Jüngst, this volume).

1. Aspects of Comics

Comics have undergone diverse historical and geographical developments, and some
genres, often associated with a particular format, are more known and widespread in
some areas than in others. As Pilcher and Brooks (2005:12) explain,

Depending where you come from, most people’s concept of comic books is either
that of Spider-Man and Batman, ‘juvenile’ strips like The Beano, Tintin and Astérix
or, more recently the all-encompassing term ‘manga’… In some countries like
Britain and Singapore, comics are regarded as a juvenile form of entertainment. In
others such as France, they are a highly regarded form of expression – The Ninth
Art – while in Japan, comics are so integral to its culture and society that it would
be impossible to imagine the country without them.

Today, comics are published over the ive continents. Almost every country in the world
has its own comics industry, and each regional tradition has developed its own brands
of them, including Africa, where new authors, most notably from Francophone Congo
and Anglophone South Africa are now being brought to the general attention (Federici
and Marchesini Reggiani 2002, 2004, 2006; Lent 2006). A typology of world comics, not
to mention a presentation of the main authors and characters, is well beyond the scope
of this introduction.5 However, this section attempts a general overview of interrelated
aspects such as genre, readership and publication/distribution form, since these may
have a direct impact on comics in translation.

1.1 Genre

Depending on the theoretical framework adopted and on the context in which the term is
used, comics have been variously termed a ‘genre’, ‘medium’, ‘language’, ‘semiotic system’,
etc. For example, by ‘language’ of comics we could mean both the natural language in
which the verbal component is expressed, or the ‘grammar and semantics’ of the medium/
genre. The term ‘genre’ on the other hand, if broadly deined as a type of publication, may
be used to distinguish comics from other printed products such as written or illustrated
books. However, it would appear more appropriate to refer to the genres of comics rather
than to comics as a genre. Over the years and across the world comics have in fact devel-
oped a whole range of genres which may well compare to those of written literature and
cinema. Like most printed matter, comics are mainly produced and read for leisure or for
educational purposes and can generally be categorized according to their primary func-
tion (entertainment vs. instruction). Most comics belong to ictional/narrative genres,
5
See e.g. Horn (1976/1999), Restaino (2004), Pilcher and Brooks (2005) and various essays in the International
Journal of Comic Art (since 1999) for a survey of diferent national traditions and authors. For further reference
on the history and criticism of comics, see Spehner (2005).
 Comics in Translation: An Overview

but a variety of instructional and educational genres have been and are produced in
diferent parts of the world, for diferent age groups and readerships.
While it is often not easy to trace clear boundaries between genres, we may distin-
guish among three main types of ictional (super-)genres, namely comedy, epics and
tragedy. The irst super-genre, comedy, is sometimes identiied with the whole form,
since, as pointed out above, historically the word comics refers to the American news-
paper text type of humorous comics strips whose heroes were mostly ‘funny animals’
(e.g. Disney characters), children and pets. However, the super-genre of comedy includes
also strips and books only targeted at adults and which range from gag and slapstick
humour to political and social satire. The second super-genre, epics, includes a perhaps
even wider array of genres, which have had varied success over time and are not equally
represented in all countries. Popular genres include crime and detective iction, horror,
science-iction, romance, war, sports, adventures in exotic scenarios and historical set-
tings (from Africa to the American West, from the Japanese Middle Ages to the present),
and erotica, as well as serious ‘graphic novels’. The third super-genre, tragedy, is more
recent (or less studied as such), and has perhaps been more developed in Japanese and
American comics than in European ones (Groensteen 2005b).
Educational (or instructional) comics can be subdivided into ‘technical’ and ‘at-
titudinal’ (Eisner 1985:142). Comics designed to explicitly instruct young readers on
subjects such as history, religion and politics, or on proper behaviour and adherence
to moral rules, have existed since the beginning of the form. Comics are also being
used as a source of material for education in general, including language teaching and
learning. Non-ictional genres, both for children and adults, include – among other
things – biography, autobiography and journalism, as well as non-narrative texts such
as how-to manuals, philosophy textbooks (e.g. Osborne and Edney 1992) and essays on
the language of comics (e.g. McCloud 1993). Educational comics, both ‘technical’ and
‘attitudinal’, seem to have a relevant role to play in developing countries, where they
can often reach illiterate populations or groups speaking minority languages (Gravett
2006, Jüngst, this volume).

1.2 Readership

The form and content of comics may vary not only according to the age of the target
readership they address – a irst obvious distinction being that between comics for
children and comics for adults – but also in relation to other target group variables
such as genre/sex, occupation, etc. In the US, where comic books in the 1930s opened
the market to young readers (Restaino 2004:121-125), the super-hero genre primarily
addressing male adolescents still remains the mainstream production. In Japan, an
extremely developed system of genres addresses various combinations of age, gender,
social and occupational groups with diferent brands of comics. Furthermore, target
readerships may overlap, so that, for instance, while some genres may be exclusively
targeted at adults (e.g. comics involving violence, sex, or philosophy) it is rarely the case
that comics addressed primarily to children, like all children’s literature (Lathey 2006,
Federico Zanettin 

Oittinen 2006), do not imply an adult audience to some extent. Even within superhero
comics of American origin or inspiration, some variations and subgenres have appeared
which appeal primarily to an adult rather than to a younger readership.
A second aspect concerns the often assumed status of comics as para- or sub-literature,
as opposed to ‘serious’, high-brow cultural products which supposedly appear only in
written form. Comics have often been described as popular literature for poorly educated
readers, repetitious mass products with no intrinsic artistic quality and written by anony-
mous hacks – if not as dangerous vehicles of moral corruption. Like many mass culture
products, most comics are in fact based on stereotypical plots and characters which
make for recognizable narrative structures (Eco 1994), and quite a few serial publications
have met and meet low quality standards, being poorly written and drawn. While this
would not be in itself a reason not to do research on comics (Fresnault-Deruelle 1990),
it amounts to a blatant over-generalization. Comics production ranges in fact from ‘low-
brow’ to ‘hi-brow’ and, as Restaino (2004:26) convincingly argues, some comics have the
same complexity and require the same reading efort (and ofer the same reading reward)
as works by ‘serious’ prose writers such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and
Virginia Woolf.
Again, in diferent countries and times comics may primarily address a certain reader-
ship rather than another, and this may have implications for the way translated comics
are perceived and the strategies used to translate (or not translate) them. For instance,
Scatasta (2002) argues that whereas translations of ‘low brow’ comics literature, which
represents the largest segment of readership, are dictated by the market and are gen-
erally target-oriented, translations of ‘high-brow’ comics literature are instead more
source-oriented.

1.3 Production and Distribution

The allocation of genres and readerships both within and across regional productions
is also mirrored by a variety of publication formats. In the US, the two most well known
formats are the newspaper comic strip and the comic book. Comic strips are by necessity
self-contained narrations, which are meant to be read on a daily or weekly basis. Among
newspaper strips, humorous strips are usually self-conclusive, a series of variations on a
restricted number of themes and situations ending up with a inal gag, whereas adven-
ture strips develop longer plots. Even adventure strips, however, to some extent have
their own narrative structure: the irst panel usually recalls the previous day’s episode
and the last panel introduces an element of suspense, so that each daily episode can be
read in isolation. In many European and Asian countries comic strips as a newspaper text
type are less widespread – or, as in Italy, almost unknown – and the preferred formats
of publication are the comic magazine and the comic book. Stories are either printed in
installments in anthological magazines – and the most successful ones are then reprinted
in volumes – or they are published directly in book form. Popular series are published
in self-concluding episodes or in installments, usually on a monthly basis, whereas
‘graphic novels’ are often published as ‘stand-alone’ volumes, in a variety of formats. As
 Comics in Translation: An Overview

Rota (this volume) notes, the publication format of comic books, rather than their genre,
usually determines their allocation on the shelves of comic bookshops and bookstores.
The typical American superhero comic book is a stapled periodical booklet containing
a few dozen pages (including advertisements) of high-testosterone adventures printed
in four colours on low quality paper, while graphic novels are usually longer (up to 200
pages) and contain non-serialized stories printed on good quality paper and glittering
full colours, targeted at a readership on average older and more diversiied than that of
traditional comic book readers (mostly male teenagers). In Italy, the current most com-
mon format for popular comics is the ‘notebook’ or ‘bonelli’ format (from the name of the
major Italian comic books publisher, Sergio Bonelli Editore), of around a hundred pages,
printed in black and white. The typical French format is the album, hard bound, large
(A4) paper size, 48 to 64 pages and in full colours, sold in bookshops and addressed to
an upper-market readership. Manga are usually irst published in monthly anthologies
and then in smaller pocket-size books called tankōbon, consisting of 300-400 pages, all in
black and white (and, of course, they are read from right to left and from top to bottom).
A story can go on for a few thousands pages, perhaps in episodes, but many stories have
a proper beginning and an end (see Rafaelli 1997 for a review of comic book formats).
Popular comic books are based on ixed characters, whose adventures are often serial-
ized by a team of script writers and draughtsmen who ensure continuity and periodicity.
Other, often more ‘intellectual’ comics, are instead usually produced by a single author or
pair, and although very successful characters may be featured in a series of adventures
over the years, they are not periodical publications.
When comics are translated a change of genre, readership, publication format (or a
combination of the three) may be involved which will then govern primary translation
choices, as will become apparent in many of the articles contained in this volume. For
example, a change in the form of production and distribution (e.g. serial to non-serial
publication, publication in newspaper vs. publication in magazine) may lead to diferent
translation strategies and audience design. When American comic strips such as George
McManus’s Bringing up Father (translated as Arcibaldo e Petronilla) were irst published in
Italy at the beginning of the last century on the pages of Il Corriere dei Piccoli and other
similar magazines for children, the balloons were deleted and the images retouched,
and rhymed sentences narrating the stories were added below each panel, in conformity
with Italian drawn stories. Actually, the Italian word for ‘comics’, i.e. ‘fumetti’ – literally
meaning ‘balloons’, shows how much this particular device was identiied with the form
visual narratives had developed in the United States. Notwithstanding the ban imposed
on American comics by the Fascist regime in the second half of the 1930s,6 the ‘fumetti’
were subsequently appropriated by Italian culture. A second example comes from the
Italian translation of the irst episode of Milton Canif’s Steve Canyon, which was originally
published on a Sunday page in the US. The Italian weekly magazine L’avventura published
as a irst installment only the irst 7 out of 11 panels of the original Sunday page, thus
destroying the narrative tension of the original (Eco 1994:159).

6
Disney comics were the latest to be banned because of Mussolini’s liking for them (De Giacomo 1995).
Federico Zanettin 

The prototypical medium of comics is printed paper, either in the form of newspapers,
magazines or comic books. However, since the 1990s comics have ventured onto the
Internet, where they have found a congenial environment. This is because while on the
one hand “computers make use of the imagery and of some of the conventions of the lan-
guage of comics”, on the other “comics can beneit from the immense possibilities ofered
by computer graphics” (Saraceni 2003:95). Some critics (most notably McCloud 2000)
have argued that the electronic medium has the potential to transform the way comics
are created and read. The Internet is presented as both the site of a radical aesthetic
evolution and as a means to revolutionize distribution. On the one hand, by exploiting
features of ‘electronic canvases’ such as scroll-down capabilities and hypertextual links,
the electronic environment may change the form and mechanisms of production and
consumption of comics. On the other, the global network may favour the creation of di-
rect links between authors and readers, who would purchase webcomics through online
transactions and bypass intermediaries. Other critics are more wary of the possibilities
of the medium and simply maintain that “digital technology ofers new avenues of aes-
thetic experimentation for comic artists” and that the Internet “has given some comic
artists a modest prosperity that they would not have without the internet as a means
of distribution” (Fenty et al. 2004:2). Print has remained the main form of publication for
comics, while the Internet is used to distribute and archive comics already published in
print such as strips syndicated in newspapers, and as an outlet for self-publication by
a growing number of authors (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcomics, http://
www.thewebcomiclist.com).
While an efect of online publication can be the worldwide availability of a comic in
its original (albeit electronic) form rather than in translation, a development of interest
to Translation Studies is the practice of scanlation. This consists in scanning, translating
and distributing on the Internet unoicial electronic editions of manga, prior to publica-
tion in print. Scanlation and fansubs, the unoicial subtitled editions of anime (Japanese
animation ilms), are usually tolerated by publishers and oicial distributors because
of their promotional value, since scanlated manga and fansubs often efectively pilot
commercial publication. While these practices are carried out by comics and anime fans
– amateur translators who do not necessarily comply with prevailing professional norms
for comics and cartoon translation – their choices orient the decisions of professional
translators (Ferrer Simó 2005) and highlight the inluence comics readers exert on shap-
ing translation strategies (see Jüngst, this volume).

2. Comics, Semiotics and Translation

One of the irst mentions of comics in the literature on Translation Studies is probably
to be found in Jakobson (quoted in Gorlée 1994:163): “however ludicrous may appear
the idea of the Iliad and Odyssey in comics, certain structural features of their plot
are preserved despite the disappearance of the verbal shape” (Jakobson 1960:350).
Jakobson is here making reference to his well-known distinction between three kinds
of translation, or “ways of interpreting verbal signs”, namely, intersemiotic translation
10 Comics in Translation: An Overview

or ‘transmutation’, deined as “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of

nonverbal sign systems”; interlingual translation, or ‘translation proper’, deined as
“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of another language”; and
intralingual translation, or ‘rewording’, deined as “an interpretation of verbal signs by
means of the same language” (Jakobson 1992 [1959]:145).
In Jakobson’s deinition, then, translation always involves the interpretation of
verbal signs (i.e. natural languages) into other signs which can be verbal or non-verbal
languages or sign systems. While Jakobson’s exempliication of intersemiotic transla-
tion does not perhaps suggest a high consideration of comics, it deines them as a
kind of non-verbal, multimedial [sic] language. Typical examples of transmutation are
the translations from verbal language into visual languages, as in the plastic arts, archi-
tecture, painting, sculpture and photography; into auditive languages, such as music
and song; into kinesic languages, such as ballet and pantomime; and into multimedia
languages, such as cinema and opera (Jakobson also provides the example of “transpos-
ing Wuthering Heights into a motion picture”). According to Gorlée (1994:162), in the
case of ‘transmutation’, the term ‘translation’ has to be intended metaphorically, since
visual, kinesic and multimedia languages are ‘artistic codes’ and ‘languages only in a
metaphorical manner of speaking’.
Jakobson’s model has been further elaborated, most notably by Toury (1986) and
Eco (2001, 2003). Toury (1986) proposes a irst-level distinction between intra- and
intersemiotic translation. Within intrasemiotic translation a second-level distinction is
posited between intra- and inter-systemic translation. This allows for the inclusion in
the semiotic model not only of types of intersemiotic translation involving transmuta-
tion between verbal and nonverbal sign systems, but also between non verbal (or not
exclusively verbal) ‘languages’ (in a metaphorical sense) such as, for example, music into
ilm or comics into sculpture.
Starting from the consideration that Jakobson was using ‘translation’ in a metaphorical
way as a synonym for ‘interpretation’, Eco (2003) proposes a typology of forms of inter-
pretation, which include interlingual interpretation, or ‘translation proper’ as well as
other forms of interpretation within or between other semiotic systems. Thus, intrasys-
temic interpretation includes rewording, that is ‘translation’ within natural languages
(as in synonymy, paraphrase and comment) as well as ‘translation’ within other semiotic
systems (e.g. scale reproduction in visual arts, changing a piece from major to minor in
music), whereas intersystemic interpretation includes not only ‘translation proper’, but
also rewriting, ‘translation’ between other semiotic systems and adaptation or trans-
mutation (what Jakobson and Toury term ‘intersemiotic translation’).7 According to this
typology, we should ultimately regard ‘translation proper’ as an interpretative activity
taking place between ‘verbal systems’, i.e. diferent natural languages. However, natural

7
Eco posits also a third irst-level category, that of interpretation by ‘transcription’ (mechanical substitution).
A further type of intrasystemic interpretation is performance (diferent interpretations of a song or diferent
performances of a drama), while parasynonymy, which can be illustrated by amplifying the phrase ‘that one
over there’ by pointing at the object with a inger, is a type of intersystemic interpretation which, like adapta-
tion, involves a mutation in the semiotic continuum rather than in the substance (see also Torop 2002).
Federico Zanettin 11

languages are not the only ‘semiotic systems’ which may be ‘translated’ (in a metaphori-
cal sense), and semiotic systems such as music, painting, illustration and dance, as well
as ‘multimedia languages’ such as cinema and theatre, can go through interpretative
processes similar to those of verbal language.
Examples of transmutation involving comics abound, since comics can and have
been adapted from and into a variety of other art forms, such as written literature,
cinema (including animated cartoons), painting, music, song, sculpture, pantomime, etc.
Especially fruitful has been the relationship between comics and cinema, and between
comics and other visual languages, such as illustration and graphic design. Close relatives
of comics are cartooning and animated cartoons, both of which make use of drawings.
This relationship is underlined by the overlapping meaning of the terms used: thus in
English ‘cartoons’ may refer to all three. Cartoons ‘proper’ difer from comics in that they
consist of a single panel or vignette, although they are similar in that they share many
of the same conventions, e.g. speech balloons, caricatural drawing style, action lines,
and so on, and in fact many comic artists practice both forms. Animated cartoons (like
all ilms) difer from ‘comics’ in that comics are based on ellipsis, so that the time of nar-
ration is independent from that of seeing/reading, while in motion pictures (including
cartoons) time and vision coincide.8 Animated cartoons and comics also have much is
common, and the two forms have strong historical links and have inluenced each other
in both directions, for instance Walt Disney characters or The Simpsons by Matt Groening,
which appeared irst as animated cartoons, or the many ‘anime’ which Osamu Tezuka
derived from his manga stories.9
The relationship between cinema and comics has been one of continuous inter-
change. On the one hand cinema has been for comics an endless source of plots,
characters, faces and techniques, and many successful ilms have been adapted into
comics or have generated some sort of comics sequel. On the other, ilmic genres have
been inluenced by comics (see D’Arcangelo, this volume, on the inluence of horror
comics on cinema). Characters from comics have often been the source of both cartoons
and ilms with real people, notably superhero comics, many of which have irst been
transposed into animated series and, especially in the last few years – thanks to special
efects and computer graphics, into ilms featuring real actors (Barbieri 1991, Festi
2006).10 The adaptation of a verbal narrative to a comic book (Baccolini and Zanettin, this
volume, on Art Spiegelman’s Maus) can also be seen as an example of transmutation.
A second type of ‘comics in translation’ is represented by comics which are republished
as comics, rather than ‘translated’ into another semiotic environment. ‘Republication’
may however entail a number of diferent things. There are reprints, new editions and
new versions of comics. Comics may be subject to ‘rewriting’ (in a metaphorical sense),

8
In fact, the translation of cartoons has more in common with ilm dubbing and subtitling than with comics
translation, since in moving pictures the verbal component is spoken rather than written.
9
In Japanese, the word ‘manga’ may also refer both to ‘comics’ and ‘anime’ (a shortened borrowing for ‘animated
pictures’).
10
One particular form of ‘comics’ are the storyboards which are often used during cinema production. Eisner
(1985:146) discusses storyboards as a type of instructional comics.
1 Comics in Translation: An Overview

as comic characters and stories may change in time and space (e.g. new versions of the
same Spider-Man story or ‘parallel’ versions of Spider-Man, both in America (Spider-Man
‘classic’, ‘2040’, ‘ultimate’) and elsewhere (e.g. Japanese and Indian versions of Spider-
Man), as can be seen from Figure 1.2 (centre fold).
When a comic is reprinted or republished, either in the same or in a diferent country/
area, other semiotic systems are ‘translated’ besides verbal language (which may itself
not be translated, as verbal text remains unchanged in most reprints). Not only might
‘reprints’ of the same stories be (partially) re-written and re-drawn, but a comic may be
reproduced with a diferent page size and layout, diferent panels arrangement and
reading direction, in colour rather than in black and white and vice versa, and diferent
types of ‘translation’ may co-exit at diferent levels.
All the ‘languages’ used by comics can be ‘translated’ within and/or between semiotic
systems. However, since translation takes place between texts rather than languages,
it “does not involve comparing a language (or any other semiotic system) with another
semiotic system; it involves passing from a text ‘a’, elaborated according to a semiotic
system ‘A’, into a text ‘b’, elaborated according to a semiotic system ‘B’” (Eco and Nergaard
1998:221). From a semiotic point of view, the translation of comics is thus concerned
with diferent layers of interpretative activities, which can be variously conceptualized
as inter- or intra-semiotic or systemic, depending on one’s deinition of system.
This volume is primarily concerned with the republication of comics in a country dif-
ferent from that of original publication, which usually involves translation between two
natural languages. However, it seems important to stress that comics are primarily visual
texts which may (or may not) include a verbal component, and that in the translation of
comics interlingual interpretation (‘translation proper’) happens within the context of
visual interpretation. Language is only one of the systems (in as far as we are happy with
deining a language as a system) involved in the translation of comics, which both as
‘originals’ and ‘translations’ simultaneously draw on a number of diferent sign systems.
The translation of comics into another language is primarily their translation into
another visual culture, so that not only are diferent natural languages such as English,
Japanese, Italian or French involved, but also diferent cultural traditions and diferent
sets of conventions for comics. In other words, the translation of comics does not only
imply the interlinguistic (or intralinguistic) replacement of verbal material. Comics
published in other languages may also undergo a number of changes which involve
the interpretation of other sign systems, not just ‘translation proper’ between natural
languages (Rota, this volume).

3. The Language(s) of Comics

In semiotic terms, comics can be described essentially as a form of visual narration which
results from both the mixing and blending of pictures and words.11 That is, pictures and
words are not only co-present in comics as the two ends of a scale which encompasses

11
General studies which analyze comics mainly from a semiotic perspective include Fresnault-Deruelle (1990),
Gasca and Gubern (1988), Barbieri (1991), McCloud (1993), Peeters (2000), Groensteen (1999).
Federico Zanettin 1

iconic signs (the drawings) and symbolic signs (the words), but may be situated at various
points along a continuum of communication practices (Saraceni 2003:13-35). Pictures
can range from a maximum of realism, as in quasi-photographic representations, to a
maximum of abstraction and iconicity, as in stylized ‘cartoony’ drawings. Words, on the
other hand, do not only have a purely ‘verbal’ meaning but are also embodied with a
visual, almost physical force. Words have graphic substance, forms, colours or layouts
which make them ‘part of the picture’. Not only can there be a calligraphic use of letters
and words, but even lettering, as Will Eisner (1985:10) expresses it, “treated ‘graphically’
and in the service of the story, functions as an extension of the imagery”. Furthermore,
“[t]he interanimation of meaning between panels can afect the manner in which the
reader blends the words and pictures in a particular panel. For instance, once a reader
learns what a character or location looks like in one panel, the depiction in subsequent
panels can become superluous unless new actions or aspects are presented” (Duncan
2002:140). These mixes and blends may appear in diferent combinations and weight-
ings according to the type, genre and target readerships of particular comics, and be
modiied in translation. For example, German publishers have used machine lettering
for a long time, a sign of ‘serious’ writing, both in original and translated comics (Kaindl
1999, Jüngst, this volume).
Like cinema and theatre, comics are a syncretic semiotic environment, encompass-
ing texts, media and discourses. In comics, diferent semiotic systems are co-present
and interplay at diferent levels, and are culturally determined along dimensions of
space and time. This multiplicity and heterogeneity of semiotic systems, referred to by
Barbieri (1991) as the ‘languages of comics’, includes visual systems such as illustration,
caricature, painting, photography and graphics; temporality systems, comprising written
narratives, poetry and music; and mixed systems of images and temporality, i.e. cinema
(from which comics derive techniques such as shot, angle, etc.) and theatre, inasmuch as
in comics the characters are ‘shown acting’ and dialogues are ‘performed’. Because of the
possibility of representing the non verbal components of interaction (body language,
facial expressions, use of space, etc.), dialogues in comics have a quality that is more akin
to drama than to novels.
What differentiates comics from other forms of visual communication such as il-
lustration, photography and painting is that comics are formed by the juxtaposition
of at least two panels – which may or may not include words, in a sequence.12 The
narration is produced by the sequential gap between images, and the reader is left
to fill in that gap with expectations and world knowledge: “the recognition by the
reader of real-life people portrayed in the art and the addition of ‘in-between’ action
are supplied by the reader out of his own experience” (Eisner 1985:140) or, as McCloud
aptly puts it (Figure 1.3):

12
It is in fact sometimes diicult to draw a precise line between a single vignette and a sequence. The white
space between panels, ie. the ‘gutter’, may sometimes not be drawn even if it is understood to be there, or
some strips may occasionally consist of only one panel. Conversely, sequential panels may in fact contain
only one ‘scene’.
1 Comics in Translation: An Overview

Figure 1.: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, 1993, p. 68

The single panel, or ‘frame’ is the lower unit of meaning in comics (Horn 1976, Groen-
steen 2005a). However, in comic books as opposed to comic strips, the basic articulatory
unit is the page (Fresnault-Deruelle 1990). Comic books are ‘seen’ before they are read,
and ‘reading’ is in fact based on the tension between sequential narration and the use of
layout pagination for creative efects (Peeters 2000:39). Peeters identiies diferent types
of uses of the page, according to the relationship between the temporal/narrative and
the spatial/visual dimensions. Visual and narrative aspects can be autonomous, with
either one predominating. Narration predominates in ‘conventional’ uses, where each
panel is of equal size and neatly separated from the adjoining ones by white spaces (the
‘gutter’). This is the case, for example, of the irst American comic books, which were
simply collections of previously published newspaper strips.13 In ‘decorative’ uses the
visual dimension predominates, in its pictorial or compositional aspects, and the page
is read irst as a picture.
In ‘rhetorical’ and ‘productive’ uses, the dimensions, layout, visual efects etc. of panels
and pages are functional to the diegesis, rather than autonomous entities. The conven-
tional ‘grid’ may be altered, and the potential of using the size and shape of panels for
narrative or metalinguistic creativity had been in fact already fully exploited by Winsor
McCay on the Sunday pages which narrated the Adventures of Little Nemo at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century (Carlin 2005). Sometimes the gutter can be missing, and
readers have to imagine an ideal segmentation of a page into panels; or part of a panel
(e.g. a human igure or an object) can go over and beyond the border of a panel and

13
In collections of narrative daily strips, the irst panel of each strip was often modiied to erase the ‘summary
of previous events’.
Federico Zanettin 1

invade the space of an adjacent one (‘bleeds’), or the border of an external panel may
‘overlow’ and coincide with the limit of the page. This last stylistic device is consistently
used in manga (see Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.: Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami, Crying Freeman,

1986 (Italian edition by Granata Press, 1992)
1 Comics in Translation: An Overview

As an example of how the interplay of verbal text and images in a page may afect
(and be afected by) a translation, let us consider three diferent Italian translations of a
page from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen (Figure 1.5, centre fold).
Watchmen, written by Alan Moore (see D’Arcangelo, this volume, on Alan Moore),
drawn by Dave Gibbons and coloured by John Higgins, is usually credited as one of the
main contributions to American comics’ ‘coming of age’ in the 1980s (the others being
Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns) and to the
revitalization of the superhero genre (Sabin 1993). Watchmen was irst published as a
mini-series in 12 ‘chapters’ by DC comics between 1986 and 1987, and in Italy between
1990 and 1991 as a series of pullout booklets, of the same format of the original American
edition, attached to the comic magazine Corto Maltese. Both in the US and in Italy it was
soon after published in book form. A second Italian translation (in volume form) was
published in 2002 by Play Press, a small company specializing in American superheroes.
Finally, it was published again as a volume by Panini in 2005 and distributed with the
national newspaper La Repubblica.
The irst chapter of the story begins with two detectives investigating the violent
death of a character that was killed by being thrown out of a window from a tall building.
The detectives are on the crime scene and are seen on page 4 exiting the building and
discussing what course to give to the investigations. The construction of the page may
seem at irst sight rather ‘conventional’, with a standard, semi-ixed number of same-sized
panels repeating itself page after page. However, when the page is ‘read’ graphically, it
becomes apparent that two diferent ‘narrative tracks’ intermingle. The reconstruction
of the events in the dialogues between the two investigators is accompanied by a visual
lashback, a second ‘narrative track’ which is seen as if under a purple ilter, its panels
alternating with those of the main narrative track where things happen in ‘real time’. The
page is full of intra- and inter-textual references, both verbal and visual, e.g. the refer-
ence by one investigator to the ‘knot-tops’ in the irst panel is followed by a peripheral
view of one of these in the ifth panel; in the third panel we read some headlines from
a newspaper stand, in front of which there is a boy wearing a ‘winged’ cap who reads a
comic book, which are all elements functional to the narration; a new character, Rorshach,
is mentioned in panel 6, and readers will later learn that this is the same person crossing
the path of the two detectives wearing a sign in which the writing “the end is nigh” can
be inferred. Through panels 2, 4 and 6, we follow the fall of the victim from outside the
window and down to the street below. The point of view is that of a ixed camera, which
starting from the middle of the top row in the page follows the body until it becomes a
spot on the pavement. In the fourth panel, we can read an ‘of-screen’ comment made
by one of the detectives, who is suggesting that the investigation should not be too
widely publicized. The sentence in the box, “Well, what say we let this one drop out of
sight?”, thus acts also as a verbal commentary on the sequence shown in purple. In fact,
“this one” may be taken to refer both to the investigation and to the body falling down
the building.
The three Italian translations, by Stefano Negrini (1990/91), Alessandro Bottero (2002)
Federico Zanettin 1

and Gino Scatasta (2005), difer in a number of respects, including translation of the
dialogues in balloons. The translations of the text in panel 4 are as follows:

 “be’ che ne diresti se lasciassimo tutto nel dimenticatoio?” [lit. “well, what would you
say if we left it all in oblivion?”] (Negrini)
 “beh, credi che sia meglio che tutto inisca nel dimenticatoio?” [lit. “well, do you think
it is better that it all ends up in oblivion?”] (Bottero)
 “… sarebbe meglio lasciar cadere la cosa.” [lit. “…it would be better to let this thing
drop/fall.”] (Scatasta)

In the translations by Negrini and Bottero, the idiomatic meaning and the spoken register
efect of “let this one drop out of sight” are in some way recreated by recourse to the
expression “leave/end up it all in oblivion, which however fails to reproduce the ambigu-
ity provided by the dual verbal and visual reference of the original. The translation by
Scatasta, on the other hand, avoids the pitfalls of rendering too closely the structure of
the source verbal text, and by focusing instead on a visual reading of the page (Celotti,
this volume) condenses the piece of dialogue around the central communicative func-
tion of the utterance, the ambiguity of the verb ‘drop/cadere’.
A page is a unit of reading not only in the sense that each panel should be interpreted
in the context of page layout and composition, but also in the sense that, in stories which
last over several pages, each page should be interpreted in the sequential context of the
page(s) preceding and following. The efects of pagination on reading, often exploited in
comics for dramatic purposes, as when a splash action page in an adventure or superhero
comic book opens after a page illed with ‘regular’ panels leading up to the action, are
not unknown to works of written iction, ever since they were put to use by Lawrence
Sterne in Tristram Shandy (1759). In translated comics reading can be especially afected
by a change of publication format (Rota, this volume). When Watchmen was translated
in France, it was adapted to the French album format and published in six larger-sized
volumes, with new ‘classical’ covers, thus changing the graphical proportions, narrative
coherence and detailed structural construction of the original ‘graphic novel’ (Peeters
2000:61-63). A change in publication format may involve not only a change in the size
and shape of the page, but also a change of the colours, which may be altered, added
or subtracted (Jüngst, Rota, D’Arcangelo, Zanettin, all this volume), or in the reading
direction, which may be reversed (Jüngst, Rota, Zitawi, all this volume). Comics can also
be globally adapted to it reading habits and expectations of target users. For example,
the language of European comics is more literary than that of American ones (Sebastiani
2002), and their reading pace is usually slower (the rate of words to images is higher in
American comics, (D’Arcangelo and Zanettin 2004, Zanettin, this volume). The reading
pace is instead usually quicker in Japanese comics, where long sequences of pages
without verbal content are anything but uncommon.
Comics have also developed a recognizable – at least to comics readers – set of
conventions which, while already existing in visual art forms, proliferated in American
1 Comics in Translation: An Overview

newspaper strips and spread throughout the world, merging with indigenous traditions
of visual narratives, and which have come to be seen as the ‘articulatory grammar’ of
comics.
A irst prototypical feature is the presence of speech balloons, i.e. bubbles containing
verbal text in the form of direct speech to represent dialogues and thought. However,
narrative text in captions may also be used, as well as alphabetic signs outside balloons
and captions, as part of the drawings. Furthermore, while comics usually contain both
images and words, the density of the verbal component in relation to images varies, to
the point that some comics do not contain any words at all.
Other graphical and pictorial conventions have been developed to represent sounds,
movements and other aspects of sensorial experience. Sounds are usually represented
by onomatopoeic words, non-lexical strings of alphabetic symbols and punctuation
marks (Valero Garcés, this volume). Movements are expressed through motion lines.
Actions and concepts can be represented not only through (more or less) naturalistic
pictures and words, but also through ‘visual metaphors’ or pictograms, i.e. conventional
stylized representations which are intertextually recognized, such as a saw to represent
sleep or stars to represent pain in humorous comics (see Gasca and Gubern 1988 for a
description of an extensive repertoire).
Most ‘grammatical devices’ such as speech balloons, onomatopoeia and visual meta-
phors are used in comics produced in many diferent cultures and can be seen as central
to comics as an art form, while other features are perhaps less salient. However, there
is not one single ‘language’ of comics, as each regional tradition has developed its own
set of conventions and stylemes, as regards reading pace, drawing style, subject matter
and themes. Each of these regional varieties of comics can thus be seen as a ‘dialect’ of
the language of comics.
For instance, since Osamu Tezuka – a.k.a. the ‘Japanese Disney’ or ‘the God of Manga’
– who from the late 1940s revolutionized comics conventions in Japan by imposing his
own drawing and narrative style, manga conventions have begun to distance themselves
from those of Western comics. Tezuka brought the techniques of animated cartoons to
comics, developing the pace of Japanese comics storytelling by increasing the number of
panels used to narrate a story, which could go on for hundreds of pages. Another major
diference between most Western and Japanese comics is the type of transition between
panels. Whereas in Western comics ‘action-to-action’ transitions are the default choice,
manga often make use of transitions such as ‘moment-to-moment’, ‘subject-to-subject’
and ‘aspect-to-aspect’, thus highlighting mood and sense of place rather than action
(McCloud 1993:74-82). Mimicking the stylistic conventions of Disney cartoons, Tezuka
also introduced a way of representing characters’ faces, with large eyes, small noses, tiny
mouths, and lat faces, which is now perceived as typically Japanese.
Other notable diferences between manga and comics include the representation
of dialogue and thought, movement, the proportions of the human igure and visual
metaphors. For instance, in Western comics speech balloons are bubbles linked to char-
acters by a pointer called ‘tail’, and thought balloons are cloud-like bubbles with a tail of
Federico Zanettin 1

increasingly smaller circular bubbles. In manga, tails are much less common for speech
balloons, while the same convention used in American comics to represent thought is
used to represent whispered dialogue instead (see Figure 1.4). An awkward or speechless
moment is represented by an ellipsis over one’s head. Movement is represented not only
by speed lines, but also by ‘background blurs’, i.e. an overlay of straight lines to portray
the direction of movements.
Furthermore, manga have their own repertoire of visual metaphors, for instance a
white cross-shaped bandage to indicate pain, sweat drops to indicate bewilderment,
nervousness, or mental weariness, throbbing veins in the upper head region to indicate
anger or irritation, hatchings on the cheek to represent blushing. A character suddenly
falling onto the loor is a typically humorous reaction to something ironic happening.
All facial features shrinking, the nose disappearing, the character lifting of the loor and
the limbs being multiplied as if moving very fast may symbolize panic or, if with larger
facial features, comic rage.14
In the same way as American conventions (such as speech and thought balloons)
have entered European and Japanese traditions, Manga conventions are now exerting
a strong inluence on American and European ones.

4. Comics in Translation Studies Literature

About 30 years after the establishment of Translation Studies as an academic ield, quite
a large body of literature has been produced, widening the scope of the discipline to
spoken and multimedia translation, and to other forms of intercultural communication.
Many diferent translation products, processes and practices have been analyzed and
discussed, and it seems therefore almost surprising that relatively little has been written
on the translation of comics, which enjoy a wide readership and whose history is much
intertwined with translation.15
In an overview of research dedicated to comics within Translation Studies, Celotti
(2000:42-45; see also Kaindl 1999, Raskin 2004, Celotti, this volume) describes a situation

14
For a list of manga-speciic conventions, see ‘Manga’, Wikipedia (online) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga.
15
The relative paucity of studies dedicated to comics is, however, not unique to Translation Studies. As Eco
(2005:36) notes, while those who review a novel (or a ilm) do not have to start with a legitimization of written
literature, those who write about a comic (at least for the general public) often still preface what they have to
say about them with apologetic statements about their cultural legitimacy. This is not because the discourse
on comics is missing altogether from the public arena. Rather, on the one hand there is a poorly consolidated
tradition of scientiic and academic enquiry about comics which, as Eco suggests, may simply be due to the
fact that many academics do not read comics, and are therefore unable to talk about them. On the other hand,
a large part of the discourse on comics is taken up by fandom. The majority of writings about comics appear in
news-stand publications, fan magazines and, increasingly, Internet channels such as discussion forums, blogs
and fans’ web sites, which often provide an enthusiastic but uncritical approach, coupled with an extreme
attention to detail and a deep knowledge of the subject, including translation related aspects. Comics started
to attract the interest of scholars from the 1960s onwards, most notably in Italy and France (see Horn 1976,
Restaino 2004 and a number of forum articles in the International Journal of Comic Art for a history of comics
criticism). However, more than a century after their generally acknowledged birth, and having not only spread
throughout the world but also evolved into new and unforeseen directions, comics are increasingly gaining
critical attention.
0 Comics in Translation: An Overview

in which comics are mentioned only in passing in Translation Studies encyclopedias,

dictionaries and textbooks, and they are not usually included in analytical indexes.16
While in the last decade or so the number of publications on comics in translation has
been consistently growing and diversifying, as can be seen from a quick glance at the
dates of the about 150 items listed in the annotated bibliography found at the end of
this volume, the picture described by Celotti is still by and large accurate.
In some studies (e.g. Hatim and Mason 1990:18-20, 202, Harvey 1995, 1998) comics
are used in order to exemplify a type of translation procedure, strategy or orientation,
for example when discussing the translation of puns or the technique of compensation.
When not ignoring altogether the speciicity of the art form, such studies focus exclu-
sively on the verbal component of comics, thus treating them as if they were efectively
written-only texts. The comics discussed in these studies, as well as in a large percentage
of the research articles speciically dedicated to the translation of comics, are the French
series Astérix and Tintin. The discussion often focuses on detailed linguistic aspects,
analyzing the translation of features such as wordplays, proper names, onomatopoeia,
citations, allusions, or the use of spoken language. Astérix and Tintin are amongst the
most popular and translated comic series in the world, and having been translated into
more than 50 languages ofer rich material for research (Delesse, this volume). However,
their ‘overexposure’ in Translation Studies literature may have contributed to creating
or consolidating the perception that research on the translation of comics is almost
exclusively concerned with humorous language and children’s literature.
Comics are often presented as a type of multimedia text,17 and implicitly or explic-
itly addressed within a ‘constrained translation’ approach. According to Mayoral et al.
(1988:362), constrained translation difers from non-constrained translation in that in
the latter “in both SL and TL, the written language system is not accompanied by other
systems and … the message occupies only the visual channel”. This circumstance “will
condition our translation of the text” and “remove the condition of freedom which allows
us, in isolated written prose, to approach the highest degree of dynamic equivalence in
our translated text” (1988:363). While situating ‘constrained translation’ within an over-
all semiotic framework, such an approach exclusively focuses on ‘translation proper’,
considering natural languages as the only ‘systems’ which are afected by translation. It
is acknowledged that “non-linguistic systems … must be considered by the translator”,
but they are regarded as “not speciic objects of the translation process” (Mayoral et al.
1988:358).
According to Gottlieb (1998), comics, together with advertising and ilms, are poly-
semiotic texts, since they use visual and/or auditory channels in addition to the verbal

16
The only exceptions mentioned by Celotti are two textbooks in Spanish, Santoyo Mediavilla (1987) and
Rabadán (1991), which include a speciic discussion on the translation of comics.
17
However, while comics associate diferent semiotic systems (images and written text), they are visual narra-
tions which only trigger the sense of sight (Groensteen 2001). It could be argued, therefore, that comics are not,
strictly speaking, multimedia texts like ilms and theatre plays. Pellitteri (1998), on the other hand, contends
that the images in comics trigger a multisensorial experience, in that they not only stimulate the sense of sight
but also those of hearing, touch, smell and taste.
Federico Zanettin 1

channel of communication which is exclusively used in monosemiotic texts (e.g. written

books and radio programmes). Like ilm dubbing, comics involve isosemiotic translation
in that the same channel is used, writing for comics and speech for ilm dubbing.18 In
the translation of ilms (including cartoons) the translation is constrained by both visual
limitations (lip-synch for dubbing and legibility for subtitling) and temporal limitations.
In translated comics time remains a prerogative of the reader, while translation is seen
as constrained by visual limitations such as the space provided by balloons and captions
and the interplay of visual and verbal signs.
As Celotti (this volume) argues (see also Yuste Frías 2001), two assumptions often
underlie the ‘constrained translation’ approach: that written text inside speech bal-
loons and boxes is the only component of comics which may change in translation,
whereas everything else (more speciically, ‘the pictures’) remains unchanged (D’Oria
and Conenna 1979:24, Mayoral et al. 1988:359, Würstle 1991:162), and that images have
a ‘universal’ meaning (Rabadán 1991:296). Both these assumptions seem however to be
misconceived.
Verbal language is not the only component of comics which gets translated, since
visual components are often modiied as well, as is amply demonstrated by many of the
articles published in this volume and elsewhere. It is true that retouching the pictures,
for example to remove or redraw unwanted elements or to modify the size and shape
of balloons, involves extra costs for the publishers, and that commercial considerations
are usually at a premium, especially as far as ‘popular’ comics are concerned. However,
other social factors may intervene which justify such expenses, for example the prevailing
conventions for comics in a country or area (see, for example, the removal of balloons
from American comics in early twentieth-century Italy), direct or indirect censorship
(Kaindl 1999, Zanettin 2007, Zitawi, this volume), or speciic cultural and/or promotional
agendas (D’Arcangelo, this volume). Furthermore, current technologies have changed
the way comics, especially comics in translation, are produced. Traditionally, the transla-
tor would provide the publisher with a printed translation of the verbal content, which
would then be reviewed by an internal editor and handed to the letterer. After having
scratched away the original text from the balloons in the ilms with a razor blade, the
letterer would write the translation by hand in the empty balloons before the ilms
went to the printing press. Today the translation is received as a text ile, and lettering
is usually done with the help of a graphics programme, by erasing the original text and
importing the translated dialogues in the area of the balloons on the graphic ile. If
need be, the original handwritten characters can be scanned and reused as fonts in a
translated comic book, and dialogues can be ‘shrunk’ to it into balloons. Not only letter-
ing, but also other graphic adaptations involving the retouching of pictures have been
made simpler and less expensive by computer technology (Valero Garcès, this volume).
Furthermore, modiications involving a change in publication format, use of colours,
page layout, panels composition, etc. may even involve saving on costs, as happens for

18
Film subtitling instead involves diasemiotic translation, since a diferent channel is used (writing rather than
speech).
 Comics in Translation: An Overview

instance when a comic book originally printed in colour is printed in black and white
(D’Arcangelo, this volume), or when translated text is typewritten rather than handwrit-
ten (Zanettin, this volume).19
As for the supposedly universal nature of images, it seems clear that visual cultural
references, citations and allusions may well represent ‘cultural bumps’ (Leppihalme 1997)
and be subjected to diferent translation strategies. Anthea Bell (n.d.: online), for instance,
explains how a pun based on the interplay of text and images in an Astérix panel was
translated by reframing both verbal and visual context, for target readers who are less
familiar with the visual citation:20

This drawing parodies the dramatic painting by Géricault of the notorious incident
when a number of seamen were set adrift on a raft to die; their place is taken, in the
Asterixian rendering, by the pirates who are constantly having their ship scuttled
by the Gaulish heroes […] In the French, the pirate captain is exclaiming, ‘Je suis
médusé!’ = ‘dumbfounded’ – from the Gorgon Medusa whose gaze turned the
beholder to stone, but with reference here to the ship called La Méduse whose raft
and seamen were painted by Géricault. The solution, in English, was to use a pun
on Géricault/ Jericho (by Jericho!) instead – the pun itself was the idea of a friend
of the translators, who then worked it in by pointing up the artistic connotations
with a rueful: ‘We’ve been framed.’ To give a further clue to the pun, space in the
frame, bottom right, was used to add a footnote: ‘Ancient Gaulish artist’, which is
not present in the French.

Like verbal communication, visual communication relies on shared cultural assump-

tions. In his celebrated analysis of the irst page of Steve Canyon by Milton Canif, Eco
(1994 [1964]:138, 163) suggests that Italian readers of the Italian translation would not
read visual clues in the same way that American readers would. Not only would they
not be able to understand that the hero is an aircraft pilot because of missing verbal
clues (military slang), but they would probably also attribute to Steve Canyon’s ‘brunette’
secretary a familiar rather than an exotic connotation. The interpretation of visual signs
by the readers of a comic in translation is afected not only by possible alterations (re-
touching or removal) of (part of ) the picture, but also by ‘typographical’ changes such
as those involving format (e.g. lettering, colour, reading direction, etc.). For instance,
whereas the irst manga published in the West were ‘lipped’ to conform to Western read-
ing habits, most of them are now printed in the original right-to-left reading direction
(Jüngst, Rota this volume). Barbieri (2004) argues that this ‘philological’ approach can
in fact alter the perception of manga by Western readers. Images are not symmetrical,
and the disposition of bodily masses on the panel afects their interpretation, which is
often culture-speciic. For instance, while in the Western igurative tradition a movement
is perceived as luent and efortless if going from left to right and as diicult if going
in the opposite direction, the reverse is true in the Japanese igurative tradition. Thus,

19
I would like to thank Andrea Ciccarelli of Saldapress for providing details on editorial practices concerning
the process of publishing a translated comic.
20
On cultural allusions in Astérix, see Rivière (2001).
Federico Zanettin 

‘reading’ the images in the ‘original’ direction (from right to left) not only conlicts with
the direction in which the words are read (from left to right), but alters the perception
of the stream of actions portrayed.
Finally, as seen in section 1.3 above, speciic comics conventions do not always coin-
cide in diferent comics cultures. For example, the ‘same’ convention can be interpreted
in diferent ways in ‘comics’ and ‘manga’, e.g. cloud-shaped balloons can represent either
thought (in comics) or whispering (in manga).
By looking at the translation of comics from a strictly linguistic perspective and
focusing exclusively on the verbal text, many studies thus regard comics translation as
a special case of interlingual translation, constrained – or at best ‘supported’ (Gottlieb
1998) – by visual or technical limitations.
Other studies call for a closer integration between linguistic analysis and a wider so-
ciocultural and semiotic outlook. Most notably, Klaus Kaindl (1999)21 has proposed that
comics translation practices should be analyzed within their social context of production
and reception and has suggested a taxonomy of aspects of comics which may be modi-
ied during the translation process. According to Kaindl, Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘agent’,
‘ield’ and ‘habitus’ may help in providing a viable descriptive framework to account for
the social dimension of this practice. Thus, for example, while early American comics were
mainly situated in the journalistic ield, “European comics have developed along diferent
lines and are primarily rooted in the literary ield” (Kaindl 1999:270). Furthermore, Kaindl
draws up a translation-relevant anatomy of comics, based on a systematic account of
features of translated comics vis-à-vis the originals. These include typographical signs
(font type and size, layout, format), pictorial signs (colours, action lines, vignettes, per-
spective), and linguistic signs (titles, inscriptions, dialogues, onomatopoeia, narration).
Each of these elements may be subjected to strategies of change such as replacement
(the standard option for linguistic signs), deletion, addition etc.
The translation of comics is diferent from ‘translation proper’ not only because words
co-exist with non-verbal systems, but also because verbal language in comics is only part
– if sometimes the only visible part (i.e. overt translation) – of what gets translated. From
a descriptive stance, however, while the analysis can be focused only on the translation
of the verbal component, it cannot dispense with an examination of how words interplay
with pictures in the co-construction of meaning. If we want to compare what readers in
diferent countries do when they read the ‘same’ comics, we must also take into account
the changes that afect comics as visual texts, and as semiotic and cultural artefacts.

5. Contents of This Volume

The irst part of the volume deals with rather general aspects of the translation of com-
ics, while the contributions in the second part are each focused on a more speciic case
study. The article by Nadine Celotti outlines a semiotic perspective for the study of the

21
This article was based on a PhD dissertation (Kaindl 1999), which later grew into a full monograph focused
on comics in translation (Kaindl 2004). Unfortunately, both works are only available in German.
 Comics in Translation: An Overview

translation of comics, adopting the point of view of the translator, who is seen as a semiotic
investigator. Celotti deines comics as “a narrative space where pictorial elements con-
vey meaning, not less than verbal messages, over which they often have primacy” and
advocates a move away from the constrained approach. She argues that the primacy of
pictorial elements over verbal messages should not be seen as a constraint, nor trans-
lators of comics as subject to the ‘tyranny’ of visual messages. Rather, she emphasizes
the role of the visual component in comics and the importance of ‘reading’ the images
together with the verbal messages in order to interpret – and translate – them. She irst
suggests that translators should distinguish four diferent ‘loci’ of translation, namely
balloons, titles, captions and linguistic paratext. She then discusses the diferent ways
in which the linguistic paratext, i.e. verbal messages within the drawing, can be dealt
with in translation. Finally, she shows how the diferent types of interplay between visual
and verbal messages in comics can afect their translation.
While Celotti draws her examples mainly from Franco-Belgian comics (translated
into Italian), Heike Elisabeth Jüngst’s contribution deals with the translation of manga,
currently the largest segment of translated comics in the world. Jüngst deals speciically
with manga translated into German, but her analysis can be extended to most Western
countries. She provides a detailed historical overview of how the strategies applied to the
translation of manga have changed over the years, and describes some of the translation
strategies used for dealing with both verbal and visual text in manga. An important factor
which has conditioned manga translation practices is fan culture: manga readers “want
their manga to look Japanese, and this extends to some linguistic as well as pictorial
aspects”. For example, translated manga are now mainly published in the right-to-left
original reading direction; Japanese loanwords are retained for aesthetic purposes, and
words that describe realia are explained rather than translated. Referring to Nida’s clas-
sic distinction between formal and dynamic equivalence, Jüngst argues that ‘formally
equivalent’ translations seem now to be the prevailing norm for manga, to the efect that
a translated manga may almost look more Japanese than the original.
Valerio Rota draws attention to the importance of an analysis of the cultural contexts
in which (translated) comics are published, and looks at how the geographical origin
of a comic book may inluence expectations relating to it. Since authors conceive their
works (story length, graphic techniques, genre, etc.) keeping in mind how and where
they will be published, publication formats have an important impact on the quality of
comics, the attitude of readers and the periodicity of their publication. Rota distinguishes
between four main comic book formats, typical of the American, French, Italian and
Japanese comics industries, and argues that a modiication of the size, proportions and
characteristics of the original format through editorial processes in the receiving country
substantially alters the original work, with important consequences for the reception of
translated comics. Like Celotti, Rota points out that a distinction between text and pic-
tures may be misleading and that written text should be treated like a graphic element
of the page. The ‘texture’ of comics, that is “the complex structure resulting from the
interweaving of texts and pictures”, is presented to the target culture after a process of
adaptation which takes into consideration both the expectations and tastes of the new
Federico Zanettin 

cultural context, and the features of the work to be translated. Either domesticating or
foreignizing strategies (Venuti 1995) can be adopted, and a comic book can be adapted
to the local format, kept in the same format of the original, or presented in a third format,
diferent from both the original and the local ones. Rota argues that, since the formats
of publication which characterize each geographic area clearly appear before the eyes
of the reader, translated comics can be seen as the tangible proof of the ‘experience of
the foreign’ highlighted and wished for by Antoine Berman.
The contributions in the second part of the volume deal with the translation of comics
belonging to quite diferent genres and aimed at readers of diferent age groups (e.g.
children vs. adult readers), social class and culture (e.g. ‘popular’ vs. ‘quality’ comics). Lan-
guage pairs and translation directions involved include English, Italian, Spanish, Arabic,
French, German, Japanese and Inuit. All based on irst-hand research and on thoroughly
documented data, the articles exemplify a wide range of approaches.
Rafaella Baccolini and Federico Zanettin analyze the foreign editions of Maus by Art
Spiegelman, the account of his father Vladek’s experience during the Shoah. The authors
argue that translation is a central feature in Maus, both in a metaphorical and a technical
sense. They use the term ‘translation’ to describe Spiegelman’s attempt to deal with a
traumatic experience by using words and images which adapt, condense and transform
Vladek’s tape-recorded story into graphic narrative, in the mixed form of Spiegelman’s
own account of himself. Translation is also thematized in the graphic novel by the shift
in the language spoken by Vladek in the past (Polish translated into standard English)
and in the present (broken English). Vladek’s broken language is the ‘language of telling’,
which succeeds in representing the traumatic experience of the Holocaust and at the
same time mirrors the impossibility of making sense of it. The article discusses how this
has been one of the most problematic aspects involved in the publication of foreign
editions of Maus, and focuses in particular on two Italian translations.
Taking up Kaindl’s (1999) suggestion that research on comics should be based on
sociological grounds, Adele D’Arcangelo carries out a contrastive analysis of the American
and Italian traditions of horror comics. Against this backdrop, the Italian editions of the
episodes of The Saga of the Swamp Thing written by Alan Moore are analyzed in terms
of editorial policies. Whereas in the US the episodes written by the British author were
published by DC Comics as an attempt to revitalize a series which had lost its popularity
over the years, in Italy they were presented by Magic Press as a graphic novel (i.e. a ‘unitary
work’ by a precise author), as part of a wider cultural and publishing project. D’Arcangelo
argues that this editorial operation has actually improved Alan Moore’s fame in the target
culture, and that through its publishing policies Magic Press successfully managed to
act as an agent of cultural innovation, bringing about a change in the expectations of
the target community of readers.
A detailed account of the Arabic language comics market and of the editorial prac-
tices of publishers in Egypt and in the United Arab Emirates also forms the background
of Jehan Zitawi’s analysis of Disney comics in Arabic translation. Zitawi examines a
sizable corpus of Disney comics translated into Arabic, together with their English source
texts, within the framework of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory. She identiies
 Comics in Translation: An Overview

three main translation strategies followed in translating Disney comics, which contain
many sketches that could be construed as face threatening to Arab readers. Potentially
ofensive written and visual materials are handled by translators, publishers and oicial
censoring bodies according to the politeness strategies they believe most appropriate
for Arab readers. For example they can manipulate comics by deleting romantic, sexual
or religious references (‘don’t do the Face Threatening Act’ strategy), or by replacing
them with ‘euphemistic’ alternatives (‘do the Face Threatening Act on record with mitiga-
tion’), or they can retain them unaltered (‘do the Face Threatening Act on record with no
mitigation’). Zitawi shows, however, that both the ‘Arab translator’ and the ‘Arab reader’
are composite and plural entities rather than monolithic ones. Accordingly, editorial
practices may vary considerably, so that Disney comics produced and distributed in the
more conservative Gulf States contain more modiications and deletions than those
translated in Egypt.
While dealing with very diferent types of comics, the next three articles all make ref-
erence to globalization/localization as a useful conceptual tool for the analysis of comics
in translation. Jüngst deals with the translation of a rarely investigated genre of comics,
namely educational comics. While most educational comics are not meant for transla-
tion, some of them are designed for plurilingual distribution and are thus ‘globalized’, for
instance by avoiding the use of culture-speciic elements in the pictures. Other comics
are instead only later ‘localized’, i.e. stripped of their original characterizing features and
adapted to a new target group. The problem of conveying special factual knowledge in
a popularized shape is certainly often an issue when translating educational comics, but
translation decisions and strategies also depend to a large extent on social and political
factors. Educational comics in translation can in fact be published by public institutions
such as the EU, or by private ones, be they multinational companies or non-proit and
political organizations. They can be directed to a minority language group in a multicul-
tural territory, e.g. Spanish-speaking people in the US or Inuit people in Canada, or to
a speciic target group in a diferent country, e.g. Japanese educational comics for girls
(shojo-manga) in Germany, or for a speciic educational purpose, as in the case of Astérix
comics translated into Latin.
Zanettin suggests that the translation of comics may be usefully investigated within a
localization framework, understood in its broadest sense as the adaptation and updating
of visual and verbal signs to a target locale. Diferent actors are involved in the process, in
addition to the translator proper, and ‘translation’ in the sense of ‘replacement of strings
of natural language’ is only a component of the localization process. This approach is
illustrated through discussion of the production processes which lead to the publication
of a number of comics in translation, with examples from comics translated from and
into English and Italian. As a case study, Zanettin then discusses three diferent Italian
translations of a 1961 French comic book, an episode of the Blueberry Western saga by
Charlier and Giraud. Each edition of La pista dei Navajo is the result of a localization pro-
cess involving the modiication of both verbal and visual sign systems and is designed
for diferent receiving audiences, in terms of age-group and cultural background.
Elena Di Giovanni discusses the foreign translations of the Winx Club animated
Federico Zanettin 

cartoons and comics. This is an Italian production primarily targeting young girls,
which revolves around the adventures of a group of fairy teenagers. Both cartoons
and comics are translated and distributed worldwide, and enjoy a wide popularity and
commercial success. According to Di Giovanni, the Winx Club success story can be seen
as an instance of resistance to multimedia globalization through translation, in that
the Italian producers’ management and supervision of all English versions of the Winx
Club products ensures an overall control of the translation process. The English transla-
tions, even though they are usually performed by English native speakers, often reveal
traces of the original Italian. While these can occasionally be perceived as inadequate or
awkward, they efectively stand out as an alternative ‘voice’ running against the tide of
translation from English into countless target cultures, and act as a vehicle for a minor
language and culture which can positively inluence a redeinition of media-generated
cultural traic.
The last two articles in this collection are concerned with two somewhat more
‘traditional’ topics, i.e. the translation of onomatopoeic sounds and inscriptions and
the translation of humorous language. Carmen Valero Garcés’ article deals with ono-
matopoeia and unarticulated language in Spanish comic books, comparing original
and translated Spanish production. She irst provides an overview of previous research
on the subject, and then discusses her own data, consisting of a corpus of comics
translated into Spanish from American English and a corpus of original Spanish comics.
Her discussion is supplemented by the results of a questionnaire concerning the use
of onomatopoeias by Spanish authors. The data show that, as regards the translation
of onomatopoeic sounds, two main translation strategies are applied in Spain. In the
case of sounds produced by animals, unarticulated sounds produced by humans, and
sounds used to show feelings or attitude, English onomatopoeias are replaced by
Spanish equivalents. When English onomatopoeias are used to represent ‘mechanical’
sounds, they are instead usually retained. However, many onomatopoeic sounds now
feel as though they are part of the Spanish language even though they were originally
borrowings from English, and English onomatopoeias are largely used even in comics
originally written in Spanish.
In her article on the translation of proper names, onomastic puns and spoonerisms,
Catherine Delesse investigates the British translations of the two well known French
comic series Astérix and Tintin. Both series were extremely challenging for the translators,
since they often play on linguistic devices such as polysemy, homophony, paronymy and
metathesis for humorous efects. Delesse describes the various strategies used by the
two teams of English translators, who often resorted to ‘generalized compensation’. Both
teams were very creative and used both linguistic and visual resources to recreate target
texts whose coherence is sometimes greater than that of the original texts.
The last contribution, by Zanettin, consists of an annotated bibliography on the
translation of comics. An abstract is provided for most publications listed.
As far as possible, visual documentation is provided for all the examples discussed,
either within each article or in the centre fold in the case of illustrations in colour. Obtain-
ing copyright permissions was a complex matter. While a consolidated practice of ‘fair
 Comics in Translation: An Overview

use’ allows for the quotation of short extracts from written texts (usually up to 400 words)
in scholarly works, all ‘quotations’ from visual texts such as comics at present require
permission from copyright holders. Most publishers and authors gracefully agreed to
allow free republication, but some never replied to our letters of request, others asked
for a (sometimes substantial) fee, while still others (notably Disney) denied permission
without any apparent reason. Leonard Rifas and Scott McCloud,22 who own the copyright
for some of the images which appear in this volume, remarked that ‘quoting’ a panel
or two should be considered ‘fair use’. It is hoped that this may become a consolidated
practice in the future, thus facilitating a deeper understanding of comics in translation
and a smoother circulation of ideas.

6. Conclusion

This volume is mainly addressed to researchers and students working in institutions

specialized in translation studies, translator training and intercultural communication
and to scholars of comics. However, because of the variety of cultural contexts and ap-
proaches involved, the volume should also appeal to scholars working in other ields,
such as literary and cultural studies.
The articles in this volume provide only a partial account of comics in translation, as
it touches upon just a few genres, types and aspects. Considering the pervasiveness of
comics (and cartoons), which not only appear in large print runs in newspapers, maga-
zines and books, but also form part of the general cultural fabric and are in a relation
of reciprocal exchange with many social activities and cultural artefacts (e.g. ilms, ad-
vertising, design, computers, etc.), the study of comics in translation is certainly still an
underdeveloped area, especially if compared with that of other art forms such as cinema,
of which comics are coeval. However, it is hoped that this volume may help towards a
wider understanding of this social practice.

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