Comics translation from English into Arabic: A comparative study on translation strategies in young adult and adult comics between publishing houses and scanlation websites

Abstract

Comics are a multimodal medium wherein meaning is created by taking in all modes of expression at once. It uses different semiotic modes, the verbal and visual modes, in the design of a semiotic product to make meaning. Indeed, these different modes can be socially and culturally shaped to convey meaning. Therefore, translation cannot treat comics as monomodal texts by translating only the verbal mode inside or outside the speech balloons, as the cultural differences and meanings are also encoded in the visual mode. With the rise of the internet and editing software, comics translation has expanded beyond the traditional confines of professional contexts such as publishing houses and official translation and has opened up new avenues for fan translations, “scanlation.” Scanlation has increasingly emerged at the hands of individuals who are emotionally attracted to the culture and medium. Scanlation is voluntarily carried out by fans who translate out of passion. Understanding how the multimodal relationship in comics is exploited and interpreted in the translation can be explained by exploring the translation strategies and procedures adopted by publishing houses versus scanlation websites. This thesis investigates the translation of comics from English into Arabic, with a focus on young adult and adult comics, addressing a significant gap in the existing literature. This aim is based on the premise that the production and reception of comics depend on the position of comics within a given culture’s literary polysystem. To investigate these issues, this research first identified the position of young adult and adult comics translation in the Arab world based on bibliographical data analysis using the hypotheses of the Polysystem Theory as a guiding framework. Second, this research compared the strategies and procedures used by publishing houses with those seen on scanlation websites using corpus analysis. More precisely, this comparative investigation sought to highlight the translational norms of the cultural references and the medium conventions in English comics translated into Arabic. Third, this study aimed to understand how the adopted translation strategies influenced the multimodal relationships between modes in comics in light of the text-image classification framework. The findings in this study demonstrate that the translation of young adult and adult comics is, first and foremost, a reflection of the position of comics in the target culture’s literary polysystem. In other words, the small number of comic titles translated into Arabic has a significant bearing on the translation strategies deployed. Both publishing houses and scanlation websites depend predominantly on the verbal mode to convey the meaning, with alterations made to the visual mode to conform to the target culture’s norms, even in content aimed at young adult and adult audiences. As a result, the text-image relationships change according to the strategies applied, causing a shift in the semantic balance favouring the verbal mode. The findings of the present study provide valuable and critical insights into the translational norms for translators and scanlators. It offers an enhanced understanding of handling multimodal texts such as comics focusing on linguistic, pictorial, and typographical signs. Keywords: comics, translation, scanlation, multimodality, literary polysystem, translational norms, comics text-image relationship, Arab countries.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Sharifa Mohammed A Alshahrani: orcid.org/0009-0009-3561-6992

ORCID for Darren J Paffey: orcid.org/0000-0003-2709-8012

Catalogue record

Export record