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Translating comics and graphic novels

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TRANSLATING COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

Federico Zanettin

1. Introduction
There is no consensus among comics scholars as to the definition of comics (Groensteen 2009)as
some authors maintain, for instance, that comics are characterised first of all by a sequence of
panels and their transitions (e.g. McCloud 1993), while others consider even single-panel cartoons
as comics (e.g. Harvey 2009).The term comics is sometimes used as a synonym for visual
storytelling, thus categorising as ‘comics’ all forms of graphic narrative, to begin with ancient cave
painting, Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, European medieval tapestries, early Chinese
woodprints, Japanese Buddhist scrolls, and so on. Certainly the study of modern comics has to be
connected to the history of visual storytelling, and comics are to be understood in the light of major
conceptual developments such as (visual) literacy, i.e. ‘the idea that signs could be ordered into a
deliberate sequence and formed around a grammar’ (Petersen 2011,xxi), the invention of caricature
in the sixteenth century, and the rendering of sequential action based on ‘complex relationships
between groups of images in what is called a montage’ (xxi.). However, comics as a type of graphic
narrative rely on a specific set of conventions and symbols which is the result of a specific history
and evolution over time and, to a large extent, cultural exchange through translation. Since the first
(proto)comics publications in nineteenth century Europe, translation has played a major part in the
making of comics cultures and traditions around the world, to the extent that ‘[s]ome comics have
found their primary audience in a country or language that is not their makers’ own’ (Altenberg and
Owen 2015a,i). For instance, Disney comics are more popular in the rest of the world than in the
US, while the stories of Lee Falk’s (1911-1999) The Phantom, the first US costumed superhero,
have witnessed an even bigger success in the Scandinavian countries, Australia and India (Petersen
2011, 115-116).
While modern graphic narratives gradually developed from the visual literacy which has its
foundation in Asian and European picture recitation traditions and elaborated on previously existing
graphic elements, comics as a specific type thereof are characterised by a number of prototypical
features which distinguish them from previous and coexisting forms of graphic narrative.
Prototypical semiotic features, sometimes referred to as the vocabulary and grammar of comics,
include the combination of images and words within panels and an array of emanata, conventional
visual codes used as shorthands to represent invisible elements such as speech and thought, music,
noise and motion. While the use of emanata predates comics, for instance phylacteries or speech
scrolls found in European medieval paintings can be seen as the antecedents of speech balloons,
their consistent use and systematisation as conveyors of dialogue is first found in early twentieth
century US comic strips. Not all comics include such prototypical elements as, for instance, there
are quite a few comics that do not contain words or emanata. However, even when some of these
prototypical elements are not present, they are often understood as missing in what are recognisable
instances of comics, albeit perhaps experimental ones, that is as somewhat deviant examples within
the conventions of the comics form.
At the cultural level, comics are prototypically characterised by their being a form of
popular mass fiction, marked by serialisation within distinct genres and with recurring characters.
As noted by Petersen (2011), with the invention of print in Europe, in the fifteenth century,
narratives begun to be prevailingly delivered using the new medium while visual art became almost
exclusively figurative. Graphic narratives survived as popular publications, and reached their
maturity in the comics format at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the same time as visual
art became increasingly abstract, formal and non-figurative.1
The term graphic novel, though sometimes used simply as a more dignified synonym for
comics, refers to a distinct, although closely related, form of graphic narrative. The two forms share
the same iconic language but at the same time exhibit some aspects of discontinuity (Couch 2010).
As opposed to previous and coexisting forms of narrative visual art (e.g. panoramic, synoptic and
cyclic graphic narratives),2 in both comics and graphic novels the telling of a story happens through
sequential images which follow an internal compositional logic determined both by the arrangement
of panels on the page and by page sequence. However, while based on the semiotic conventions
developed in popular comics genres, graphic novels are usually associated with longer, more
refined, non-serialised graphic stories in book form aimed at an educated adult readership rather
than at children or adolescents. The graphic novel can thus be considered as a different cultural
object which has reached its maturity at the turn of the new millennium, contributing to narrowing
the gap between elite and popular arts, so that visual narratives are no longer disregarded as
unworthy of serious consideration even in cultures where they were traditionally looked down upon.
Finally, webcomics are graphic narratives specifically designed for and delivered through the
Internet rather than digitised versions of printed comics and graphic novels (Fenty, Houp and
Taylor 2004). Even though the ‘displayed contents of a webcomic site are very similar to those
found in comic magazines’ (Zanfei 2008, 56), the kind of interaction required by the screen is quite
different from that required by the printed format, as it stimulates different reading paths from the
printed page, and offers readers the opportunity to access themed collections from comics archives
and easily enter into a fan community. To authors, a webcomic site can serve as a space for self-
promotion and for receiving feedback across an international audience.
 2. Historical perspectives
Translation has played a paramount role in the development of comics cultures around the world,
two defining moments being the Golden Age of North American comics around the 1930s and the
height of Japanese manga in the 1990s. The word ‘comics’itself has to be placed into perspective as
just the English language term used to designate a form of narrative in which ‘dramatic sequential
action [is] organized into brief moments shown in panels across the page’ (Petersen 2011, 73).
However, US comics have had a major influence in shaping this cultural form worldwide, being
largely responsible for spurring the growth of graphic narratives around the world and dictating
imagery and medium conventions, as they encountered and influenced pre-existing national
traditions which subsequently developed their own peculiar features, e.g. French BDs, Italian
fumetti, Spanish tebeos/historietas, Japanese manga, etc. Subsequently, and while owing a clear
debt to US comics culture, manga grew of their own accord into the largest comics culture of the
twenty-first century, with a production ten times greater than that of the rest of the world taken
together, influencing in their turn other national and supranational comics traditions.
The lineage of comics as a specific type of graphic narrative can be traced back to a
number of nineteenth century ‘protocomics’, i.e. graphic narratives in which the comics format is
not yet fully established. These include the French Jean-Charles Pellerin's Imagerie d’Epinal,
illustrated children’s literature in colours which from the turn of the eighteenth century ‘told a
complete story in a deeply abridged cyclic narrative style’ (Petersen 2011, 83-84); the Swiss
RodolpheTöpffer's1830s picture stories, which were the first publications to feature a montage of
several closely connected images in the same page as a way of representing unfolding actions; the
German Wilhelm Busch’s popular Max und Moritz stories (1865), which consistently included
action lines and onomatopoeic sounds, thus beginning to develop a visual code unique to graphic
narrative; and the British Charles H. Ross and Marie Duval’s3Ally Sloper, the first recurring comic
character to have his own serialised magazine (Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, 1884), which introduced
the use of the balloon in its modern sense and set a new standard for the popular press by reaching a
weekly circulation of 1.5 million copies in 1893 and establishing novel promotional strategies
(Sabin 2009). These and other publications in the course of the nineteenth century were consistently
published and distributed in translation, creating a largely shared culture of popular graphic
narrative.
However, 1896 is often regarded as the birth date of comics, with The Yellow Kid, a
character by Richard F. Outcalt first published in Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper New York World in
1895 and a year later as a full colour page in the Sunday edition of William Randolph Hearst’s New
York Journal American, as its icon. The cultural and commercial success of The Yellow Kid, which
was aimed at a general, mass readership rather than exclusively at children, was largely the result of
technological developments, as this was the first comics product to exploit the combined
possibilities of improved offset colour printing and high speed rotary colour presses (first used in
1892), which allowed for multiple print runs.
Soon newspapers begun to publish a very large number of Sunday pages, and from 1906
syndication allowed US comics to become a national and then an international phenomenon, and
contributed to the development of daily strips. Other comic artists working at the time, such as
Frederick Burr Opper, James Swinnerton and Rudolph Dirks, whose Katzenjammer Kids are a
recognisably comics version of Busch’s Max und Moritz stories, codified more systematically the
conventions of the new sequentially dramatic narrative style, while with creators such as Winsor
McCay and George Harriman the possibilities of the medium were further explored and expanded.
Newspaper strips, which often lasted for decades and include among many others George
McManus’ Bringing up Father and E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre, were mostly about familiar
comedy and humour. However, from the 1920s narrative continuity was fully established and new
comics started to come out, often drawn in a more naturalistic style as well as longer and more
dramatic than humorous strips. Adventure comics were the result of the convergence of reprints of
comic strips in book form and of pulp fiction, which lent to comics characters such as Edgar Rice
Burroughs’s Tarzan (through the mediation of films) and Francis Nowlan’s BuckRogers. By the
mid-thirties, comic books with original material begun to be published based on popular written
narrative genres, including crime, romance, fantasy and science-fiction, together with the new genre
of costumed superheroes spearheaded by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel’s Superman (1938) and Bob
Kane’s The Bat-Man (1939), marking the beginning of what is known as the Golden Age of
American comics.
When comics from the US first started to be published in Europe, they were adapted to
established formats of graphic storytelling. Most notably, Britain and France had a tradition of
graphic narrative going back to caricature magazines such as the French La Caricature (1830–
1835) and the British Punch Magazine4 (1845-1992), but similar publications were present also in
other European countries. Because of the perceived superiority of the written word, for a long while
images were treated only as illustrations of verbal stories, and graphic narratives were considered as
culturally inferior and suitable only for the uneducated and children (Detti 1984). Thus, when
American comics begun to be preferably sourced over other foreign products (all usually pirated
and published without attribution), they were heavily manipulated in order to conform to the
European format and readership. Balloons were erased and replaced by written text below the
panels (rhymed, in the case of the leading Italian weekly Il Corriere dei Piccoli), and other changes
which affected the drawings were made when deemed necessary (Zanettin 2014). However, while
European publications upheld this pedagogical format long after its disappearance in the United
States, from the late 1920s balloons started to appear in both translated American comics and
indigenous works by local authors. This transition is especially apparent in the new terms which
started to designate comics in Italian, i.e. fumetti, meaning ‘small clouds of smoke’.
Heralding the new wave of ‘American’ comics were humorous characters like Disney’s
Mickey Mouse and adventurous ones like Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon of the eponymous
science-fiction fantasy. After debuting in animated cartoons in 1928, the anthropomorphic mouse
created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks appeared in US comic strips in 1930, to be almost
simultaneously reprinted in translation in various European countries, which soon also started to
publish very successful magazines named after the popular character, e.g. Topolino in Italy (1932),
Le Journal de Mickey in France (1934) and Mickey in Spain (1935). Flash Gordon was first
published in the US in 1934, and then in the first issue of the new comic magazines L’Avventuroso
(Italy, 1934), Aventurero (Spain, 1935) and Robinson (France, 1936, under the name Guy l’Éclair).
Since then, the comics markets in these countries boomed, and indigenous works based on the
American comics format started to appear next to imported American comics in quickly multiplying
magazines. While the new brand of European comics, including the widely translated Tintin (by the
Belgian Hergé, from 1929) and later Astérix (by the French René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo,
from 1958), developed its own distinctive features (ligne clair drawing style, long dialogues, etc.),
its visual language denoted a break from previous traditions of graphic storytelling, and was closer
to that of American comics.
Although the development of comics industries in Europe and elsewhere followed different
paths according to national and social histories, a common trajectory can be discerned in that
foreign comics, often specifically from the US but also from other European countries, were
frequently the target of both explicit, institutional censorship and self-censorship by publishers and
authors. The reprinting of foreign comics in other cultures, every so often described as an
‘invasion’, has repeatedly provoked waves of disturbance, and censorship, motivated by religious,
moral, economic or political reasons has affected the way both foreign and indigenous comics are
appreciated by readers. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia a comics industry was never allowed
to take hold, while laws prohibiting or limiting the amount of foreign comics were passed both
under dictatorships (e.g. in 1938 in Italy, in 1955 and 1964 in Spain, in the 1950s in Portugal) and
democracies (e.g. in 1949 in France and in 1955 in the UK).Self-regulatory codes were also applied
by national publishers’ associations in many countries, in Europe (Germany and Italy) as well as in
Australia, Brazil, Canada and the US, where from 1954 the Comics Code Authority did away with
many popular adult genres such as crime, horror and romance, effectively thwarting the US comics
industry for almost a decade. To avoid, prevent or apply censorship, only selected foreign comics
were published, which were often heavily edited by deleting unwanted visual and verbal references.
European comics include both pseudo-originals and pseudo-translations. Pseudo-originals
are translated comics which, in order to circumvent censorship were disguised as original works by
indigenous authors. In Fascist Italy, for instance, Rob the Rover by British author Walter Booth
became the fascist aviator Lucio l’Avanguardista, while William Ritt and Clarence Gray’s Brick
Bradford was variously renamed, among others, as Bruno Arcieri, Marco Spada and Guido
Ventura, later changed into Giorgio Ventura to suppress what was considered a hint of
‘Jewishness’. Not only the names of characters but also those of the authors were changed into
Italian ones, so that one Amedeo Martini was named as the author of Guido/Giorgio Ventura.
Besides the names and the written narrative, the pictures were edited (for instance the colour of
Brick Bradford’s hair changed from blond to black) or even consistently redrawn by Italian artists
(Gadducci, Gori and Lama 2011).
Pseudo-translations are original comics which were presented as translations, a not
uncommon practice in many countries after WWII. This first happened when the demand for very
successful foreign comics exceeded the original production, so that some authors and publishers
begun to create original stories using licensed (or pirated) material, which became imbued with
foreign themes and styles. For instance, original Phantom stories were created outside of the US to
cover local demand, and in the 1970s translated Italian and Spanish Phantom stories were published
in the US (Brancatelli1976, 551). Examples of pseudo-translations also include creations
supposedly originating in a fictional work by foreign authors, such as the Spanish comic book
Claudio y la Tabla Redonda, whose main author, Victor Mora Pujadas, pretended to act merely as a
translator of the non-existent writer Vincent Mulberry (Zarandona 2016). In some cases, pseudo-
translation veered towards transcreation, the most notable example being Disney comics which,
considered mainly as merchandising, have been only intermittently published in the US, while
original stories are mostly created in countries such as Italy and Denmark, and then translated into
other languages using English scripts as a basis for localized dialogues (Zanettin 2008b, 202-203).
European and South-American authors developed original characters, such as Donald Duck, and
created new ones adapting narratives and identities to local audiences. Disney pseudo-translations
and transcreations were extremely influential in local cultures, as, for instance, they seem to have
played a considerable role in the history of Italian linguistic unity (Bosco Tierno 2015).
 In the second half of the twentieth century, national comics industries and cultures became
firmly established in most European countries, their production including a large percentage of
foreign comics imported from the US (most notably Silver Age mainstream superhero comics such
as Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four) but also from Europe and South America, which had also
developed strong national comics industries building on the original American comics format. The
main comics exporting countries were the US, France and Belgium, Italy and Argentina, although
Spanish, British and other authors were also sourced at different times. Western comics cultures
have different histories and may differ considerably as regards narrative and drawing styles, formats
and genres as well as social and cultural recognition. For instance, in the UK, comics have until
recently largely been perceived as only a type of children’s literature, whereas in France the artistic
and cultural merits of ‘the ninth art’ have long been acknowledged. However, through translation
and cross-pollination, western comics traditions have developed a common heritage of visual codes.
A major development in this respect was brought about only when Japanese comics entered the
scene and eventually surpassed the dominant comics production role of the US, reshaping comics
cultures all over the world.
Like in Europe and elsewhere, Japanese comics or manga, as they began to be called from
the 1920s, gradually established themselves at the confluence of US influence and substrata of a
pre-existing national tradition of graphic narratives, from the ancient Buddhist tradition of
Kamishibai, live picture recitation of stories from painted scrolls (etoki), to Edo period (1603-1867)
caricature and erotic woodblock prints (most notably by Katsushika Hokusai) and kibyoshi, mass-
produced serial picture books with closely linked sequential actions. The Japanese comics industry
started after Japan ended its international isolation in 1856, with the publication from 1863 of the
magazine Japan Punch by the ‘progenitor’ of Japanese comics, the British expatriate Charles
Wirgman, which established the cartoon genre in the country after Western-style caricatures and
satirical prints. From 1905 the very popular colour magazine Tokyo Puck published European-style
comics by Rakuten Kitazawa, who only later adopted a more typical Japanese brushwork technique.
The translation of American comics reprinted in Japanese magazines began in 1923 with George
McManus’s Bringing Up Father and rapidly expanded to include local imitations, and in the early
1930s children’s magazines began to include serialised comic stories. A mass industry was soon
born which consisted of translated comics as well as original ones, both imitating translations and
developing original themes and characters. From the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in
1937until well after the end of WWII, however, because of paper shortages and censorship, popular
print publications plunged. These years saw a resurgence of popular kamishibai theatre, and when
eventually live performances gave way to television, many popular characters from kamishibai card
sets migrated, together with their authors, to the upwelling comics industry.
The birth of modern manga is generally dated to Osamu Tezuka’s 1947 Shin Takarajima
[New Treasure Island], which revolutionised comics conventions in Japan by imposing a new
drawing and narrative style inspired by the techniques of US animated cartoons. Tezuka developed
the pace of Japanese comics storytelling by increasing the number of panels used to narrate a story
and, mimicking Disney cartoons, introduced a way of representing characters with flat faces, large
round eyes, small noses and tiny mouths now perceived as typically Japanese. In the following
decades, the Japanese comics industry grew exponentially into the single largest comics industry in
the world, catering for readers of different ages and varying tastes and interests, while manga
conventions begun to distance themselves from those of Western comics by developing a vast range
of diverse styles, themes and genres targeted to specialized readerships. The five main categories of
manga, shōnen [boys], shōjo [girls], redisu or redikomi [ladies], seijin [adult erotica] and seinen
[young men] are in their turn subdivided into a myriad of sub-genres and cover just about every
subject matter, from samurai epics to post-apocalyptic and dystopic cyberpunk and mecha [robot]
science-fiction, rooted in the Japanese experience of war and defeat and formally inspired by US
popular culture (Bouissou 2011, 189), from male gay romance addressed to adolescent women to
high-school comedy, just to name a few of the main indigenous genres. Furthermore, manga are not
restricted to fiction, but include educational and instructional genres covering all aspects of life,
from cooking to parenting, from table and computer games to business, from religion to all kinds of
sports (Pilcher and Brooks 2005, 93). Today the business volume of comics in Japan is fifty times
as large as that of the United States (the second largest), and takes up about 40% of all the printed
material published in the country (as opposed to3% in the US). During its height, manga generated
colossal revenues—more than 400 billion yen or almost 4 billion euro in1988. Altogether in 1994,
comics magazines sold 1,000,890,000 copies (in December of that year the magazine Shōnen Jump
alone sold 6,530,000 copies), while in 1995 there were 265 comics magazines in Japan, compared
to 18 in France in 2008 (Bouissou 2011, 68-95).
Japanese comics have been translated in Asian countries since the 1960s, but remained
practically unknown in the West until they started to be published in the US, France and Italy in the
1980s, and from the 1990s manga flooded Western markets. Manga were first introduced by
capitalising on the success of anime (animated cartoons) on TV networks, and some of the first
manga published in the West were in fact not translations but original productions inspired by
Japanese popular animated series (Pellitteri 2006). Western societies’ reaction to the manga
‘invasion’ was initially rather harsh, as Japanese comics were perceived as vulgar, violent and badly
drawn. On the one hand, this perception rested on the unfamiliarity with Japanese popular culture,
in which sex and scatological motives are not taboo even in family- and children-oriented products
and where ‘even the most popular samurai hero can fart, burp, get drunk, and cry’ (Bouissou 2010,
17). On the other, Western and Japanese comics had developed notable differences in their visual
language, including the representation of dialogue and thought, movement, visual metaphors and
modes of representation, type of transition between panels, page layout and construction, and
publishing format. For instance, in Western comics speech balloons are bubbles linked to characters
by a pointer called ‘tail’, a much less common convention in manga. Western thought balloons are
cloud-like bubbles with a tail of increasingly smaller circular bubbles, which in manga are used to
represent whispered dialogue. An awkward or speechless moment is represented in manga by an
ellipsis over one’s head, while movement is shown not only through ‘objective’ but also
‘subjective’ motion lines and ‘background blurs’, i.e. an overlay of straight lines to portray the
direction of movements. In addition, manga have their own repertoire of pictograms and visual
metaphors, for instance huge sweat drops to convey embarrassment or bewilderment or a bloody
nose to indicate lust, while panic may be symbolised by the shrinking of facial features, the
disappearance of the nose, or by the character lifting off the floor with the limbs being multiplied as
if moving very fast. Manga also make frequent use of panel transitions such as ‘moment-to-
moment’, ‘subject-to-subject’ and ‘aspect-to-aspect’, thus highlighting mood and sense of place,
whereas in Western comics ‘action-to-action’ transitions are the vast majority (McCloud 1993, 74-
82). While the typical structure of a Western comics page is that of a regular series of sequential
rectangular panels, Japanese comics developed an holistic approach in which the page is more
easily appreciated as a pictorial unit. The page often displays an irregular layout, with differently
shaped and positioned panels, and stylistic devices such as ‘bleeds’ (i.e. a human figure or object
going over and beyond the border of a panel, and invading the space of an adjacent one) and
‘overflows’ (i.e. the border of an external panel coinciding with the limit of the page) are
consistently used. Finally, manga stories are normally published in black and white, as opposed to
coloured US and French comics.
Today, favoured also by the ‘denationalisation’ approach adopted by the Japanese cultural
industry (Bainbridge and Norris 2010), imported manga compete for shelf space in bookshops and
libraries with autochthonous comics everywhere, amounting to between one third and one half of all
published comics in the US, France and Italy, and reaching an even higher percentage in countries
which, like Germany, had a less developed local comics tradition. Manga have also reshaped local
traditions by increasingly imposing their visual and narrative conventions, as new generations of
authors all over the world have absorbed the Japanese ‘style’ of comics, whose impact can be
compared to the influence exerted by US comics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Comics
cultures everywhere in the world have increasingly assimilated and incorporated manga visual
conventions and drawing styles (Ng 2002, Mahamood 2003, Johnson-Woods 2010), and original
non-Japanese manga—so-called ‘global manga’—are also being produced (e.g. North-American
‘Amerimanga’ and French ‘Manfra’).
A more recent development of graphic narratives is graphic novels. In the West, the term
graphic novel was first popularised by Will Eisner in 1978 with the publication of his book A
Contract with God, and then from the 1980s used to refer to works such as Pulitzer prize winning
Maus (1986-1991) by Art Spiegelman,5 although already in 1957 Yoshihiro Tatsumi had coined the
similarly connotated Japanese word gekiga to differentiate his more dramatic works from
mainstream manga, then mostly aimed at children. Graphic novels have joined written literature in
bookshops and are currently one of the main success stories in the Western publishing world,
increasingly gaining readership,6 literary prizes and critical acclaim, to the extent that they have
been celebrated as the most notable phenomenon of adult literature (Spinazzoli 2012). Non-fictional
genres such as autobiography and graphic journalism are similarly increasing their market share and
cultural appreciation. Finally, the advent of digital reading devices and digital networking7 and the
rise of native digital comics are changing reading habits and shifting readerships.8

3. Critical issues and topics

Four main areas of interest can be discerned in research on comics translation, although with
considerable overlaps. First, the study of translation strategies, processes and practices as related to
comics characterised by different geographical provenance, genre and publication format, and
addressed to different readerships; second, research on the history of comics translation; third, the
study of comics translation as a way to investigate concepts of cultural, social and political identity;
and fourth, research on intersemiotic translation/adaptation between comics and other media/art
forms.
The first area addresses issues related to whether and how foreign comics are translated in
different ways according to the culture-specific visual and verbal conventions of the receiving
countries, as well as depending on the type of comics being imported. Just to give a few examples,
Jüngst (2008a) illustrates how, when first translated in the US and in Europe, manga were usually
coloured and printed reversing the left to right original direction to suit target reading conventions, a
practice no longer implemented—at least for most manga genres. Rota (2008) draws attention to
how the modification of size, layout, pagination etc., a common practice given that comics
industries in different countries each have their preferred publication formats, substantially alters
original works, with important consequences for the reception of translated comics. Zanettin
(2008b) shows how major modifications of both visual appearance and textual content are related to
a change in the age group targeted in translation. Kaindl (2010, 38) reports that, since in US comics
the time lapse between panels can be much longer than the short gaps German-speaking readers are
used to, the passing of longer time is sometimes made explicit in translated comics by inserting
narrative text. As more case studies investigate specific comic books, series and genres as well as
graphic novels in translation, a better description of translation strategies and norms is emerging.
Also increasing is the number of studies on the translation of graphic novels and other non-fictional
graphic narratives such as graphic journalism (e.g. Evans 2012, Maher 2012), autobiography (e.g.
Baccolini and Zanettin 2008), and instructional comics (e.g. Jüngst 2008b, Castro 2015).
The history of comics translation is an area still lacking appropriate research. Addressed
issues may concern, for instance, the function played by some publishers, literary agents and other
mediators, with special reference to questions of copyright, ideology and censorship. For instance,
the Italian Lotario Vecchi, who founded various publishing houses across Europe between the
1930s and the 1960s, had an important role in the translation of American comics in Europe
(Zanettin 2018 forthcoming a), as did the Spanish Hispano Americana de Ediciones publishing
house as regards their translation in Spanish-speaking countries (Martin 1968, Balteiro 2010,
Valencia-Garcia 2012). Another interesting topic within this area is the study of how technological
developments have affected translation strategies and practices. For instance, since digital tools for
enhancing comics begun to be used in 1992, it has become possible to change the size of the
emanata to suit the needs of the target language (Petersen 2011, 228), and the flexibility and the
reduced costs allowed by desktop publishing have affected the way translated comics are produced
by publishers working for several language markets such as the French Glenat and the Italian
Panini Editore (Zanettin 2014).
The comparative study of original and translated comics may provide insight into how
cultural and political identities are constructed, communicated and negotiated in graphic narratives.
For instance, Brems (2013) investigates the relations between the cultural identities of French- and
Dutch-speaking Belgians by looking at the economic and cultural-politic factors which informed
different translations of Hergé’s Quick & Flupke comic strips. Mohamed (2016) discusses her
webcomic Qahera, about a female Muslim superhero fighting against Islamophobia and misogyny,
which was first published in English and then translated into Arabic by the author herself, and
points out how in the process its content was radically transformed and adapted ‘to different
constituencies and a rapidly diversifying set of audiences’ (138). The study of pseudo-translation
and transcreation practices in the comics industry (Bosco Tierno 2015, Pellitteri 2006) may shed
light into how cultural change is introduced by foreign influences between literary innovation,
forgery and explorations of style and norms (O’Sullivan 2011).
Finally, the study of comics translation concerns not only the domain of translation studies
in a more restricted sense, that is the translation/republication of comics in other languages and
cultures within the confines of the same medium/language/semiotic code/ graphic narrative form,
but also the interrelations and exchanges between comics and other media since, as Mitchell (2014,
259) suggests, comics can perhaps be best defined as a trans-medium ‘moving across all boundaries
of performance, representation, reproduction, and inscription to find new audiences, new subjects,
and new forms of expression […] because it is translatable and transitional, mutating before our
eyes into unexpected new forms’. Thus, research in intersemiotic translations may concern the
analysis of adaptations between graphic narratives and novels (e.g. Stein 2015), films (e.g. Brumme
and Esteruelas 2015), video games (e.g. Gröne 2015), sculpture (e.g. Bukatman 2014), theatre (e.g.
Bremgartner 2015), and so on. This type of analysis is often carried out within the burgeoning field
of comics studies but also by an increasing amount of research at the interdisciplinary confluence of
translation studies, communication theory and media studies, investigating phenomena of media
convergence, hybridity, crossover and synergy (e.g. Bartosch and Stuhlmann 2013) such as
transmedia storytelling, i.e. how stories unfold across different media products.

4. Current contributions and research

While there has been an increase in research in the last few years, with a few collected volumes
(e.g. Zanettin 2008a, Altenbergand Owen 2015b, Mälzer 2015) and a growing number of
conferences, articles, doctoral dissertations, degree and Masters’ theses dealing with the translation
of comics and graphic novels, this field still remains largely underdeveloped. Whereas the first
studies framed comics translation within a ‘constrained translation’ approach, focusing on the
verbal content of graphic narratives and sometimes assuming a lack of change of the pictorial
content, more recent approaches have taken into account the multisemiotic nature of graphic
narratives, with reference to audiovisual translation and localisation. A groundbreaking publication
was Kaindl (1999), which proposed a sociological and semiotic framework of analysis and sketched
an ‘anatomy’ of comics translation, that is, a classification of the elements of comics and of related
translation strategies. Most studies currently adopt a multimodal approach to the study of translation
which accounts for the mixing and blending of verbal and visual signs in comics and graphic novels
(e.g. Kaindl 2004a, YusteFrías 2011,Borodo 2015, Weissbrod and Kohm 2015). Zanettin (2008b,
2014) suggests a localisation approach to comics translation, whereby the translation of the verbal
content is seen as only one component in a larger process which involves possibly altering also the
publication format, page layout, the drawings, etc. As in other types of localisation processes,
various actors are involved, from publishers and editors to letterers. Thus, research may focus on
verbal (e.g. Macedoni 2010) or on visual adaptation (Zanettin 2014), on publishing formats (Rota
2008), on the paratext (Yuste Frías 2010) or on lettering (Armour and Takeyama 2015). Lettering
proper consists of the replacement of text inside balloons and boxes, but the letterer is usually also
responsible for other types of visual adaptation which involve retouching the drawings and
replacing titles and other verbal signs which are part of the visual paratext, such as inscriptions,
road signs, newspapers, sound effects, onomatopoeic and unarticulated sounds, etc. (Ficarra 2012).
Because of ‘comics’ tendency to treat words as visual elements, the look of letters as graphic signs,
trading in an eye for an ear, as McLuhan put it’ (Mitchell 2014, 260) letterers themselves can be
seen as comics translators (Gonsalves de Assis 2015).
The most studied comic books in translation are indubitably those of Astérix (e.g. Delesse
and Richet 2009, Richet 2011, McElduff 2016). Research on Astérix and other popular and widely
translated French and US comics (e.g. Tintin, Calvin and Hobbes, Disney comics) initially focused
on the translation of linguistic features such as proper names, cultural references and onomatopoeia,
but its scope has now widened to include the analysis of non-verbal aspects. A long favoured topic
is the study of the translation of humour (e.g. Koponen 2004, Kaindl 2004b, Zanettin 2010), while a
growing number of studies have concerned themselves with the translation of manga (e.g. Ferrer
Simó2005, Jüngst 2008a, O’Hagan 2009, Rampant 2010, Peixoto Martins 2015, Curran 2015), with
topics ranging from the translation of Japanese honorifics to scanlation practices. Since the 1990s
manga fan groups in the West have started to get hold of unpublished Japanese series, organising
themselves into teams of ‘translators, editors, photomanipulators[…] and scanners’ (Rampant 2010,
236), who then distributed the translated manga in digital format through the internet. This
unofficial, non-commercial practice was instrumental for a change in translation norms by
favouring ‘formal equivalence’, i.e. unchanged visual appearance, over adaptation to target norms.
By creating expectations as to the type of localisation strategy, fan and consumer pressure (together
with other technical and commercial factors) changed the norm of commercial manga translation, as
manga publishers, who previously favoured domestication, adopted a foreignising translation
strategy. Finally, some studies discuss the translation of comics within the context of translator
training and language teaching (e.g. Beeby Lonsdale 1996, 143-147, El-Arousy 2007, O’Hagan
2008).
 5. Recommendations for Practice
A distinction should be made between comics translation/localisation and the work of comics
translators. The first concerns the translation of ‘the entire repertoire of expressive means in both
verbal and visual modes, as well as the ways in which they interact’ (Altenbergand Owen 2015a,i)
and their interrelation with the wider production context, which may involve editing or removing
images, adding/removing/altering colours, changing layout, size and pagination, etc. (Zanettin
2014). Comics translation thus encompasses all different aspects of the transfer of comics and their
publication in a foreign country, and is concerned with the practices of graphic artists, letterers and
editors as well as those of the ‘translator proper’. The latter term is instead commonly understood to
refer to the professional responsible for providing a translation of the written text to be used as a
source for the replacement of verbal material in the comics to be translated. The work of comics
translators, with reference to the more restricted definition of interlinguistic translation, can be seen
as a step of the overall process which concerns the production of translated/localised/adapted
comics. Training future translators of comics does not, however, imply the acceptance of a
reductive view of translation, and of translators as only concerned with the written text of comics
abstracted from the surrounding visual context. Rather, competent translators of comics should be
seen as ‘semiotic investigators’ (Celotti 2008), skilled readers of the medium who are aware that
meaning in comics is created by relationships of complementarity and dialogue between verbal and
nonverbal messages, for whom the visual context constitutes an opportunity rather than a constraint,
and who may be able to anticipate and perhaps also have an influence on orienting the visual
appearance of the localised product. As such, competent translators of comics rely not only on
bilingual and bicultural expertise, but on a profound knowledge of the (trans)medium and of the
various aspects of its production, which involve interaction with other members of a
translation/localization team.

6. Future directions
It seems unlikely that in the short run comics will give way to graphic novels, or that printed
graphic narratives will be supplanted by digital ones. As it often happens, cultural innovations do
not suddenly replace previous forms, but flank and interact with them, and as new forms of graphic
narrative develop, new forms of transfer and norms of translation emerge. For instance, while the
translation of popular comics genres has been largely dictated by market considerations, a varied
quality being often the result of quick production times, low costs and limited cultural capital,
graphic novels have exited the circuit of popular literature and the cultural stigma attached to it,
bringing about a shift in translation requirements and norms, more geared towards source author-
and source text-centred models of translation usually associated with ‘serious’ written literature. At
the same time, the production and dissemination of digital content through the internet has changed
the usability of graphic narratives, affecting both reading and translation practices, on the one hand
providing for an easy access to original foreign visual literature, on the other favouring a mode of
translation, scanlation, which is based on crowd sourcing and fan culture rather than on professional
activities.

7. FurtherReading
Comics translation
There is currently only one monograph, in German, on comics translation, i.e. Kaindl (2004a), some
of whose contents, in English, can be found in Kaindl (1999). Collected volumes include Zanettin
(2008a), which also contains a comprehensive annotated bibliography of research on the topic,
Altenberg and Owen (2015b), and Mälzer (2015). An introduction to comics translation can be
found in two encyclopedic entries by Zanettin, in Baker and Saldanha (2009; forthcoming b) and by
Kaindl, in Gambier and Van Doorslaer (2010).

Comics studies
Essential introductory volumes to comics studies are Eisner (1985), Gasca and Gubern (1988),
McCloud (1993), Groensteen (1999), Barbieri (1991), Peeters (2000), Pilcher and Brooks (2005),
Heer and Worcester (2009) and Petersen (2011). Excellent introductions to manga culture(s) are
Bouissou (2011) and Johnson-Woods (2010). Journals include The International Journal of Comic
Art, The Comics Grid, and Image TexT.

8. Related topics
audiovisual translation, localisation, translation and the publishing industry, intersemiotic
translation, adaptation, popular fiction.

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1
Not all visual art totally abandoned narration. Some notable examples from the pre-comics era include allegorical and
cyclic graphic narratives such as Francisco de Goya's etchings Los caprichos and Los Desastres de la Guerra,and
William Hogart’s engravings A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress, which were however regarded as a lower
form of art than non-narrative paintings. Examples of narrative art in the twentieth century include Max Ernst's
surrealist collages, comics-inspired situationist works by André Bertrand, and urban graffiti and street art—from the
work of artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat to the murals on Cairo’s walls during the Egyptian
revolution (Karl and Hamdy 2014).
2
Although many graphic novel authors also experiment with these forms of narration as well as with different formats,
layouts, etc. (Chute and Jagoda 2014).
3
This being the pen name of Ross’ French-born wife Isabelle Emilie de Tessier (b. 1850–?).
View publication stats

4
Where the term cartoon in the modern sense of humorous illustration was coined.
5
Spiegelman's work is deeply influenced by US underground ‘comix’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Other works from the
1980s often cited are Watchmen by the British Alan Moore and David Gibbons, which was hailed for its structural and
visual narrative achievements, and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, a re-reading of the Batman myth in which the influence
of Japanese narrative and visual conventions was beginning to be felt. Both works were instrumental to revitalising
popular comics culture through the introduction of adult themes, thus bringing the superhero genre to an older and
educated readership.
6
See e.g. MacDonald (2015) and Hayley (2014). According to the Italian Association of Publishers (AIE), graphic
novel titles accounted for more than 10% of the total production of fiction titles in Italy in 2013.
http://www.aie.it/Portals/_default/Skede/Allegati/Skeda105-3087-
2013.11.26/07_Comunicato_Professionale.pdf?IDUNI=918
7
In the last decade the number of titles and sales figures of digital manga, mostly distributed on cell phones, has
increased sharply both in Japan and in the US (Bouissou 2011, 106; Petersen 2011, 230).
8
For instance, the most downloaded manga series belong to the semi-pornographic genre (Bouissou 2011, 106), and
while in the US ‘women represent only a minority of print manga readers, they constitute more than 70 percent of the
readers of cell phone manga’ (Petersen 2011, 229).