Comic Book Translation and Humor
Comic Book Translation and Humor

Summary/Abstract: Translating comic books is a relatively unexplored area of Translation Studies. There are, however, at least three different perspectives one might use in order to approach the topic: (1) the constraints of translating comic books (e.g. the size of speech bubbles), (2) multimodality (the relation between the visual and the verbal), and (3) humor translation. Humor translation is considered to be a task that requires a certain level of creativity from the translator, which can be pointed out by investigating the strategies used to maintain the humorous load of the original utterance in the target text. In this paper, I focus on the connection between the constraints of translating comic booksand humor translation. I also try to argue that in case of comic books (similarly as in the case of certain modes of audiovisual translation), the constraints of translating comic books, in certain cases, might greatly affect the translators’ decisions about how a given humorous load is transmitted through the target text. The language examples used were analyzed in an English → Hungarian language pair.

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