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For a very young but steadily developing subfield of Translation Studies such as the translation of comics it seems only natural to look to other research areas within the discipline for inspiration and research methods. This is also one of the aims of the present article, which will attempt to point to certain similarities between comics translation and the subdiscipline of Translation Studies known as AVT (Audiovisual Translation) and the field of subtitling in particular. Both films and comic books are multimodal texts based on the interplay between the verbal and the visual. What is more, both films and comic books are primarily based on dialogue, which is nevertheless transcribed and communicated in writing in both subtitled films and translated comics. Text will, in both cases, usually appear in clearly specified areas, that is at the bottom of the screen (with some exceptions) in subtitled films, and in speech balloons (with some exceptions) in the case of comics. Furthermore, text may be condensed due to the existence of spatial and technical constraints, such as the limited number of characters that may appear at the bottom of the screen or the size of speech balloons and the type of the lettering employed in the case of comics. It is particularly the latter aspect, that is textual condensation related to both spatial constraints and the multimodal character of comics, that the article will focus on, investigating the first Polish translations of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips created by the American cartoonist Bill Watterson.

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The article focuses on Kaytek the Wizard, the English translation of Janusz Korczak's children's classic Kajtuś czarodziej, originally published in Poland in 1933. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book came out in English with the New York-based Penlight Publications in 2012, almost eighty years after the original publication. The article begins with an overview of the theoretical context of translating children's literature, with regard to issues such as censorship, political correctness, and ideological manipulations. It demonstrates that contentious passages have often been mitigated, in order to create a commercially or ideologically "appropriate" text, for example in the former countries of the Eastern Bloc, in Spain, or in the contemporary United States. It then describes the context of the publication of the English version of Korczak's novel, shedding light on the roles of the copyright holder and translation commissioner, the publisher and the translator, and also mentioning the English language reviews of the translation in literary journals. Following that, the article examines the translator's treatment of the original expressions and passages concerning racial issues, which would be considered racist today. These include references to Africans as "savages", "apes" or "cannibals", a reflection of the European racial stereotypes of that period. It is demonstrated that, in her treatment of such lexical items, the translator adopted a middle course, retaining some of the contentious passages but also partly omitting and toning down other controversial * This article was originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec 2016, vol. 33, pp. 196-213. The English version was published with the financial support from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (DUN grant). 144 Michał Borodo examples in question. The article also reflects on the role of, and constraints on, the literary translator, who may be confronted with the ethical dilemma of either respecting the integrity of the original, and recreating the collective consciousness of a bygone era, or appropriating the original text, through eliminating passages which negatively portray blacks, so as to better adapt it to the target context of multicultural American society.

Artykuł jest próbą przybliżenia czytelnikowi historii polskiej powieści dla dzieci, która doczekała się największej liczby angielskich przekładów. Jest to próba wyjaśnienia, za pomocą nieomawianych wcześniej przykładów, w jaki sposób tłumacze Korczaka potraktowali tekst Króla Maciusia Pierwszego w przekładzie, stosując odmienne strategie tłumaczeniowe. Badany materiał zasługuje na uwagę nie tylko ze względu na to, że pozostawał dotąd jedną z „białych plam” polskiego przekładoznawstwa, ale również dlatego że każdy ze wspomnianych tłumaczy zaakcentował inne pokłady znaczeniowe oryginału, modyfikując go pod względem stylu, organizacji językowej oraz odniesień kulturowych.

The creation of comic books has traditionally been the domain of men. It is, however, a comic book story about a young girl written in French by a Polish woman author that seems to be one of the more significant comic book titles describing the Poland of the second half of the twentieth century. Written by Marzena Sowa and illustrated by Sylvain Savoia, Marzi is an autobiographical account of life in the socialist reality of the 1980s recounted from the perspective of a young Polish girl, carefully observing and analyzing the world of adults. Originally created in French in 2004, the comic book in focus has been translated into several languages, including English, Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean as well as the author’s native language, Polish. The paper concentrates on the notions of translation, foreignization and localization. The notion of translation is crucial to understanding Marzi and may be regarded as a keyword that sheds more light on the very process of creating the book. The strategy of foreignization is observable both in the French and the American editions with regard to the depiction of Polish cultural specificity. Finally, the French, Polish and American editions, which are the focus of the present paper, may be used to illustrate the concept of localization, applied to the sphere of comics translation by Federico Zanettin (2008).

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