Translation, localization and foreignization: The metamorphoses of a comic book about a girl from the socialist bloc

Abstract

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).

Transnational Adaptation of a Marvel comic book event: the case of X-Men: ‘fatal attractions’ in Finland

“…Translating comics can involve changing page or panel size, reversing images for a different reading direction, changing colours or altering the images in another way. (Zanettin 2014;Borodo 2018. ) I analyse what was left of the event, as its storyline was adapted in Finland.…”