La traducción de la variación lingüística en los cómicsEl dialecto de Ebony White en The Spirit

  1. MIGUEL SANZ JIMÉNEZ 1
  1. 1 Universidad Complutense de Madrid
    info

    Universidad Complutense de Madrid

    Madrid, España

    ROR 02p0gd045

Journal:
Hikma: estudios de traducción = translation studies

ISSN: 1579-9794

Year of publication: 2021

Volume: 20

Issue: 2

Pages: 69-94

Type: Article

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More publications in: Hikma: estudios de traducción = translation studies

Abstract

This study analyzes the Spanish translation of Ebony White’s dialect in the comic-book The Spirit, by Will Eisner. This African-American boy embodies several demeaning racial stereotypes. He is represented as an obsequious character in wide eyes, ballooned lips, and protruding ears. Trying to contextualize this qualitative study, the first step is to explore the publishing context of Eisner’s works and the circumstances of theirpublication in Spain. Specifically, this paper focuses on how Ebony White’s dialect has been translated into Spanish, ashe is one of the supporting characters who helps the masked vigilante. It is observed how the source text’s pages portray, thanks to the «eye-dialect» technique, some of the phonological and morpho-syntactic features of Black English in a parodical tone. This contribution examineswhich strategies have been used to render Ebony White’s marked dialect into the target comic-books published by Norma Editorial and translated by Enrique Sánchez Abulí.This contrastive studysheds some light on how Sánchez Abulí plays with spelling and opposes the protagonist’s lines to Ebony White’s, as he speaks a fictional variety of non-standard Spanish. Thanks tothetranslation strategies, certain stereotypes underlining the otherness in The Spirit’s sidekick are reproduced in both source and target texts.

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