Speech or Silence The Significance of Balloon Size in Translating Comics

The present article discussed translations of comics, a topic largely neglected in Translation Studies. Comics in Persian polysystem don’t occupy a special position, so our translators face a new genre and must create some strategies to translate the comic books. The limited amount of space as well as interplay of words and pictures could make translating comics much more difficult than translating prose. The translators have got to almost count the letters in their sentences because everything has got to fit in the bubble, in this space.This paper was aimed at studying the translation of Tintin comics before and after the Islamic Revolution to determine whether the expansion strategies mostly adopted for translating them were necessary or not. The research falls under the category of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) as developed by Toury; and as it was a descriptive study, the discussions are mostly subjective. The result revealed that the translators of the new Farsi version by Rayehe-Andishe publication added lots of unnecessary words arbitrarily while the translators of the old Farsi version by Universal publication dedicated more attention to the imagination of their readers andsuppressed arbitrary and unnecessary expression to fit the size of the speech balloon.

Keywords:

Comic books , polysystem , speech balloon , image , balloon size , addition , Descriptive translation studies