Multimodal Quality Assessment: The Case of Persian Translations of Tintin Comics

Nazari Robati, Fatemeh Zahra; Ketabi, Saeed; Afrouz, Mahmoud; Amirian, Zahra

doi:10.22059/jflr.2024.371111.1118

Multimodal Quality Assessment: The Case of Persian Translations of Tintin Comics

Document Type : research article

Authors

Department of English Language and Literature;University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran.

10.22059/jflr.2024.371111.1118

Abstract

Tintin comics, as one of the most popular comics of the 20th century in the world, has been translated and read by different age groups in Iran as well. Translating comics is a difficult task. The purpose of the present study is to assess the quality of translations of seven series of this collection, translated by Masume Razapour, from both verbal and nonverbal aspects considering four challenging areas of idiom, slang, onomatopoeia, and equivalence. Thus, English and Persian texts were compared with each other. To examine the verbal part Waddington’s (2001) type A model and for the nonverbal part, Kress and van Luween’s (2006) model have been used for examining the three metameanings of multimodal texts and determining the violation of image-text relations. The result of the study shows that the translator acted the most successfully in The Black Island (7.45) and the least successfully in The Broken Ear (-1.36). The changes in metameanings have happened in compositional meaning due to changes in font type/size or discontinuities of color. There are some cases of violation of image-text relation due to cultural differences and differences in writing direction. Examining the two verbal and non-verbal parts shows that the translator in a few cases of domesticating the texts due to cultural differences has caused some violations in meaning and image-text relation. The results of study can be used in teaching translation, informing translators about the more challenging areas of comic translation, and considerate use of localization to save image-text relations.

Keywords

Main Subjects

مطالعات ترجمه

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