The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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16 The Linguist Vol/58 No/1 2019 ciol.org.uk/tl FEATURES Speech bubbles and slang During the comics exhibition 'reframe', which I co-curated in 2014, I translated a short comic, Angry Turks, about the Gezi protests in Istanbul the previous year. The amount of text and the density of each panel, including the use of black and white, convey the idea of turmoil and urgency. The political discourses get claustrophobic. In the panel below, we see a variety of characters speaking to each other. The dialogue bubbles have been coloured so readers can identify which conversations go together, but the use of colour also takes us out of the black-and-white world of the rest of the story, and into the reality of the political situation in everyday life. A Turkish reader will immediately recognise the conversations, which are part of daily discourse both in the Turkish media and on the street. As a translator, I could have included an appendix to explain every element, but it would have added noise to an already dense comic. The tone of these dialogues, the characters' expressions and the whole movement inside the single panel already give an idea that the country is polarised, and that people have clashing opinions on issues related to politics, freedom of the press, LGBTQ rights and religion. The images give the reader more than enough to understand and engage with the story (even if they miss certain subtleties), and this is something I can utilise and rely on as a translator. More challenging, perhaps, is the frequent use of colloquial language and slang. At a comics and translation forum in Singapore, Carlo Vergara explained some of the challenges of translating his hugely successful comics from the original Filipino. They centre around a gay beauty salon owner who ingests a spiky stone and is transformed into the fabulous superhero ZsaZsa Zaturnnah – a powerful woman with large red hair. I do not read Filipino, but I can imagine the fascinating storytelling possibilities around language, gender and sexuality in this work. A particular translation conundrum arises when one of his characters uses the expression Miss Malaysia. "In Filipino, when you say malay it means 'consciousness', as in regaining consciousness after you lose it, but it can also mean 'to be conscious of' or 'to be aware of', 'to know'. When you say 'I don't know', you say malay in Filipino," he explained. "The Filipino homosexual, especially the Filipino effeminate homosexual, tends to add things to words, like turning malay into Miss Malaysia. So that's how 'I don't know' became Miss Malaysia." In a similar way, Pakistan came to mean 'I don't care' (from paki alam; 'I don't care to know'), and Malaysia a Pakistan, 'I don't know and I don't care'. "how can you translate that in a crosscultural context?" Vergara asked. It is clear that, when approaching slang, the translator needs to enter the world of each character in order to identify their tone of voice, the context in which they are speaking and the way in which they use language. As a medium, comics allow the most complex stories to reach wide audiences. The more they are translated, the more our languages will get richer with new vocabulary, both visual and textual. COMIC VALUES Close-up of a panel from Murat Mıhçıoğlu's 'Angry Turks' showing the use of colour to aid the reading of an overcrowded scene (below); with the full page (inset); and (above) Carlo Vergara's popular superhero ZsaZsa Zaturnnah