From ''Uncle Scrooge'' to ''Zio Paperone'': A Challenging Journey into the Translation of Disney Comics

Anno Accademico 2009/ 2010
INTRODUCTION.
      This work aims at analysing Disney comics from the point of view of language, 
translation and culture. 
      What motivated me to choose this subject was an essay I have read recently, 
Lucchetti, babbani e medaglioni magici: Harry Potter in italiano: le sfide di una 
traduzione by Ilaria Katerinov, which concerns the way the novel Harry Potter had 
been translated from English into Italian. In particular, I immediately appreciated the 
chapter about the translation of proper names, so I decided to consider this subject, 
and, together with it, all the aspects related to linguistics and translation.
      As it shows a great number of characters -and, as a result, of proper names- I have 
chosen Disney comics, even though any comic story, film, tv series or book could 
serve this purpose. 
      In chapter one, I am going to provide a brief overview of Disney comics, in order 
to make readers aware of what they are reading.
      In chapter two, I am going to give some useful information about the linguistic 
and extra-linguistic aspects of comics, their translation and some of the possible 
difficulties we may find when translating them from a source language to a target 
one.
      In the next two chapters I am going to illustrate two cases: in the former, English 
is the source text and Italian is the target text, in the latter the we encounter the 
opposite situation, in other words, a text in which Italian is the source language is 
being shown. I have selected Mickey Mouse’s Inferno , which is a nineteenth- century 
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parody of Dante Alighieri’s well-known masterpiece: The Divine Comedy to explain 
this last case.
As far as I am concerned, it is a very interesting task to try to understand how all the 
linguistic aspects of this text have been translated into the English language.
      At the end of this work, I am going to sum up the collected data and try to draw 
up considerations concerning translation in general and the differences between the 
two languages I have taken into account.
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Chapter 1: DISNEY COMICS. 
      Comics
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 is a graphic medium in which images convey a sequential narrative. 
Before dealing with Disney Comics, its story, evolution and main features, it may be 
helpful to provide some background information about this unique narrative genre.
Spiegelman, the author of a graphic novel called Maus , defines comics as ‘a medium 
using words and pictures for reproduction’ and Scott McCloud reminds us that 
‘comics is used with a singular verb’
2
.  
      Given this, let us begin with two essential aspects related to the creation of 
comics, which have been clearly described by Pratt in his essay Medium Specificity 3
. 
First of all, the causal origins of comics are multifaceted, at least when compared to 
classic works of literature. Comic production commonly requires writing, layout, 
penciling, inking, lettering and colouring (if applicable). Sometimes a single person 
does all of these tasks, but the vast majority of mass-marketed comics are created in a 
co-operative context
4
. 
Secondly, historically speaking, the first creators of comics came from backgrounds 
of low social and economic status. Many of the pioneers in comics were immigrants 
to the United States or children of immigrants. They were often Jewish, women, 
homosexuals, or African Americans, driven to comics because they could not find 
work in any other field of art at a time when their conditions put them at significant 
disadvantage. Because of this reason, comics, which has been primarily understood as 
1
 This word derives from the Greek κωμικός, kōmikos ‘of or pertaining to comedy’, via the Latin 
cōmicus .
2
 In his book called Understanding Comics (1993).
3
 Pratt, Henry John,  Medium specificity and the Ethics of Narrative in Comics (Lincoln NE: 
University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
4
 The people involved in the comics production process are usually a plotter, a breakdown artist, a 
penciller, an inker, a scripter, a letterer and a colourist, with some roles being performed by the same 
person.
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a popular art form, has been underestimated and contented with much denigration. 
Only recently, have all its features been appreciated, since it has been noticed that 
they offer an intricately layered narrative language that comprises the verbal, the 
visual, and the way these two representational modes interact on a page. The fact that 
comics has become one of the subjects of Modern Fiction Studies demonstrates the 
viability of graphic narrative for serious academic inquiry and also reveals its 
differences from all the varieties of narrative forms we have previously met . 
     According to Chute
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 every kind of graphic narrative calls a reader's attention both 
visually and spatially. Comics does the work of narration at least in part through 
drawing. Because of the foregrounding of the work of the hand, graphic narrative is 
an autographic form in which the mark of handwriting is an important part of the rich 
extra-semantic information a reader receives.
      It is worth noting that, although there is not a significant tradition before the 
twentieth century that accounts for the specific manifestation of comics, there are 
some significant historical precedents. In the sixteenth century, the swarming images 
in Brueghel's paintings suggested that a single image could also be narrative, and also 
implied the mixture of word and image that appeared in the following centuries.
The Sister Arts tradition in the eighteenth century, building on analogies and points of 
resemblance between word and image (deriving from Horace’s slogan ut pictura 
poesis 6 ), laid the basis for the exploration of the connection between written text and 
pictures. More importantly, William Hogarth’ s work is fundamental to understanding 
how graphic narrative has been built on a tradition associated with the history of the 
novel in the eighteenth century. A Harlot's Progress , produced in 1731, much like 
5
 Chute, Hillary and DeKoven, Marianne, Introduction: Graphic Narrative (Baltimore: The Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 2007).
6
 Literally: ‘as painting, so is poetry’.
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graphic narrative, is a picture story: Hogarth displayed a sequential pictorial narrative 
in six paintings. This work of art represented punctual moments, so he introduced a 
sequential, novelistic structure to a pictorial form.
Other historical precedents include William Blake’s illuminated poetry , in which the 
words and images were dependent on each other.
 In addition, Goya's Disaster of War series of reported images, created between 1810 
and 1820, which consisted of a numbered sequence of eighty-three etchings with 
captions, set an enormous precedent for many contemporary authors.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Rodolfe Töpffer established the conventions of 
modern comics in Switzerland, such as panels’ borders and the combined use of 
words and images. In his work, named Word and Image , Mitchell noted that we 
might call the division between word and image ‘the relation between the seeable and 
the sayable, display and discourse, showing and telling’. 
      After reading this short introduction, we can now move to a brief journey into the 
story of Disney Comics. 
The first Disney comics appeared in the United States of America, in form of daily 
newspaper strips on January 13, 1930. These newspapers were syndicated by King 
Features with production done in-house by a Disney comic strip department at the 
studio.  
      So, the Mickey Mouse daily comic strip began to be published, featuring Mickey 
as an optimistic, adventure-seeking young mouse. After two wears, a Sunday strip 
started and it was a topper Silly Symphony strip which dealt with the adventures of 
Bucky Bug , the first Disney character to originate in the comics. It subsequently 
printed adaptations of some of the Symphony cartoons , and so stories involving Pluto , 
Little Hiawatha, Snow White and Pinocchio were introduced. What about Donald 
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Duck ? He made his first comics appearance in the Silly Symphony adaptation of the 
1934 Disney short The Wise Little Hen . As Donald's popularity grew, he became the 
star of the Silly Symphony strip for a long period -from August 1936 to December 
1937- and then had his own daily strip published in February, 1938. A Donald 
Sunday strip was edited in December, 1939.
      The Silly Symphony Sunday strip stopped in 1942 and was replaced with an 
adaptation of Bambi , after the conclusion of which, a José Carioca Sunday strip was 
printed. It was replaced by Uncle Remus in 1945.
      Apart from the strips mentioned above, other Disney strips were distributed, such 
as the following:
1) Uncle Remus and His Tales of Brer Rabbit , which was a Sunday strip, published 
from October 1945 to December 1972;
2) Merry Menagerie , that consisted of a humorous daily panel with anthropomorphic 
animals, but no Disney characters (printed from 1947 to 1962);
3) Treasury of Classic Tales, which was another Sunday strip (1952-1987);
4) True Life Adventures (a daily panel appearing from 1955 to 1971);
5) Mickey Mouse and His Friends , that was a pantomime aimed at an international 
audience and was edited from, 1958 to 1962;
6) Scamp (1955-1988);
7) Winnie the Pooh (1978-1988);
8) Gummi Bears (1986-1989).
      Another special daily strip with a holiday theme and the Disney characters was 
produced each year since 1960. It generally ran for three weeks with the concluding 
strip appearing on Christmas day. These were really special because they made the 
Disney characters belonging to different stories interact (e.g. the Big Bad Wolf met 
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the fairies from Sleeping Beauty ). The tradition was continued in the mid 1990s in 
contemporary Disney animated films: Beauty and the Beast (1992), Aladdin (1993), 
The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and 
The Little Mermaid (1997). Newspaper Enterprise Association offers a similar 
holiday themed special strip still today.
       Floyd Gottfredson (Mickey Mouse, Treasury of Classic Tales), Roman Arambula 
(Mickey Mouse), Rick Hoover (Mickey Mouse, Gummy Bears), Manuel Gonzales 
(Mickey Mouse), Bill Wright (Mickey Mouse, Uncle Remus), Ted Thwaites (Mickey 
Mouse), Riley Thomson (Uncle Remus), Chuck Fuson (Uncle Remus), John Ushler 
(Treasury of Classic Tales, Scamp, Uncle Remus, holiday), Carson Van Osten 
(Mickey Mouse), Al Taliaferro (Donald Duck), Frank Grundeen (Donald Duck), Al 
Hubbard (Donald Duck), Kay Wright (Donald Duck), Ellis Eringer (Donald Duck), 
Dick Moores (Uncle Remus), Paul Murry (Jose Carioca, Uncle Remus), Daan Jippes 
(Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse), Tony Strobl (Donald Duck, holiday), Jim Engel 
(Mickey Mouse), Ken Hultgren (Mickey Mouse and His Friends), Julius Svendsen 
(Mickey Mouse and His Friends), George Wheeler (True Life Adventures) and Bob 
Grant (Merry Menagerie). Writers included Merrill De Maris (Mickey Mouse), Ted 
Osborne (Mickey Mouse), Bill Walsh (Mickey Mouse, Uncle Remus), Bob Karp 
(Donald Duck, Merry Menagerie), Carl Fallberg (Treasury of Classic Tales, holiday], 
Frank Reilly (Treasury of Classic Tales, holiday), Milt Banta (Mickey Mouse and Hid 
Friends), Roy Williams (Mickey Mouse and His Friends), George Stallings (Uncle 
Remus), Jack Boyd (Uncle Remus), Dick Huemer (True Life Adventures) and Floyd 
Norman (Mickey Mouse, holiday) were among the artists working on the Disney 
comic strips.
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In 1990 the Donald strip ended and Disney closed its comic strip department, 
while the Mickey strip went on, supervised by King Features with Floyd Norman as 
the writer and Rick Hoover as the artist. In addition, reruns of the Mickey Mouse and 
Donald Duck comic strips still appear on some newspapers all over the world.
      American Disney comic book writers and artists include Carl Barks, Tony Strobl, 
Paul Murry, William Van Horn, and Don Rosa. 
      Some Disney comic titles in the USA are:
1) Mickey Mouse and Friends (since 1933);
2) Walt Disney's Comics and Stories (since 1940);
3) Donald Duck Four Colour (since 1952);
4) Uncle Scrooge (since 1952);
5) Huey, Dewey and Louie Junior Woodchucks (1966-1984);
6) Uncle Scrooge Adventures (1987-1990, 1993-1997); 
7) Donald Duck Adventures (1988-1990, 1993-1997).
      What about Italy? The first Italian Disney comics was published at the beginning 
of the 1930s, and Federico Pedrocchi wrote and drawn the first long Disney comic in 
1937. Some of the most famous Disney comic artists, such as Romano Scarpa, 
Giorgio Cavazzano, and Giovan Battista Carpi  are Italian. 
      Another very important thing to be said is that Italy has introduced several new 
characters to the Disney universe, including Donald's superhero alter ego Paperinik , 
whose production was handled by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore from 1935 until 1988.
Italy is also behind the digest-sized format used in the long running Donald Duck 
pocket book series.
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Recently, Disney Italy has launched several new lines, including PK (a comic 
book version of Paperinik addressed to a slightly older audience), W.I.T.C.H ., and the 
comics published under the imprint Buena Vista Comics .
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Chapter 2: THE LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION OF 
COMICS.
      As I have pointed out in the previous chapter, it is no longer necessary to prove 
the worthiness and literary potential of the medium of comics nowadays: new literary 
and popular genres are spreading and graphic narrative has become part of an 
expanding literary field, absorbing and redirecting the formal, ideological and 
creative energies of contemporary fiction. Comics is but ‘thinking about using the 
text and the pictures to deliver two levels of information simultaneously’, as 
Coughlan writes in this essay titled Paul Auste 's City of Glass: The Graphic Novel .
        Jacobs, who is an American fashion designer, describes the convergence of 
various media in contemporary cultural forms in general, and the usefulness of the 
concept of multi-modality to examine comics as complex textual environments. His 
meticulous reading of the changing shape of word balloons, changes in fonts and type 
size, the use of line and white space, the plan of gutters and panels, changing 
perspectives, and the strategic use of the close-up, suggest how many elements 
combine in the process of meaning making comics. Linguistic, visual, and spatial 
design elements interconnect in co-presence. For all these reasons, trying to translate 
comics is a really challenging task: you have to take into account all the above-
mentioned elements. 
      Before talking about the translation of this particular narrative genre, I would like 
to focus on its characteristics.
      Comics play a pivotal role among the media since it is addressed to an audience 
with huge differences in social class and culture. The balloon, which contains the 
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characters’ words, is the main feature of comics. It is so important that the neologism 
that has been invented in Italy to define it- fumetto - underwent a metonymical process 
and is now referred to comics itself, so it does not mean ‘balloon’ any more.
What about the term comics ? It reflects the predominance of the comic, humorous 
subject matter in its first decades of life.  With regards to its language, we can say that 
it is made up of a strong linkage existing between the iconic (the image) and the 
verbal code (the written part). It is a narrative through pictures, and these are the 
essential element, while words have a secondary function: if we omitted them, the 
meaning would not change. However, written text is important because it determines 
the rhythm of the narration: it gives pictures a temporal dimension and coherence, as 
well.
Not only is the language of comics obtained from a blend of pictures and words, but a 
lot of other elements contribute to create it. They have been borrowed from the field 
of the cinema, the theatre, literature, television and computers: it is a dynamic 
medium which may be applied to various genres: adventure, gothic, love stories and 
so on. What is more, it may be published in different ways: daily strips, books, 
magazines, episodes etc. It can be seen from diverse points of view: sociology, 
psychology, pedagogy, literary criticism, linguistics and translation, too. And here I 
am going to study comics from the point of view of linguistics and translation. Before 
we go stright to the point, it would be advisable to explain how is the ‘grammar’ of 
this particular genre made up.
2.1: The ‘grammar’ of comics.
      Let us focus on the principal elements:
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