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

I have already explained the importance of this peculiar kind of proper designations in the previous chapter, therefore I am going to focus directly on the names of the characters I have found in the story.
Before starting, I must say that with some names we have a back translation: as most characters had been invented in by American authors, we find that the names of the protagonists have been translated from English to Italian, and then to English again.
At the very beginning, there are Mickey Mouse and Goofy, whose Italian names are, respectively, Topolino and Pippo. It is difficult to establish what translation strategy has been used here, since these names are now considered fixed equivalences, incorporated by a shared knowledge of the Disney world, and nobody thinks their translation represents a problem. However, one may ask why Mickey Mouse becomes Topolino. The answer is obvious, it is an arbitrary translation, due to the fact that the name Mickey is completely lost, to give place to a name expressing the concept of a small mouse.
Even stranger is the case of Goofy. In English, he has a ‘speaking name’, a self-explanatory name, since his characteristics and qualities are hidden behind it, and in Italian all them disappear. Pippo is a name that does not mean anything. Even the phonetics of the name suggests something completely different, because in Italian you find the alliteration of the voiceless bilabial plosive ‘p’ and in English you don’t.
Throughout the text you come across with other names such as Peg leg Pete and Abdul.
Peg leg pete, who appears in the first page of the plot, is called Gamba di legno in Italian. Both the English name and the Italian one refer to the fact that the character has got an artificial, made of wood leg. In addition, the alliteration of the voiced velar plosive ‘g’ in the English name is very funny and produces a comic effect, but it has been completely lost in the Italian version. However, it does not represent a huge problem, because what matters here is the preservation of the meaning, a ‘sense for sense’ translation: in other words, in this case we have an equivalence in content, but not in form. Because of this reason this translation can be considered effective, and it is a clear application of the so-called Minimax strategy.
Let’s move to Abdul. It is another characters appearing in the first page of the narrative. As you see, the name stays the same in both texts, and I fully agree with this choice because it evokes both in Italian, British and American culture the image of an Asian person. As a matter of fact, Abdul is a sort of Asian magician hired by Peg leg Pete to make Mickey’s performance on stage fail. As he is a foreigner, he speaks in a very peculiar way, but I will talk about this in the paragraph named ‘Accents and dialects’.