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

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 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.