Comic books and graphic novels are generally enjoyed as a solitary, silent experience, but the visual and written representation of sound is a big part of what makes them so expressive.
Linguists call the way in which comic book artists render sound ‘textual audio.’ This refers, among other things, to the heavy use of onomatopoeia (the use of made up words to reproduce non-language sounds), often in combination with the liberal use of punctuation indicating emphasis, to communicate what a particular action sounds like: for example, a kiss (SMACK!!), a punch that’s as devastating as a gunshot (KAPOW!!!), or an explosion (BOOOOOM!!!!).
And while comic book artists often draw on a rich library of textual audio that has been used before, and that everyone recognises, they can also invent new sounds to match their characters and storyline. Often, these sounds only make sense in the context of the image and the specific action it depicts.
Translating comic books is an exciting challenge. Some onomatopoeia works quite well in multiple languages, at least so long as they have the same writing system and similar phonetics, but sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and the translator must find a sonic equivalent in the target language, while avoiding unwanted connotations. And it’s more difficult again when translating from a language with a completely different writing system to the target language (think Japanese into German, for example).
Comic books, a literary format that is often underestimated in terms of its cultural reach, can call for the most refined, most delicate, most sophisticated translating skills of all.
GADZOOKS!!!???!!!!
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