Inferência e omissão na solução de problemas de tradução em histórias em quadrinhos

Abstract

Comic books, due to their inherent multimodality as expressed by the relationship between text and images, have been attracting the interest of Translation Studies researchers, who have the possibility of investigating both the translation product and the process. By assuming that the pictorial component can aid translators in solving translation problems in comic books, this senior thesis investigates how eight translators deal with inferences and omissions when translating a comic book excerpt from U.S. English into Brazilian Portuguese extracted from a story of Conan, the character created by American writer Robert E. Howard in the 1930s. The objective was to determine how performing the task from the panel set or from text segments had an impact on the choices made by the participants and single out the decisions provided in the comments as well as the number of renditions and the time spent on the tasks. Data collection was carried out by means of a web-based application named jMAT developed by this thesis’ author and consisted of two stages: firstly, participants were asked to provide a translation for six segments, out of which four containing nouns and adjectives in attributive position were analyzed; secondly, they were quizzed on whether they knew or inferred the meaning of some of the parts of speech appearing in the source text and encouraged to provide comments on their decisions accordingly. An eye tracker kit, comprised of both hardware and software, was used to keep track of participants’ eye movements and register the moves throughout the tasks performed, which were subsequently exported to video format. The results indicate that overall the inferences drawn by the participants worked and did not compromise the narrative despite the translations not being accurate from a purely linguistic perspective. Working from the panel set did not necessarily give translators an advantage and seemed to have required greater cognitive effort on their part as suggested by the time spent on the tasks and the renditions made by some of the participants. Omissions of attributive adjectives took place regardless of the visual input.