Translation of Visual Phraseological Units in Pilkey’s Dog Man

Abstract

The use of visual phraseological units in graphic literature is a common occurrence that has not received much attention from the scholarly community, having nonetheless been analysed in advertising and journalism. This lack of interest has been caused, at least partially, by the low esteem that academia has for this genre, which has undergone great development over the last few decades, growing both in complexity and in popularity among the reading public. Furthermore, this type of literature provides unmatched creative opportunities for authors and artists to explore different resources for multimodal communication, which also impacts the labour of translators and how the work, either in its original version or as a translation, is understood by readers. This article explores the use of visual phraseologisms in the series of children’s graphic novels Dog Man to determine how visual phraseological units are used in the various volumes and to analyse how this practice affects the translation of a genre, including the added difficulty for translators of having to preserve the connection between text and picture as intended by the author.