La traducción de la variación lingüística en los cómics: El dialecto de Ebony White en The Spirit

Abstract

This study analyzes the Spanish translation of Ebony White’s dialect in the comic-book The Spirit, by Will Eisner. This African-American boy embodies several demeaning racial stereotypes. He is represented as an obsequious character in wide eyes, ballooned lips, and protruding ears.

Trying to contextualize this qualitative study, the first step is to explore the publishing context of Eisner’s works and the circumstances of their publication in Spain. Specifically, this paper focuses on how Ebony White’s dialect has been translated into Spanish, as he is one of the supporting characters who helps the masked vigilante. It is observed how the source text’s pages portray, thanks to the «eye-dialect» technique, some of the phonological and morpho-syntactic features of Black English in a parodical tone. This contribution eamines which strategies have been used to render Ebony White’s marked dialect into the target comic-books published by Norma and translated by Enrique Sánchez Abulí.

This contrastive study sheds some light on how Sánchez Abulí plays with spelling and opposes the protagonist’s lines to Ebony White’s, as he speaks a fictional variety of non-standard Spanish. Thanks to translation strategies, certain stereotypes underlining the otherness in The Spirit’s sidekick are reproduced in both source and target texts.