Mediation of Multimodal Word Literature and Indirect Translation: Analysing The Adventures of Tintin

Abstract

The current work attempts to explore the issues present during indirect translation of multimodal word texts like a world comics created by Hergé with the help of a pragmatic theory, Relevance Theory of Communication propounded by Sperber and Wilson (1986, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Blackwell, 1995), which has been successfully applied in the domain of translation by several scholars, notable and foremost among them being Ernst-August Gutt (Translation and Relevance: Cognition And Context, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, Translation and Relevance: Cognition And Context, St. Jerome, 2000). Using the insights provided by Gutt’s application of Relevance Theory to translation, this chapter will attempt a comparative analysis of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin and its highly popular Bengali rendering. While acknowledging that linguistic differences are one major hurdle to be overcome for successful translation, the relevance-theoretic approaches bring out that contextual differences constitute a second major hurdle, of at least equal importance to the linguistic one. Thus, the study posits that one can depend on the assumption that multimodal world texts can also be called as visual world literature, and the related issues can be explicated through assistance by means of Mona Bakers Translation Universals