Paralanguage in the Translation of Children's Graphic Novels into Arabic: Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Graphic novels are marketed as helpful for reluctant young readers. The supplementation of text with visual stimuli as part of a multimodal narrative is often claimed to improve reading comprehension and motivation in children and young adolescents. The translation into Arabic of Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, by comparison, fails to deliver an equally engaging reading experience. In the Arabic versions of Rodrick Rules and Hard Luck, language acts as an obstacle to comprehension due to the misrepresentation of textual paralanguage, broadly defined as the written representation of nonverbal aspects of communication including tone, stress and volume. As paralanguage is also involved in character portrayal, this translation approach paints a rather dull image of the series' protagonist Greg. Using the textual paralanguage typology proposed by Luangrath et al. (J Consum Psychol 27:98-107, 2017), the case is made here for closer attention in translation to the pragmatic meanings contained in textual paralanguage. As the novel evolves to incorporate an ever-expanding array of multimodal elements, so should the translation strategies involved in rendering these texts into other languages.

Automated summary

Graphic novels are marketed as helpful for reluctant young readers, as the combination of text and visual stimuli is claimed to improve reading comprehension and motivation. However, the translation of Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series into Arabic fails to provide an equally engaging reading experience.