The focus of this article is on the translation of comics. In the first part the
author provides a review of the existing research in the translation of this
particular textual genre andfinds that for a long time comics have been ignored
by Translation Studies as an object of investigation in their own right.
Sometimes used as mere examples to illustrate the technique of "compensation"
or a "reader-centred" translation approach, comics have been recently included
in a new type of translation called "constrained translation", where the
illustration is seen as a constraint for the translator. In contrast to such an
approach, the second part of the article proposes a translation approach to
comics where the linguistic and the semiological aspects have a parallel status.
Translators need therefore to develop their semiotic competence in order to be
able to consider the illustration as a fundamental semantic feature of the
linguistic message in the creation of the story.
