A study of the translation of Kobane Calling into Brazilian Portuguese: The Roman dialect and fictional orality

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present some of Fernando Scheibe’s translation solutions for Kobane Calling, Zerocalcare’s most successful comic book, which recounts two of the author’s trips to Syria. We sought to investigate how the translator dealt with the elements of the Roman dialect (Viviani, 2013; Ventura, 2019), present in the speech of the narrator and the characters Armadillo and Mammoth, and with the fictional orality (Bagno, 2017; Abella, 2020) present in the construction of the dialogues. The linguistic variant used by the author is known to be intended to mark a political position, shedding light on the way of speaking on the periphery of Rome, where he lives. The dialogues are constructed in a way that emulates real speech situations, constituting written and fictional recreations meant to be “heard” by the reader (Eisner, 2007, apud Abella, 2020, p. 1). We note that while Scheibe finds excellent solutions for the feigned orality, the elements of linguistic Romanity are lost in translation.