Désir de traduire et professionnalisation du traducteur de bandes dessinées

Contrary to popular belief, comic books constitute a very specific category of texts. These, because of their multisemiotic nature, are very difficult to translate. Nonetheless, many a publisher is quick to resort to comic book fans to translate their comic strip books, believing that a reasonably decent knowledge of the foreign language and a strong passion for comic books will be enough to guarantee a good translation. The resulting translation is often a poor one that does not do justice to the original work and that might even affect sales. A number of practical examples and the experiment conducted by O’Hagan on manga comic books and scanlations show that the desire to translate and distribute comic strip books is sufficient to produce good translations.