Translation Quality Assessment of Sounds in Comics: A Comparative Study for Analyzing Onomatopoeias and Interjections in Persian Translations

Comics are considered as one of the most popular books because authors and illustrators of such books combine sounds, images, and words in a creative manner to lead readers' thoughts to the specific storyline. Although the translation of sounds such as onomatopoeias and interjections is of great significance, translators sometimes encounter considerable difficulties in conveying them from one language to another. Concerning translation quality assessment, the present research was conducted to investigate and analyze the translation quality of onomatopoeias and interjections in comics. To this end, six issues of an English comic entitled the Walking Dead were selected to assess both onomatopoeias and interjections. The sounds applied in the aforementioned comic were rendered into Persian by two translators and the website. In consequence, three different translations were utilized to perceive how well and efficiently the translators were able to translate the sounds from English into Persian. According to the specific rating scale, three raters evaluated the equivalents to determine which translation had the highest quality. Lastly, inter-rater reliability and descriptive statistics were utilized to indicate the quality of all three translations. The results of this study demonstrated that Akhtari's translation surpassed Sohrabi and TWDfans, and the lowest quality appertained to Sohrabi's translation. Despite the fact that Sohrabi's translation had the lowest quality, it was not greatly inferior to TWDfans.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.