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...

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Published in:Children's Literature in Education Vol. 56; no. 2; pp. 256 - 273
Main Author: Alós, Julieta
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Jun2025
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Jun2025
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        atl: Paralanguage in the Translation of Children's Graphic Novels into Arabic: Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
      aug:
        au: Alós, Julieta
        affil: https://ror.org/00yhnba62 Department of English Literature and Linguistics, College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar
      su:
        Graphic novels
        Kinney, Jeff, 1971-
        Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Book)
        Paralinguistics
        Cognitive science
      sug:
        subj:
          Graphic novels
          Kinney, Jeff, 1971-
          Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Book)
          Paralinguistics
          Cognitive science
      keyword:
        Comic diary
        English-Arabic translation
        Graphic novel
        Multimodal text
        Paralanguage
        Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Psychology
      ab: 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.
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    language: English
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