Ideophones are words that depict sensory imagery, including sound, movement, vision, inner feelings andmental states (Dingemanse 2012). They are both iconic and conventionalized in nature: their formsresemble their meanings, yet different languages use different forms for the same meanings. Somethinghitting water makes a splash in English but a plask in Swedish.Ideophones are frequent in comics, where they add dimensions of sound, movement etc. and depictcharacters’ emotions. Following a tradition established in the 1920s, they are often placed in the images,as part of the graphic representation, and in the speech bubbles; McCloud (2004), Zanettin (2008),Guynes (2014). The first set is known as sound effects, the second as vocalizations. This implies that soundeffects are not part of language proper to the extent that vocalizations are.Studies on the translation of comics have shown that the above distinction affects what is translated andhow. Vocalizations tend to be translated more often than sound effects, which may be left in the originalform or adjusted in terms of spelling. This is common especially in translations from English into otherlanguages, including Spanish, French, German (Garces 2015), Italian (Pischedda 2017), Finnish, Estonian,Latvian and Lithuanian (Takaki 2021). Apart from translations of Japanese manga, there are few studieson translation into English.This paper examines the English translations of comics written in Swedish (Rocky, by Martin Kellerman)and Finnish (Viivi ja Wagner, by Juba). Although linguistic items in images and speech bubbles can beshown to have similar properties, the latter are translated more consistently. For the former, severalstrategies can be identified: material can be left unchanged, omitted (images 1-2) or adjusted in terms ofspelling (3-4). When they are translated properly, there is no clear distinction between them and materialin speech bubbles (5-6).

Dingemanse, Mark. “Advances in the Cross-linguistic Study of Ideophones.” Language and Linguistics Compass 6/10(2012): 654–672.

Garcés, Carmen Valero. “Onomatopoeia and Unarticulated Language in the Translation and Production of Comic Books.”In Comics in Translation, edited by Federico Zanettin, 237-255. Manchester: St Jerome, 2008.

Guynes, Sean A. “Four-color Sound: A Peircean Semiotics of Comic Book Onomatopoeia.” Public Journal of Semiotics 6.1(2014): 58-72.

Juba. Viivi ja Wagner. Apua, sängyssäni on sika! Helsinki: Arktinen banaani, 1999.

Juba. Viivi & Wagner. Wow, a Pig in my Bed! Translated by Elina Koskelin and Juba. Middletown: CreateSpace, 2017.

Kellerman, Martin. Rocky. Stockholm: Ordfront Galago, 1999.

Kellerman, Martin. Rocky, Vol. 1: The Big Payback. Translated by Kim Thompson. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

Pischedda, Pier Simone. “Anglophonic Influence in the Use of Sound Symbolism in Italian Disney Comics: A Corpus-basedAnalysis.” Open Linguistics 3/1 (2017): 591-612.

Takaki, Akira. “Lits! Lörts! Šlurkt! Šliupšt! Onomatopoeettiset interjektiot suomen, viron, latvian ja liettuansarjakuvakäännöksissä.” MA diss., University of Helsinki, 2021.

Zanettin, Federico. 2008. “Comics in Translation: An Overview.” In Comics in Translation, edited by Federico Zanettin, 1-32. Manchester: St Jerome, 2008.