Secretaria de Relações Internacionais | Office of International Relations

Next Thursday, 21 March, Professor Dimitris Assimakoulas from the University of Surrey, United Kingdom, will give a lecture entitled “The Translation of Comic Books” at the UFSC School of Communication and Arts (CCE). The event will take place at the Drummond Room, Building B, ground floor, and will start at 10 am.

The lecture will be given in English and has the support of the Office of International Relations (SINTER), the School of Communication and Arts (CCE), the Graduate Program in Knowledge Engineering (EGC), the Graduate Program in Translation Studies (PPGET), the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Laboratory (Lempi) and the TraCor Research Group – Translation and Corpora.

About the topic

Humour in comic books may be one of the most memorable aspects of reading, one that may motivate cultural producers to innovate and agents of translation to overcome publication and linguistic barriers. The comic book adaptations of Aristophanes’ plays is an excellent case in point. These comic books have been immensely successful and their translations were commissioned in two locales, Greece and Turkey. Using a graphic style-inspired approach to humour and the concept of ‘rewriting’ as a unifying thread, this book sheds light on how and why humour travels across cultures and time. As is argued, the Aristophanic comic series is part of a long chain of interventions that give the inherent universality of Aristophanic thematics a new lease of life. These  interventions may be professional/logistic, ideological and broadly artistic, or, specifically in the case of translators, textual, as seen in reconfigured interrelations between the verbal and visual
channels.

About the lecturer

As an undergraduate student of English at the University of Athens, Dimitris Assimakoulas was drawn enough to the subject of translation to later pursue postgraduate studies in this field. He obtained an MSc (with distinction) and a doctorate degree from the University of Manchester after securing a PhD scholarship from the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and a stipend from the Language Engineering Department at UMIST. Before joining Surrey in 2006 he worked as a corpus assistant for the Translational English Corpus (CTIS Manchester), as a research associate for a poetry translation project (Newcastle University) and as a part-time Greek translation lecturer (University of Salford).
Currently he serves as Deputy Director (Centre for Translation Studies) and Programme Director (MRes in Translation and Interpreting Studies).