Onomatopee giappone: Strategie di traduzione nel romanzo e nel manga

Japanese language has a variety of onomatopoeias and mimetic expressions that rarely find equivalents in European languages. This paper investigates translation strategies into Italian in two different genres: novel and manga. The texts examined are the best-selling novel Kitchen by Yoshimoto Banana and two popular manga, Yazawa Ai’s Nana and Kishimoto Masashi’s Naruto. In the novel, the translator can use a variety of strategies, such as using nouns, adjectives and verbs, or can even choose omission in the target language. In a manga, the sound effects play an important role in graphics, as well as in narration. The translator uses many English onomatopoeias, but also creates new expressions for the Japanese ones that do not find adequate translations in English or Italian.