Translating and Creating Sound Symbolic Forms in Italian Disney Comics: A Historical and Linguistic Inquiry

This research will seek to map the use and importation of sound symbolic forms, such as ideophones—including onomatopoeia—and interjections, into Italian through Disney comics. It will describe the slow and still on-going linguistic adaptation involved, which has been influencing the Italian language for the past eighty years by encouraging lexical experimentation and spurs of creativity on the part of Italian cartoonists and translators. Scholars tend to dismiss the topic here analysed by affirming that Romance languages have been deeply affected by Anglophonic influences, but these assumptions are rarely backed up by empirical data. Systematic studies on the creative potentials of Italian sound symbolism or on the influence of English ideophones and interjections based on an extended corpus are scarce. Similarly rare are studies on the use and function of ideophones across languages. This is a chance to look at how a single linguistic phenomenon (i.e. sound symbolism) has been moulded into a language through eight decades of assimilation and, more specifically, to study how the Italian language and Disney comics published in Italy have adapted in order to accommodate and successfully employ sound symbolic forms.