Approaching the Portrayal of Child Abuse in Beto Hernandez’s Comics through its Spanish Translations

Abstract

Despite taking place on opposite sides of the US-Mexico border, Beto Hernandez’s Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories, Marble Season, and Julio’s Day exemplify this cartoonist’s interest in portraying child abuse and the kind of violence, both verbal and physical, that marks the protagonists’ surroundings. Racial and homophobic slurs in comics are especially complex to translate in such a way that an acceptable target text is produced for Spanish readers. This paper looks into what strategies have been followed to recreate, in Spanish, the episodes containing verbal assaults. When the history of how these comics have been published in Spain is examined, it is striking to notice that Palomar has been edited twice over the last twenty years. Therefore, this study tries to determine whether the latest edition (2024) is a retranslation and what changes have been made, in contrast with the first Spanish version (2005).