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Article In: Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts: Online-First Articles

Translating nuclear disaster

Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows

 | University of Bari
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Abstract
The advent of atomic energy vividly highlights the inherent duality of human nature, a synthesis of both creative and destructive potential (Malvestio 2021). Within the context of the Cold War, British cartoonist Raymond Briggs explores the threat of nuclear disaster in his 1982 graphic novel When the Wind Blows, thereby reflecting the anxieties of his era.
Through the interplay of words and pictures (Altenberg 2015), the reader is introduced to an unfamiliar world of devastation, seen from the perspective of a trusting elderly couple, Jim and Hilda, who naively attempt to protect their home in compliance with governmental specifications. As memories of the Second World War blend with the present, the figures of traditional enemies — the Germans and the Russians — begin to overlap.
Acknowledging the role of translation in shaping the reception of politically committed narratives in a different linguistic and cultural context, this paper presents a qualitative contrastive analysis of Brigg’s When the Wind Blows and its 1984 Italian translation. The study aims to examine the strategies employed in the target text to render culture-bound elements (Baker and Jones 2026), including terms related to British customs and politics, and to reproduce the polysemy of puns, trying to preserve the satirical undertones of the original work.
Grounded in the theoretical framework of Translation Studies, the analysis will evaluate the translator’s ability to mediate between the two cultures without erasing the foreign identity of the source text (Venuti 2001).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.“The Awful Shadow of Some Unseen Power”: Framing Nuclear Anxiety
  • 3.The Graphic Novel
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Contrastive Analysis
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (44)
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