Onomatopoeias like crash and boom are well-known examples of sound symbolism, the linguistic concept where a word's sound provides perceptual cues that indicate that word's meaning. Such expressions have become iconic to visual graphic mediums such as comic books and graphic novels, and in some languages like Japanese, they are used frequently in day-to-day speech. In Japanese comics, manga, onomatopoeias and mimetic expressions are said to add further contextual and semantic information for Japanese readers (Sasamoto, 2019; Natsume, 1995). As the popularity of manga grows internationally, manga translators are faced with the challenge of translating expressions like onomatopoeias. The current work presents an overview of existing research, examining some of the approaches taken when translating onomatopoeic expressions in manga, and culminates in a psycholinguistic experiment that investigated how different translation approaches may impact English audiences' comprehension of the material from a sound symbolic perspective. The romanized transliteration of words' sounds, also known as romaji, was a particular area of interest because of the variety of ways English speakers could interpret the text given the variety of vowel sounds that exist in English. Moreover, whether disparities between the sounds contained in English and Japanese affected comprehension was examined. Results revealed that respelling a Japanese onomatopoeic expression according to English spelling conventions increased accuracy of sound interpretation. However such respellings did not have an impact on comprehension. Further potential research on the cross-linguistic transferability of sounds in the context of graphic visual narratives is described, along with suggestions for empirically validated translation approaches that maintain symbolic properties.
Acknowledgements: I could not have finished this senior undergraduate thesis without the unwavering guidance and support from my thesis advisors, Professor Chad Rogers in the Psychology/Neuroscience Departments and Professor Junko Ueno（上野先生）in the Asian Studies/Modern Languages and Literature Departments. I could not have finished this senior undergraduate thesis without the guidance and support from my thesis advisors, Professor Chad Rogers in the Psychology/Neuroscience Departments and Professor Junko Ueno（上野先生）in the Asian Studies/Modern Languages and Literature Departments. I am also extremely grateful for the SPAN Lab members who helped pilot my study and encouraged me throughout this process, Professor Kristina Striegnitz for lending me her thesaurus of Japanese onomatopoeia and mimetic expressions, and Robyn Reed for research help during the early stages of this project's development. Finally, I would be remiss in not mentioning my parents and friends for keeping me motivated when I needed it and providing me with the strength I needed to continue and finish this thesis.
Thank you all for believing in me!