Abstract
In the last few years, two veritably burgeoning areas, comics studies and translation studies have asserted their autonomy by addressing specificities of form and context of production/reception. Acknowledging similarities between these two fields, and highlighting the role of translation as a conduit of cultural flows and representations, this article explores linguistic transfer and male/female characterisation in the English translations of Assembly of Women and Ladies’ Day. The two comics are adaptations of Aristophanic playtexts and their translations were launched as part of the general educational mission of a Greek publishing house, Metaichmio. Originals and translations are compared with the help of categories of synchrony, a concept traditionally used in audiovisual translation and adapted here to indicate alignment between text and visuals in translation: kinetic synchrony (movement and gestures), content synchrony (contextual equivalence), isochrony (text volume) and character synchrony (performative preferences for individual characters). Despite a general emphasis on space constraints in the literature, a bilingual comics corpus compiled here shows patterns of creative rewriting affecting characterisation.