Multilingual Communication in Francophone Bandes Dessinées about Russia

Abstract

In this paper we examine how the communication of characters speaking different languages is reflected in French and Belgian graphic novels about Russia. We propose to distinguish the situation of bilingual (plurilingual) communication on one hand and the reflection of this situation on the other hand. We built different schemes in order to describe the character’s choice of the language of communication, taking into account the existence of a common language, the communicant’s level of proficiency in different languages, the environment. The choice of French (correct or not) or Russian (correct or not, Cyrillic or transliterated, translated or not) in the following modules of bilingual communication has been analyzed: 1) a speaker of Russian communicates with native speakers of French, 2) he communicates with other native speakers of Russian in a francophone environment, 3) he speaks to himself (or swears), 4) he communicates with native speakers of other languages, 5) a native speaker of French uses Russian languages in communication with native speakers of Russian. In francophone graphic novels, French language is used when English-speaking and Russian-speaking characters communicate. We analyze whether the text in Russian is correct or not, whether it is written in Cyrillic or Latin alphabet, the presence or absence of translation, its correctness, the means to reflect the accent or character’s poor knowledge of French language. In conclusion we propose to discuss the reasons for the common ignorance of language contact in graphic novels.

Keywords

• graphic novels, comics, multilingual communication, image of russia