Genre Translation

Alice Wang

UCSB

Writ2 - Acadamic Writing

Valentina Fahler

August 30 2020
 In this article, I translated part of an academic paper on the studying mushroom written

for the academic community into a comic strip for kindergarten children. The author of the

academy conducted research in the lowland South American to study mushrooms in the culture

of local peoples and then record down the discovery through an academic way. Genre refers to

the reoccurred pattern of utterance and they varied in different situations. They contain different

organization, tone ect. The paper belongs to the discourse community of scholars to contribute

to knowledge and thus was written in a very objective way. However, the comic stripswere

meant for a group of kindergarten children who do not have access to difficult sentences and

terminologies, thus it contains pictures and were written in simple language . This paper is going

to discuss the contents of the two works, different communities they belong to, and demonstrate

and reflect on the writing process.

The academic paper was about mushroom in the mythology of native people in Joti The

author decided to study this topic because after her encounter with Joti, a group of native people

in South America, she found mushrooms to play an important role in their worldview. The

author believes that studying their world view about mushrooms is important because it reveals

worldview in other cultures and makes us feel more humble about our belief(Zent, pg.9).

The part of the academic paper that I select tells a few specific parts in the story that best

represent the importance of mushrooms in their mythology. In the first part, the myth explains

the coming into beings of true-human: they possess agency, morality and correct behavior also

account for the existence of many first items in the world. For example, the first mushroom

grows from the feet of the first woman. The second part of the story tells how bile monkey

mushroom was related to hunting. Spider monkeys existed initially in human form and created a
kind of bale that would make themselves live eternally but also let hunters lose their hunting

skills when being careless. The hunters could only restore their skills after being bathed with

“bile mushroom” created by spider monkeys. During the bathing, a balance between different

species and restoring the relationship between prey and predator(Zent, pg.7). The story contains

moral lessons that rhythm and correct behaviors should be followed in order to succeed in the

world. It seems very interesting to me and shows the worldview of other cultures. . I thus decided

to visualize the plots into comics so that broader audiences could access to it. .

During the translation process, I decided to consult “writing with picture” written by

Mccloud to determine the choice of flow, moment and word. Choice of flow refers to the way

that “guides readers through and between panels on a page or screen(McCloud, pg.2)”. For the

purpose of simplicity, I decided to draw nine grid in each page to let the readers follow the

sequences easily. While the original texts contain mostly linguistic mode of writing, the new

genre employed more visual mode(Gagich, pg.5). Before drawing, I first read through the whole

story and reorganized them in a more sequential way in my head. According to McCloud,

choosing the right moment is important for a comic and I thus follow his suggestion to choose

the moments that most directly and efficiently communicate the plot on a paper(McCloud). I also

added necessary words to introduce the background. The speaking of the characters were written

in a bubble to move the plot. Finally, I drew pictures after choosing the appropriate frame.

There are some changes made during the translation. I translated some of the general

statement into more specific panels. For example,the abstract started with giving an brief

introduction to the main character of the Joti’s mythology that “Joti’s cosmos is inhabited by

diverse entities conveyed of as persons or subjects(Zent)”.This sentence is converted into a

comic picture with subjects such as moon, sun surrounding an human beings to suggest that
subjects were transformed from human. It is also accompanied with words “Everything in the

world, like moon, and flowers were transformed from human beings a long time ago” that could

help with the comprehension. I also added some background for the story. Although the abstract

did not mention, the origional article introduced the local people in the beginning. I thus drew in

the comic a river and forest to represent the Amazon forest in North America. In addition to

adding information and converting from linguistic text to visual text, deletion of several

sentences that cover that make generalization for the characters of mythology was necessary as

well. For instance, in the beginning of the abstract the author introduced “mythical narratives

describe the ontological process [...]and other beings that inhabit the current cosmos.”It contains

vocabulary words such as “ontological process” unfamiliar to younger children and can be too

abstract to understand. The deletion of these generations could be done because they did not

influence the plot of the story..

During the translation process, I found that both genres have their advantages and

limitations. For comics, although information containing concrete elements could be represented

easily with pictures and conversations and absorbed by readers, some abstract statements and

theories are hard to visualize. On the contrary, even though academic papers did well in

conveying these information thoroughly using specific terminology, they could be difficult and

boring to read through for younger readers. During the translation where I have to

constantly delete or add content, it gave me a sense that the same information could be presented

in completely different conventions of genre to achieve different purposes. In this case, the

academic paper were written for scholars in the academic community thus were treated seriously

with an objective tone to both depict the plot of the story and to make certain conclusions. On the
other hand, to learn the same knowledge, kindergarten children might be more engaged when

there are pictures presented and language that is more accessible.

I have learned a lot about the differences between genres and the process of making the

translation between different audiences where I have to consider their purposes, context of

reading. Drawing comics is also fun for me and I believe I will continue with this kind of

practicing in the future.

 Work Cited

Gagich, M. (2020) An Introduction to and and Strategies for Multimodal Composing.

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 3.

McCloud, S. (1994) Writing with Pictures, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.

New York: HarperPerrenial.

Zent, E. L. (2008) Mushrooms for Life among the Joti in the Venezuelan Guayana.

Economic Botany, 62(3), 2008, pp. 471–481.