La distinction en BD, ou comment s’affranchir des déterminismes sociaux grâce à la vulgarisation et à la traduction

This paper focuses on the adaptation of humanities and social sciences into comics, taking the example of a work by Tiphaine Rivière that is loosely based on Pierre Bourdieu’s La distinction. The first part of the analysis focuses on the issues and strategies involved in adapting this work into comics, with the aim of conveying the key concepts of La distinction through a story in which the protagonist is a secondary school teacher wishing to teach his class about Bourdieu’s sociology from a perspective of emancipation from social determinism. In the second part, adopting a translatological approach that takes account of the specific features of comics as a verbo-iconic language, the study looks at the issues and problems involved in translating Tiphaine Rivière’s album into Italian. The questions addressed include the translation of the many cultural references present in the work, both in the verbal and iconic sections, as well as the translation of the diastratic and diatopic variations in the characters’ ways of speaking, which reflect their identity and social class.