The 'Manga Shakespeare' Series Translated into Brazilian Portuguese

This article analyses rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays aimed at young readers and published as comics in the series Manga Shakespeare, featured by the British publishing house SelfMadeHero, and available in Brazilian Portuguese under the Galera label, a division of the Grupo Editorial Record. Two levels of rewriting are examined: firstly, we focus on the adaptation of Shakespearean works into comics, a process which not only adds new multimodality but may also entail changes concerning time and place. Secondly, the emphasis is on the interlingual translation of the comics text and linguistic paratexts, which have resulted in the Brazilian editions of the series, titled Mangá Shakespeare. For both levels of rewriting we ascertain how these adaptations are made and how they are translated into another language and culture, to what extent the main features of the plays are retained, and what image of the playwright and his plays is conveyed to the comics’ readership