Tradurre la bande dessinée migrante. Il caso de Les Mohamed di Jérôme Ruillier

The comic book Les Mohamed (2011) by French author Jérôme Ruillier is situated in the landscape of migrant bande dessinée, with its own singular characteristics. In this work, the author traced a global portrait of Maghrebi immigrants in France, by adapting the documentary/book Mémoires d’immigrés (1997) by French-Algerian author Yamina Benguigui. As migrant storytellers in general, bande dessinée authors are often the first ‘translators’ of unknown or removed realities, making them accessible to a large public. But what happen when they are translated in their turn? In a first part, this article canvases the process of intersemiotic translation that brought from Mémoires d’immigrés to Les Mohamed. In a second part, it focuses on the verbal/visual aspects of Ruillier’s work and especially on the solutions I adopted in the Italian translation (Se ti chiami Mohamed 2015).