Translating Stories, Transforming Perceptions: Refugee Graphic Narratives as Spaces of Cultural Empathy for Youth

This paper examines the role of translation in narrating personal stories of crisis through an analysis of three refugeefocused graphic novels. As the European migrant crisis peaked in 2015, graphic novels emerged as a powerful medium for countering dehumanizing media narratives and catalyzing empathy through visual re-tellings of individual refugee journeys. The study explores how autobiographical, biographical, and fictional approaches translate refugee experiences for young readers.

The autobiographical When Stars Are Scattered illustrates the self-translating process as author Omar Mohamed renders his childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp into English. Illegal creatively adapts interviews into a fictional refugee’s perilous passage to Europe. And student authors in Black and White Lives imaginatively transcribe stories of Syrian refugees passing through North Macedonia.

Across the narratives, collaborative translation processes integrate textual and visual modes to restore refugee individuality against reductive crisis framings. The analysis reveals translators navigating complex choices around language mixing, factual authenticity, intercultural resonance, and emotional impact in rendering personal trauma for youth audiences. It illuminates sensitive negotiations of voice, agency, and identification in transposing marginalized experiences into dominant literary forms.

Ultimately, findings suggest strategic translation spaces can counter xenophobic discourse by catalyzing empathy and identification between young readers and refugees. But risks remain of appropriating refugee voices towards redemptive narratives that re-center privileged audiences. The study concludes that refugee graphic narratives underscore how translation carries ethical stakes in shaping public discourse around crises. It points to new avenues for exploring how creative youth media can build transcultural solidarity and prompt critical reflections on systemic exclusions that drive forced displacement.

This paper argues that refugee graphic narratives play an important role in translating and reshaping dominant crisis narratives, which has effects on cultural sustainability and more inclusive futures. It signals the need for an interdisciplinary analysis of creative translation practices and youth media as “third spaces” rehumanizing migrants, though not unproblematically.