Translation of a Topolino Story into Genoese

On the occasion of the National Day of Dialects and Local Languages, held on 17 January, issue no. 3660 of Topolino features, in four different Italian regions, a translation into the respective local idiom of the story Paperino lucidatore a domicilio, written and scripted by Vito Stabile and illustrated by Francesco D’Ippolito. The initiative is part of a Panini Comics project aimed at promoting Italy’s linguistic diversity, launched last year and coordinated by Professor Riccardo Regis of the University of Turin.

Thanks to the work of Stefano Lusito, the story has also been rendered into Genoese and is accompanied by a short introductory essay outlining the position of Genoese within the Ligurian varieties, the criteria adopted for Genoese spelling and reading, and the main choices made in the translation.

This is the first “official” Genoese adaptation of a Disney comic (and, more broadly, of a mass-market comic), and it symbolically opens the door to new and more structured projects aimed at promoting the language through elements of popular culture.