Whose Story Translating The Verbal And The Visual In Literature For Young Readers

This book is based on the discussions carried out in two seminars on the translation of children’s literature, coordinated by Maria González Davies and led by Riitta Oittinen. The main focus finally revolved around four questions: a) Tackling the challenges posed by translating children’s literature, both picturebooks and books with illustrations, and the range of strategies available to solve specific issues; b) the special characteristics involved in reading aloud, its emotional dimension, and the sphere it occupies between private and public reading; c) the interpretation and manipulation of child images; and, d) the role of the translator, publishers and mediators as active or passive agents whose decisions may finally mirror the images projected by the authors of the source books. This volume is also professionally-oriented and presents examples that underline the interaction between theory and practice. The topics range from Bible translation, to translating the classics, such as Beatrix Potter’s tales and fairytales, fantasy worlds for young adults as depicted in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, or novels such as those by Christine Nöstlinger, as well as stories with a psychological and social function such as the African war tales. Finally, it includes didactic applications that help enhance an awareness of the issues involved.

Analyzes topics and issues in translator and interpreter training, focussing on areas that are new and underexplored, yet crucial for translator/interpreter practice.

This is the first volume to consider the popular literary category of Early Readers – books written and designed for children who are just beginning to read independently. It argues that Early Readers deserve more scholarly attention and careful thought because they are, for many younger readers, their first opportunity to engage with a work of literature on their own, to feel a sense of mastery over a text, and to experience pleasure from the act of reading independently. Using interdisciplinary approaches that draw upon and synthesize research being done in education, child psychology, sociology, cultural studies, and children’s literature, the volume visits Early Readers from a variety of angles: as teaching tools; as cultural artifacts that shape cultural and individual subjectivity; as mass produced products sold to a niche market of parents, educators, and young children; and as aesthetic objects, works of literature and art with specific conventions. Examining the reasons such books are so popular with young readers, as well as the reasons that some adults challenge and censor them, the volume considers the ways Early Readers contribute to the construction of younger children as readers, thinkers, consumers, and as gendered, raced, classed subjects. It also addresses children’s texts that have been translated and sold around the globe, examining them as part of an increasingly transnational children’s media culture that may add to or supplant regional, ethnic, and national children’s literatures and cultures. While this collection focuses mostly on books written in English and often aimed at children living in the US, it is important to acknowledge that these Early Readers are a major US cultural export, influencing the reading habits and development of children across the globe.

This book offers fresh critical insights to the field of children’s literature translation studies by applying the concept of transcreation, established in the creative industries of the globalized world, to bring to the fore the transformative, transgressional and creative aspects of rewriting for children and young audiences. This socially situated and culturally dependent practice involves ongoing complex negotiations between creativity and normativity, balancing text-related problems and genre conventions with readers’ expectations, constraints imposed by established, canonical translations and publishers’ demands. Focussing on the translator’s strategies and decision-making process, the book investigates phenomena where transcreation is especially at play in children’s literature, such as dual address, ambiguity, nonsense, humour, play on words and other creative language use; these also involve genre-specific requirements, for example, rhyme and rhythm in poetry. The book draws on a wide range of mostly Anglophone texts for children and their translations into languages of limited diffusion to demonstrate the numerous ways in which information, meaning and emotions are transferred to new linguistic and cultural contexts. While focussing mostly on interlingual transfer, the volume analyses a variety of translation types from established, canonical renditions by celebrity translators to non-professional translations and intralingual rewritings. It also examines iconotextual dynamics of text and image. The book employs a number of innovative methodologies, from cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics to semiotics and autoethnographic approaches, going beyond text analysis to include empirical research on children’s reactions to translation strategies. Highlighting the complex dynamics at work in the process of transcreating for children, this volume is essential reading for students and researchers in translation studies, children’s fiction and adaptation studies.

This book is about interjections and their transcultural issues. Challenging the marginalization of the past, the ubiquity of interjections and translational practices are presented in their multilingual and cross-cultural aspects. The survey widens the field of inquiry to a multi-genre and context-based perspective. The quanti-qualitative corpus has been processed on the base of topics of relevance and thematization. The range of examples varies from adaptation of novels into films, from Shakespeare, from Zulu oral epics to opera, from children’s narratives to cartoons, from migration literature to gangster and horror films and their audiovisual translation. The use of American Yiddish, Italian American, South African English, and Jamaican account for the controversial aspects of interjections as a universal phenomenon, and, conversely, as a pragmatic marker of identity in (post)colonial contexts.

From Struwwelpeter to Peter Rabbit, from Alice to Bilbo—this collection of essays shows how the classics of children’s literature have been transformed across languages, genres, and diverse media forms. This book argues that translation regularly involves transmediation—the telling of a story across media and vice versa—and that transmediation is a specific form of translation. Beyond the classic examples, the book also takes the reader on a worldwide tour, and examines, among other things, the role of Soviet science fiction in North Korea, the ethical uses of Lego Star Wars in a Brazilian context, and the history of Latin translation in children’s literature. Bringing together scholars from more than a dozen countries and language backgrounds, these cross-disciplinary essays focus on regularly overlooked transmediation practices and terminology, such as book cover art, trans-sensory storytelling, écart, enfreakment, foreignizing domestication, and intra-cultural transformation.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art account of the complex field of translation studies. Written by leading specialists from around the world, this volume brings together authoritative original articles on pressing issues including: the current status of the field and its interdisciplinary nature the problematic definition of the object of study the various theoretical frameworks the research methodologies available. The handbook also includes discussion of the most recent theoretical, descriptive and applied research, as well as glimpses of future directions within the field and an extensive up-to-date bibliography. The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies is an indispensable resource for postgraduate students of translation studies.

Translating Picturebooks examines the role of illustration in the translation process of picturebooks and how the word-image interplay inherent in the medium can have an impact both on translation practice and the reading process itself. The book draws on a wide range of picturebooks published and translated in a number of languages to demonstrate the myriad ways in which information and meaning is conveyed in the translation of multimodal material and in turn, the impact of these interactions on the readers’ experiences of these books. The volume also analyzes strategies translators employ in translating picturebooks, including issues surrounding culturally-specific references and visual and verbal gaps, and features a chapter with excerpts from translators’ diaries written during the process. Highlighting the complex dynamics at work in the translation process of picturebooks and their implications for research on translation studies and multimodal material, this book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers in translation studies, multimodality, and children’s literature.