Riitta Oittinen

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.

Whose Story? Translating the Verbal and the Visual in Literature for Young Readers

Anne Ketola

Melissa Garavini

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.

Revoicing the Verbal, the Visual and the Aural for a Child Audience

Translating Picturebooks

Joanna Dybiec-Gajer

Małgorzata Kodura

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.

Riitta Oittinen

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