Translating Children's Literature PDF

Translating Children’s Literature *Children’s Literature  Children’s literature includes the body of written works and accompanying illustrations produced in order to entertain or instruct young people.  The genre encompasses a wide range of works, including acknowledged clas...

Translating Children’s Literature *Children’s Literature  Children’s literature includes the body of written works and accompanying illustrations produced in order to entertain or instruct young people.  The genre encompasses a wide range of works, including acknowledged classics of world literature, picture books and easy-to-read stories written exclusively for children, and fairy tales, lullabies, fables, folk songs, and other primarily orally transmitted materials. The proper subject matter of children’s literature, apart from informational or didactic works, is children. More broadly, it embraces the whole content of the child’s imaginative world and that of his daily environment, as well as certain ideas and sentiments characteristic of it. Children’s literature which is exclusively written for children seems to rest on three criteria (Oby, 2010: 3): the first is whether the heroes are children or teenagers, the second is whether the themes, that is the ideas, relationships and language, are simple or complex.  Literature is literature for children if the ideas, relationship and language are simple. However, literature is not children's literature if the ideas, relationship and language are found too complex whether oral or written. Thirdly, children’s literature is often aimed atteaching moral lessons. *Translating Children’s Literature  Most of the challenges of translating literature for adults – for example, fluency, accuracy, register, flexibility, a feeling for style, an appreciation of nuance, and transparency – are also present in translating children’s literature.  In addition, there are special needs in translating works aimed at children, particularly those under ten or so. Age-level must be taken into consideration: what is right for a ten-year-old will usually be beyond the grasp of a seven-year-old, while kids on the verge of adolescence feel they’re ready to read so-called young-adult literature. Appropriate illustrations must be found, though sometimes those from the source language can be used. In the United States, considerations of political correctness are a major concern; nothing capable of offending any racial, religious, or ethnic group can be included, and gender bias is also an issue.  One must come to terms with certain themes such as magic, which some Christian fundamentalists view as witchcraft (the Harry Potter books have come under criticism from some quarters for this very reason).  Sexuality in any form is a no-no.  Death and illness must be handled with extreme care.  Family strife and divorce are touchy subjects.  At the outset, one difficulty is finding material. The works of the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen are pretty much mined out.  In children’s literature, both vocabulary and tone are crucial. Words that a fifth grader might know may be beyond the grasp of his counterpart in the second grade. You will have to consciously reduce your range of words (some publishers provide a list of ‘suitable’ words) to translate in this field. The first thing a publisher will ask is what age group the work is aimed at.  Also, commercial houses are not willing to deal with the dark side, whether of human nature or of impersonal forces. Any subject that might cause insecurity in the very young – e.g., divorce, debilitating illness, or death – is a no-no for the pre- eleven set.  If you translate children’s literature in verse, rhyme is a sine qua non (olmazsa olmaz). Children, especially young children, are unequipped to appreciate more sophisticated metrical formats like blank verse or free verse. In addition, rhyme is a significant aid to memorization, and one of the purposes of literature for children is to encourage, and sometimes teach, them to read.  Where the rhyme is humorous, it’s imperative to find an equivalent in the target language, even at the cost of adapting rather than a close translation.  It is frequently necessary to exercise much greater freedom with text in children’s literature than with adult literature because children are most comfortable with the familiar, and adaptations may have to be made if the goal is to achieve commercial success. *Theories on the Translation of Children’s Literature  Oittinen (2000), for instance, emphasized that translators “need to adapt their texts according to the presumptive readers” (p. 78), and thus, insisted on ‘translating for children’ rather than using the term ‘translation of children’s literature. Puurtinen (1998) also believed in the necessity of taking the linguistic capabilities of children, and recommended translators to create comprehensible and readable target texts (p. 2). As pointed out by Reiss, translators should make deviations from the source text due to three reasons: (1) children’s imperfect linguistic competence, (2) avoidance of breaking taboos which educationally minded adults might want to uphold, (3) childrens’ limited world knowledge (qtd. in Tabbert, 2002, p. 314). Such scholars and translators have a tendency to use adaptation strategies while translating texts for children.  On the other hand, it is a fact that children have the chance to travel through unknown countries and experience different cultures with the help of the translations of their literature. That is why some scholars, such as Batchelder, believed that “children of one country who come to know the books and stories of many countries have made a beginning toward international understanding” (qtd in Metcalf, 2003, p. 324). By reading translated texts, they can gain the opportunity to bring the most distant to the nearby and learn about new traditions and cultures, and experience different lifestyles. Thus, while translating such texts, foreignization strategies can be adopted in order to expose young readers to the new, foreign, and different. EXERCISE  Translate some excerpts from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll into Turkish.  https://www.adobe.com/be_en/active-use/pdf/Ali ce_in_Wonderland.pdf (English version)  https://ulubatlihasanilkokulukaracabey.meb.k12. tr/meb_iys_dosyalar/16/07/714377/dosyalar/202 0_03/16142954_Lewis_Carroll_-_Alice_Harikalar_ DiyarYnda.pdf (Turkish version) EXERCISE  Translate some excerpts from Keloğlan ve Sincap into English.  https://worldstories.org.uk/reader/keloglan-and- the-squirrel/turkish/1055 (Turkish version)  https://worldstories.org.uk/reader/keloglan-and- the-squirrel/english/455 (English version) REFERENCES 1. “Translating children’s literature” by Landers in Literary Translation, pp. 106-108 2. -“Translating culture in children’s literature: A case study on the Turkish translation of Letters from Father Christmas” by Hastürkoğlu, pp. 729- 737. 3. https://www.britannica.com/art/childrens-literature 4. https://journal.uin-alauddin.ac.id/index.php/elite/article/download/ 3348/3162/