The Translation of Violence in Children’s Literature


Book Description

Considering children’s literature as a powerful repository for creating and proliferating cultural and national identities, this monograph is the first academic study of children’s literature in translation from the Western Balkans. Marija Todorova looks at a broad range of children’s literature, from fiction to creative non-fiction and picture books, across five different countries in the Western Balkans, with each chapter including detailed textual and visual analysis through the predominant lens of violence. These chapters raise questions around who initiates and effectuates the selection of children’s literature from the Western Balkans for translation into English, and interrogate the role of different stakeholders, such as translators, publishers and cultural institutions in the representation and construction of these countries in translated children’s literature, both in text and visually. Given the combination of this study’s interdisciplinary nature and Todorova’s detailed analysis, this book will prove to be an essential resource for professional translators, researchers and students in courses in translation studies, children’s literature or area studies, especially that of countries in the Western Balkans. .




Children’s Literature in Translation


Book Description

For many of us, our earliest and most meaningful experiences with literature occur through the medium of a translated children’s book. This volume focuses on the complex interplay that happens between text and context when works of children’s literature are translated: what contexts of production and reception account for how translated children’s books come to be made and read as they are? How are translated children’s books adapted to suit the context of a new culture? Spanning the disciplines of Children’s Literature Studies and Translation Studies, this book brings together established and emerging voices to provide an overview of the analytical, empirical and geographic richness of current research in this field and to identify and reflect on common insights, analytical perspectives and trajectories for future interdisciplinary research. This volume will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students in Translation Studies and Children’s Literature Studies and related disciplines. It has a broad geographic and cultural scope, with contributions dealing with translated children’s literature in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Spain, France, Brazil, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, China, the former Yugoslavia, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium.




Ideological Manipulation of Children’s Literature Through Translation and Rewriting


Book Description

This book explores the topic of ideological manipulation in the translation of children’s literature by addressing several crucial questions, including how target language norms and conventions affect the quality of a translation, how translations are selected on the basis of what is culturally accepted, who is involved in the selection of what should be translated for children in the target culture, and how this process takes place. The author presents different ways of looking at the translation of children’s books, focusing particularly on the practices of intralingual and interlingual translations as a form of rewriting across a selection of European languages. This book will be of interest to Translation Studies and children's literature scholars, as well as those with a wider interest in the impact of ideology on culture.




Translating Children's Literature


Book Description

Translating Children’s Literature is an exploration of the many developmental and linguistic issues related to writing and translating for children, an audience that spans a period of enormous intellectual progress and affective change from birth to adolescence. Lathey looks at a broad range of children’s literature, from prose fiction to poetry and picture books. Each of the seven chapters addresses a different aspect of translation for children, covering: · Narrative style and the challenges of translating the child’s voice; · The translation of cultural markers for young readers; · Translation of the modern picture book; · Dialogue, dialect and street language in modern children’s literature; · Read-aloud qualities, wordplay, onomatopoeia and the translation of children’s poetry; · Retranslation, retelling and reworking; · The role of translation for children within the global publishing and translation industries. This is the first practical guide to address all aspects of translating children’s literature, featuring extracts from commentaries and interviews with published translators of children’s literature, as well as examples and case studies across a range of languages and texts. Each chapter includes a set of questions and exercises for students. Translating Children’s Literature is essential reading for professional translators, researchers and students on courses in translation studies or children’s literature.




Beowulf as Children's Literature


Book Description

"The single largest category of Beowulf representation and adaptation, outside of direct translation of the poem, is children's literature. Over the past century and a half, more than 150 new versions of Beowulf directed to child and teen audiences have appeared, in English and in many other languages. In this collection of original essays, Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize examine the history and processes of remaking Beowulf for young readers. Inventive in their manipulations of story, tone, and genre, these adaptations require their authors to make countless decisions about what to include, exclude, emphasize, de-emphasize, and adjust. This volume considers the many forms of children's literature, focusing primarily on picture books, illustrated storybooks, and youth novels, but taking account also of curricular aids, illustrated full translations of the poem, and songs. Contributors address issues of gender, historical context, war and violence, techniques of narration, education, and nationalism, investigating both the historical and theoretical dimensions of bringing Beowulf to child audiences."--




Poetics of Children's Literature


Book Description

Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children's literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work. Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children's literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre's canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children's literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.




Children's Literature in Translation


Book Description

Children's classics from Alice in Wonderland to the works of Astrid Lindgren, Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are now generally recognized as literary achievements that from a translator's point of view are no less demanding than 'serious' (adult) literature. This volume attempts to explore the various challenges posed by the translation of children's literature and at the same time highlight some of the strategies that translators can and do follow when facing these challenges. A variety of translation theories and concepts are put to critical use, including Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, Toury's concept of norms, Venuti's views on foreignizing and domesticating translations and on the translator's (in)visibility, and Chesterman's prototypical approach. Topics include the ethics of translating for children, the importance of child(hood) images, the 'revelation' of the translator in prefaces, the role of translated children's books in the establishment of literary canons, the status of translations in the former East Germany; questions of taboo and censorship in the translation of adolescent novels, the collision of norms in different translations of a Swedish children's classic, the handling of 'cultural intertextuality' in the Spanish translations of contemporary British fantasy books, strategies for translating cultural markers such as juvenile expressions, functional shifts caused by different translation strategies dealing with character names, and complex translation strategies used in dealing with the dual audience in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.




The Translation of Children's Literature


Book Description

In the last few decades a number of European scholars have paid an increasing amount of attention to children's literature in translation. This book not only provides a synthetic account of what has been achieved in the field, but also makes us fully aware of all the textual, visual and cultural complexities that translating for children entails.... Students of this subject have had problems in finding a book that attempted an up-to-date and comprehensive review of the field. Gillian Lathey's Reader does just this. Dr Piotr Kuhiwczak, Director, Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies University of Warwick.




The Man Who Loved Children


Book Description

“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”




Bernard Pepperlin


Book Description

"Bernard and his newfound friends--revolutionary rats, wise-cracking cats, and coffee-chugging squirrels, to name a few--will delight and inspire readers of all ages!" --Erin Entrada Kelly, Newbery Medal-winning author of Hello, Universe The drowsy Dormouse from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is transported to modern-day New York City for the adventure of a lifetime in this middle grade novel that's perfect for fans of Stuart Little and written by critically acclaimed author Cara Hoffman. When a girl in a blue dress crashes the Mad Hatter's eternal tea party, the sleepy Dormouse feels more awake than he has in a long time. He wishes he could follow her and be a part of her adventure. And as luck would have it, a surprising twist of fate sends the Dormouse on an adventure of his own, where he must not fall asleep. For he is destined to save a magical world outside Wonderland, and it will take all his courage--and a few new friends--to do it.