Translators to Child’s Stories
Translation of child papers poses special challenges owing to some special values of children’s books and qualities of child readers. The fact that children’s literature tends to have a distant position in cultures and disadvance from lack of status makes it possible to manipulate texts translated for babies in various ways to enable them accord with the expectations of the receiving surrounding. Furthermore, children are not expected to temper as much strangeness and foreignness as adult readers, and therefore, modification of the content and language of initial texts is often judged necessary. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s literatures thus close to conform to conventional, set forms, models, and language. Nevertheless, children’s writing carries an evident part as a tool for upbringing, socialization, development of linguistic skills, and spreading global knowledge. Especially in minor linguistic cultures, where best rate translation constitute a significant share of printed children’s books, children are expected to come into contact with literature and its educative and amusing functions mainly through interpretations. That’s why, translations may have a key role in presenting child readers to characters, events, and Polish translation service, typical of fiction.
The expression ‘baby books’ usually refers to fiction aimed at readers from smallest children to young teenagers; nonfiction, such as school materials, is omitted. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a monolithic kind either; its different subgenres, e.g., fairy tales and fantasy stories, criminal writing, realistic stories, differ in terms of purpose and language, which is pretended to affect the choice of translation methods. Here, however, children’s fiction is judged as one, albeit very heterogeneous, genre. Despite children are the initial readership, children’s books actually have an important secondary target audience – grown-ups, whose preferences and literary tastes must be taken into account by all writers and translators. However, Oittinen advocates translating for children, instead of translating children’s literature, and underlies the importance of children’s culture and their magical planet, as well as society’s image of being-a-child and the translator’s own child image.
Besides the definition of two target audiences, children’s literature has a number of other distinguishing features, which have an influence on both the content and language of Russian translation: strong ideological, didactic, behavioral, and moral norms, ambivalence, aim at exceptional readability and speakability, and text–picture relationship.
Translation problems and their findings made at the level of language tend to reflect, and result from, these gradually higher levels. different norms regulating the translation of children’s literature can be aggregated under the more broad concept of culture, or ideology in a general sense, referring to accepted guesses, beliefs, and values shared by a separate society and culture. Actually, ideology is the overriding unit, an umbrella idea, dictating what is allowable in children’s literature. In general, children’s books are expected to be in a specific way enjoyable to children and sufficiently simple in terms of idea, characterization, and language to be readable for smalls. These two requirements may sometimes be contradictory. For instance, a maximally understandable text may be regarded as too simple to teach anything new and, in that respect, benefit the child reader. Moreover, notions of what is beneficial and comprehensible differ from nation to culture and change with time, which frequently leads to changing of initial texts in translating.