Translating to Children’s Literature
Translating of child books poses special challenges owing to number of special values of children’s books and qualities of child readers. The situation that children’s book tends to have a peripheral place in cultures and suffer from lack of status allows to manipulate texts translated for babies in various ways to make them cohere with the predictions of the accommodating surrounding. Beside that, children are not expected to tolerate as much strangeness and foreignness as grown-up readers, and therefore, modification of the content and language of initial passages is often judged necessary. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s books thus close to conform to conventional, accepted expressions, models, and language. However, youth literature has an evident role as a instrument for education, involvement, development of linguistic skills, and widening world culture. Especially in minor language societies, where best rate translation constitute a large share of published children’s literature, children are expected to come into relations with literature and its upbringing and entertaining functions generally through interpretations. That’s why, translations may play a key role in presenting children to characters, situations, and Polish translation company, typical of fiction.
The expression ‘baby books’ often addresses fiction aimed at readers from preliterate children to young teenagers; nonfiction, such as school materials, is omitted. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a uniform kind either; its various subgenres, e.g., fairy tales and dream-books, detective novels, realistic stories, differ in terms of idea and language, which is pretended to affect the choice of translation methods. Here, however, children’s fiction is treated as one, albeit very complicated, genre. Although children are the initial audience, children’s books actually have an important additional target group – grown-ups, whose wishes and literary habits must be taken into account by both authors and translators. However, Oittinen insists on translating for small ones, 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 childhood and the translator’s own child assumptions.
Besides the existence of two target groups, children’s literature has a number of other distinguishing qualities, which have an effect on both the content and language of quality Russian translations: strong ideological, educational, behavioral, and moral terms, ambivalence, goal at high readability and speakability, and text–picture positioning.
Translation issues and their solutions made at the stage of linguistic skills tend to explain, and result from, these hierarchically higher levels. different norms mediating the translation of children’s books can be aggregated under the more extensive concept of culture, or ideology in a neutral sense, referring to accepted guesses, ideas, and values shared by a particular nation and group. In fact, ideology is the overlapping unit, an umbrella concept, dictating what is allowable in children’s books. In a whole, children’s books are expected to be in some way enjoyable to children and sufficiently easy in terms of plot, situation development, and language to be comprehensible. These couple of requirements may sometimes be contradictory. For example, a maximally understandable book may be regarded as too simple to teach anything new and, in that respect, benefit the child reader. Moreover, notions of what is advantageous and understandable differ from culture to culture and change with time, which frequently leads to changing of source texts in translation.