Translators of Child’s Fairy Tales
Translating of child literature poses special issues owing to number of special characteristics of children’s books and qualities of child audience. The situation that children’s literature tends to have a peripheral position in cultures and disadvance from lack of prestige makes it possible to manipulate texts translated for children in different ways to make them cohere with the expectations of the accommodating surrounding. Beside that, children are not expected to tolerate as much strangeness and foreignness as adult readers, and therefore, modification of the content and language of initial texts is often considered compulsory. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s books that’s why tend to conform to spread, set expressions, pictures, and language. Nevertheless, youth writing plays an important part as a tool for education, involvement, development of linguistic skills, and spreading world culture. Especially in minor linguistic societies, where translation rates constitute a large proportion of printed children’s literature, children are expected to come into contact with literature and its educative and entertaining functions mainly through interpretations. Therefore, translations may play a vital role in presenting children to characters, situations, and Polish translation agency, typical of fiction.
The expression ‘children’s literature’ often addresses reading aimed at readers from preliterate children to young teenagers; nonfiction, such as school textbooks, is omitted. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a uniform genre either; its various subgenres, e.g., fairy tales and dream-books, detective writing, realistic stories, differ in means of idea and language, that is pretended to affect the scope of translation methods. Here, however, children’s stories is judged as one, albeit very heterogeneous, genre. Although teens are the initial readership, children’s books actually have an important secondary target group – grown-ups, whose wishes and literary tastes must be taken into account by both authors and translators. However, Oittinen insists on translating for children, instead of translating children’s literature, and underlies the importance of children’s culture and their magical world, as well as society’s image of being-a-child and the translator’s own child image.
In addition to the definition of two target groups, baby literature has a lot of other special qualities, which have an effect on both the content and language of Russian translation: strong ideological, didactic, behavioral, and moral terms, ambivalence, goal at exceptional readability and conformity, and text–picture positioning.
Translation issues and their findings made at the stage of language tend to reflect, and result from, these gradually higher steps. different approaches mediating the translation of children’s books can be aggregated under the more broad vision on culture, or ideology in a neutral sense, addressing taken-for-granted assumptions, ideas, and views shared by a separate nation or culture. In fact, ideology is the overriding unit, an umbrella concept, writing what is acceptable in children’s books. In general, children’s books are likely 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 instance, a maximally understandable book may be treated as too simple to teach anything new and, in that view, benefit the child reader. Moreover, notions of what is beneficial and understandable vary from culture to nation and change with time, which often leads to manipulation of initial texts in translating.