Translation to Child’s Books
Translation of children’s literature rises special challenges owing to number of special values of children’s readings and qualities of child audience. The situation that children’s literature tends to have a distant place in cultures and disadvance from not enough of prestige allows to manipulate texts translated for children in different ways to make them cohere with the predictions of the receiving culture. Beside that, children are not expected to tolerate as much strangeness and foreignness as grown-up readers, and therefore, changing of the content and tongue of initial texts is often judged compulsory. Instead of being creative, translated children’s books thus tend to conform to conventional, accepted forms, models, and language. Nevertheless, children’s literature has an evident role as a tool for education, socialization, development of linguistic skills, and widening global knowledge. Especially in minor language societies, where best price translations account for a significant proportion of published children’s books, children are likely to arrive into relations with literature and its educative and entertaining functions mainly through interpretations. Therefore, translations may have a vital role in introducing children to characters, events, and Polish translation agency, typical of fiction.
The expression ‘children’s books’ often refers to fiction targeted at readers from preliterate children to young teenagers; nonfiction, such as school materials, is left aside. Children’s fiction is, actually, not a uniform genre either; its various subgenres, e.g., fairy tales and fantasy stories, criminal novels, realistic stories, differ in means of purpose and language, which is pretended to influence the choice of translation methods. Here, however, children’s fiction is judged as one, albeit very complicated, genre. Although children are the primary audience, children’s books actually have an crucial additional target audience – adult readers, whose wishes and literary habits must be taken into account by both authors and translators. However, Oittinen advocates translating for children, instead of translating children’s literature, and underlies the significance of children’s culture and their magical world, as well as society’s image of childhood and the translator’s own child assumptions.
Besides the existence of two target groups, baby literature has a number of other distinguishing features, which have an influence on both the content and language of Russian translation: strong ideological, didactic, ethical, and moral norms, ambivalence, aim at high readability and speakability, and text–picture relationship.
Translation problems and their solutions made at the level of linguistic skills tend to explain, and result from, these gradually higher steps. different approaches regulating the translation of children’s literature might be aggregated under the more extensive vision on culture, or ideology in a neutral sense, addressing taken-for-granted guesses, beliefs, and values shared by a particular society or culture. Actually, ideology is the overlapping constraint, an umbrella idea, writing what is acceptable in children’s literature. In general, children’s books are expected to be in some way enjoyable to children and enough easy in terms of plot, characterization, and language to be readable for smalls. These two requirements may sometimes be contradictory. For example, a maximally understandable book may be treated as too simple to discover some new and, in that respect, benefit the child reader. Beside that, notions of what is advantageous and comprehensible vary from culture to culture and change with time, which frequently leads to changing of initial texts in translating.