Translation of Child’s Stories
Translating of child literature poses particular issues owing to some special values of children’s readings and qualities of child readers. The situation that children’s book tends to have a peripheral position in cultures and disadvance from lack of prestige allows to manipulate texts translated for children in different ways to enable them cohere with the predictions of the accommodating surrounding. Furthermore, children are not expected to tolerate as much strangeness and foreignness as grown-up readers, and therefore, modification of the content and language of source passages is often considered necessary. Instead of being creative, translated children’s literatures that’s why tend to conform to conventional, accepted expressions, models, and language. However, children’s writing plays an evident part as a tool for upbringing, socialization, development of linguistic skills, and spreading world knowledge. Especially in small linguistic cultures, where translation rates account for a significant share of published children’s books, children are likely to arrive into contact with literature and its educative and entertaining functions mainly through translations. Therefore, translations may have a vital role in introducing children to characters, situations, and Polish translation service, typical of fiction.
The expression ‘children’s books’ often refers to reading aimed at readers from smallest children to already teenagers; nonfiction, such as school textbooks, is left aside. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a monolithic kind either; its different subgenres, e.g., fairy tales and dream-books, detective novels, realistic stories, differ in terms 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 heterogeneous, genre. Despite teens are the initial audience, children’s books actually have an important additional target audience – adult readers, whose wishes and literary habits must be taken into account by all writers and translators. However, Oittinen insists on translating for small ones, rather than translating children’s literature, and emphasizes the significance of children’s culture and their magical planet, as well as society’s image of childhood and the translator’s own child image.
In addition to the definition of two target audiences, baby literature has a number of other special features, which have an effect on both the content and language of quality Russian translations: stressing ideological, educational, behavioral, and moral terms, ambivalence, goal at exceptional readability and conformity, and text–picture relationship.
Translation issues and their solutions made at the stage of linguistic skills tend to explain, and result from, these hierarchically higher steps. different approaches regulating the translation of children’s books can be aggregated under the more broad concept of culture, or ideology in a general sense, addressing accepted assumptions, ideas, and views shared by a particular nation or culture. Actually, ideology is the overlapping unit, an umbrella concept, dictating what is acceptable in children’s books. In general, children’s books are expected to be in a specific way enjoyable to children and enough easy in terms of idea, characterization, and language to be readable for smalls. 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 view, benefit the child reader. Beside that, notions of what is advantageous and understandable vary from culture to nation and change with time, which frequently leads to changing of source texts in translating.