Translating to Child’s Stories
Translation of children’s books poses special issues owing to number of special characteristics of children’s readings and qualities of child readers. The fact that children’s literature tends to have a distant place in cultures and disadvance from lack of prestige allows to manipulate materials translated for babies in various ways to make them cohere with the expectations of the receiving culture. 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 texts is often considered necessary. Instead of being creative, translated children’s literatures that’s why tend to agree to spread, set forms, pictures, and language. Nevertheless, youth writing carries an important part as a tool for upbringing, socialization, development of linguistic skills, and widening global knowledge. Especially in minor linguistic cultures, where translation rates constitute a significant proportion of published children’s books, children are expected to come into contact with literature and its educative and amusing functions generally through interpretations. That’s why, translations may play a vital role in introducing child readers to characters, situations, and Polish translation company, typical of fiction.
The term ‘children’s books’ usually addresses fiction aimed at readers from smallest children to young teenagers; nonfiction, such as school materials, is excluded. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a uniform genre either; its different subgenres, e.g., jokes and dream-books, criminal novels, realistic stories, differ in means of idea and language, that is likely to affect the scope 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 additional target audience – adult readers, whose preferences and literary tastes must be taken into account by both authors and translators. But, Oittinen advocates translating for small ones, rather than translating children’s literature, and emphasizes the importance of children’s culture and their fairy world, 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 lot of other distinguishing qualities, which have an effect on both the content and language of quality Russian translations: stressing ideological, educational, behavioral, and moral norms, ambivalence, goal at high readability and conformity, and text–picture positioning.
Translation problems and their solutions made at the level of language tend to reflect, and result from, these gradually higher steps. Various approaches regulating the translation of children’s literature can be aggregated under the more extensive concept of culture, or ideology in a general sense, addressing accepted assumptions, ideas, and values shared by a particular society or culture. In fact, ideology is the overlapping unit, an umbrella idea, writing what is acceptable in children’s books. In general, children’s books are likely to be in a specific way beneficial to children and enough simple in terms of idea, situation development, and language to be comprehensible. These couple of requirements may sometimes be contradictory. For example, 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 comprehensible vary from culture to nation and change with time, which often leads to manipulation of source texts in translation.