Translation of Children’s Fairy Tales
Translating of children’s books poses particular challenges owing to number of 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 suffer from not enough of prestige makes it possible to manipulate materials translated for children in different ways to make them cohere with the predictions of the accommodating surrounding. Furthermore, children are not expected to temper as much strangeness and foreignness as adult readers, and therefore, modification of the content and language of initial passages is often considered necessary. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s literatures thus close to conform to conventional, accepted forms, pictures, and language. Nevertheless, children’s writing has an important part as a tool for upbringing, involvement, development of linguistic skills, and widening world knowledge. Especially in small language cultures, where translation rates constitute a large proportion of printed children’s literature, children are expected to arrive into relations with literature and its upbringing and amusing functions generally through translations. Therefore, translations may have a key role in introducing child readers to characters, situations, and Polish translation agency, typical of fiction.
The expression ‘children’s literature’ often refers to fiction aimed at readers from smallest children to young teenagers; nonfiction, such as school textbooks, is left aside. Children’s fiction is, actually, not a uniform kind either; its different subgenres, e.g., jokes and fantasy stories, criminal novels, realistic stories, differ in terms of idea and language, which is likely to affect the choice of translation methods. Here, however, children’s stories is judged as one, albeit very heterogeneous, genre. Although children are the initial readership, children’s books actually have an crucial secondary target audience – grown-ups, whose preferences and linguistic tastes must be taken into account by both authors and translators. But, Oittinen advocates translating for small ones, 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 assumptions.
In addition to the existence of two target groups, children’s literature has a lot of other distinguishing features, which have an influence on both the content and language of quality Russian translations: strong ideological, didactic, ethical, and moral terms, ambivalence, aim at high readability and conformity, and text–picture relationship.
Translation problems and their findings made at the stage of linguistic skills tend to reflect, and result from, these hierarchically higher steps. different approaches mediating the translation of children’s literature might be subsumed under the more broad vision on culture, or ideology in a general sense, addressing taken-for-granted guesses, ideas, and views shared by a separate society or group. In fact, ideology is the overriding constraint, an umbrella concept, dictating what is allowable in children’s books. In a whole, children’s books are expected to be in a specific way beneficial to children and sufficiently easy in terms of plot, situation development, and language to be readable for smalls. These couple of requirements may rarely be contradictory. For instance, a maximally understandable text may be regarded as too simple to discover some new and, in that view, benefit the child reader. Moreover, notions of what is beneficial and understandable vary from culture to culture and change with time, which frequently leads to changing of initial texts in translating.