Translating to Baby Fairy Tales
Translation of child literature rises special challenges owing to number of special characteristics of children’s readings and qualities of child audience. The situation that children’s book tends to have a distant position in cultures and disadvance from not enough of status makes it possible to manipulate materials translated for babies in different ways to enable them cohere with the expectations of the accommodating culture. Furthermore, children are not expected to tolerate as much strangeness and foreignness as grown-up readers, and therefore, changing of the content and language of initial passages is often considered compulsory. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s books thus tend to conform to conventional, set forms, models, and language. However, children’s writing plays an important part as a tool for upbringing, socialization, development of linguistic skills, and spreading world knowledge. Especially in minor linguistic cultures, where translation rates account for a significant share of published children’s literature, children are expected to arrive into relations with literature and its upbringing and entertaining functions generally through interpretations. That’s why, translations may have a key role in presenting child readers to characters, situations, and Polish translation company, typical of fiction.
The expression ‘baby literature’ usually refers to fiction aimed at readers from preliterate children to young teenagers; nonfiction, such as school textbooks, is left aside. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a monolithic genre either; its different subgenres, e.g., fairy tales and fantasy stories, detective writing, realistic stories, differ in terms of idea and language, which is pretended to influence the scope of translation methods. Here, however, children’s stories is judged as one, albeit very complicated, genre. Despite children are the primary audience, children’s books actually have an crucial additional target group – adult readers, whose preferences and linguistic tastes must be taken into account by both authors and translators. But, Oittinen insists on translating for children, rather than translating children’s literature, and underlies the importance of children’s culture and their fairy planet, as well as society’s image of childhood and the translator’s own child image.
Besides the definition of two target groups, children’s literature has a number of other special qualities, which have an influence on both the content and language of English Russian translator: stressing ideological, didactic, behavioral, and moral terms, ambivalence, aim at exceptional readability and speakability, and text–picture relationship.
Translation issues and their findings made at the level of linguistic skills tend to reflect, and result from, these gradually higher levels. Various approaches mediating the translation of children’s literature can be aggregated under the more extensive vision on culture, or ideology in a general sense, addressing accepted guesses, beliefs, and values shared by a separate society and culture. Actually, ideology is the overlapping unit, an umbrella idea, writing what is allowable in children’s literature. In a whole, children’s books are likely to be in some way enjoyable to children and sufficiently easy in terms of idea, characterization, and language to be comprehensible. These couple of requirements may sometimes be contradictory. For example, a maximally understandable text may be regarded as too simple to discover anything new and, in that respect, benefit the child reader. Beside that, notions of what is beneficial and understandable differ from nation to culture and change with time, which often leads to changing of source texts in translation.