scholarly journals English Cultural Expressions Translation: Strategies Used in Rendering Narnia Chronicles into Arabic

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 1015
Author(s):  
Hussein Ali Habtoor ◽  
Abrar Abdullah Al-Qahtani

This study explores the intercultural transfer that takes place during the process of translating children's literature from English into Arabic. It's main purpose is to investigate how culture-specific items or expressions are dealt with when they are rendered into Arabic and find out the most preferable translation strategies that can be applied in an attempt to make the translated versions acceptable and accessible to the target audience. This study draws its data from three English novels that belong to the famous series of Narnia Chronicles which are translated into Arabic. It also states the effects of following domestication or foreignization translation strategies. It is found that there is no consistency in the used translation strategies despite the fact that the three books are translated by the same translator. The study also shows that a compromise which includes the use of domestication and foreignization translation strategies seems to be the ideal solution.

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Cocargeanu

Romanian children's literature, particularly translations for children, has rather low visibility in international children's literature scholarship, and translations of Beatrix Potter have not been extensively researched, either. This article contributes to filling these gaps by exploring the challenges involved in the recent publication of the first licensed Romanian edition of Beatrix Potter and the strategies employed to solve them. It identifies extra-textual challenges, related to the possibility of publishing Potter, the licensing process, the selection of particular tales and book formats for publication, and marketing strategies; and textual challenges, arising from Potter's writing style, the interdependence between visual and verbal aspects in her tales, their cultural specificity and read-aloud qualities. It also discusses the roles of the British and Romanian publishers in the publishing process and relates the translation strategies visible in the texts to the translator's apparently divided responsibility towards Potter and the Romanian audience, her conceptions of children and children's literature, and the Romanian literary tradition.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Berry

This article takes as its subject the project of British author and editor Aidan Chambers to set up a small press dedicated to publishing modern European children’s literature in translation, 1988–92. Positioned within Gideon Toury’s framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, this paper outlines the history of the firm and its founding ideology to publish children’s literature “with a difference” for a British audience. As a result, preliminary norms (relating to text, author and translator selection) and operational norms (relating to translation strategies) for four novels by Maud Reuterswärd, Peter Pohl and Tormod Haugen are identified and analyzed. Fundamental to the article’s methodology is the use of bibliographical, archival and oral history primary sources. The principal focus of research interest is Chambers’ use of language consultants in addition to his commissioned translators in an unusual and sometimes challenging professional collaboration of editor-translator-consultant within a Nordic-British setting.


Target ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haidee Kruger

The tension between domesticating and foreignising translation strategies is particularly strongly felt in the translation of children’s literature, and has been a key issue in many studies of such literature. However, despite the pervasiveness of the concepts, there is little existing empirical research investigating how child (and adult) readers of translated children’s books process and respond to for eignised elements in translation. This means that scholars’ arguments in favour of either domestication or foreignisation in the translation of children’s literature are often based on intuition and personal experience, with no substantial empirical basis. This article presents the findings of an experiment undertaken to investigate Afrikaans child and adult readers’ processing of and responses to potentially linguistically and culturally foreign textual elements in translated children’s picturebooks, against the background of postcolonial/neocolonial cultural and linguistic hybridity in South Africa. The paper reports the results relating to two of the research questions informing the study: Does the use of foreignised elements in translated children’s picturebooks have any significant effect on the cognitive effort involved in reading for child and adult readers? Is the comprehension of child and adult readers affected by the use of for eignised elements in translated children’s picturebooks? A reading study utilising eye-tracking was conducted, involving both child and adult participants reading manipulated domesticated and foreignised versions of pages from two picturebooks translated from English to Afrikaans. To answer research question (1), data obtained by means of eye-tracking were analysed for dwell time, fixation count, first fixation duration and glances count for areas of interest (AOIs) reflecting domesticating or foreignising translation strategies. In order to answer question (2), short structured questionnaires or interviews with participants were used, focusing on the degree of comprehension of the two texts. Overall, the findings of the experiment demonstrate that while there are perceptible effects on processing and comprehension associated with the use of foreignising strategies, these effects are not straightforward or uniform, with notable differences not only for different AOIs, but also for child and adult readers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Ślawska

The Domestication of Cultural Strangeness in the Translation of Children's Literature: The case of Dubravka Ugrešić's Kućni duhovi [Home Ghosts]This article is devoted to the Polish translation of Kućni duhovi [Home Ghosts], a collection of short stories by Dubravka Ugrešić, her only book addressed to the youngest readers which has been published outside Croatia. The study focuses on the issue of cultural strangeness generated mostly by proper names that appear in the stories: ghosts' names, and the names and surnames of other characters. In her translation, Dorota Jovanka Ćirlić domesticated the source text, replacing all of them with Polish equivalents. The comparative analysis presented in this article considers translation strategies she used and illustrates them with numerous examples. Oswajanie obcości kulturowej w przekładzie literatury dziecięcej. Przypadek Domowych duchów Dubravki UgrešićNiniejszy artykuł poświęcony jest przekładowi na język polski zbioru opowiadań Dubravki Ugrešić pt. Domowe duchy. Jest to jedyna książka pisarki adresowana do najmłodszych czytelników, która ukazała się poza granicami Chorwacji. Szczególna uwaga skierowana została na kwestię obcości kulturowej, którą w książce Ugrešić generują przede wszystkim nazwy własne (nazwy duchów, imiona i nazwiska pozostałych bohaterów). Dorota Jovanka Ćirlić, autorka przekładu, dokonała udomowienia tekstu źródłowego, zastępując wszystkie nazwy własne, pojawiające się w oryginale, polskimi ekwiwalentami. Zastosowane przez tłumaczkę strategie translatorskie zostały omówione oraz zilustrowane licznymi przykładami w toku analizy porównawczej.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-30
Author(s):  
Caterina Neri

The main aim of this article is to provide a thorough insight about the difficulties encountered when translating fairy tales from Slavic folklore, in a sense that not only it implies the shift from anoral version to a written one, but also it has to face all the challenges of children’s literature. In order to do this, we have analyzed one of the hundreds of fairy tales present in the work of the Russian writer and linguist Aleksandr Nikolaevič Afanas’ev, Narodnye russkie skazki, an extraordinary collection and classification of a large amount of fairy tales of the Slavic oral culture. Our analysis focuses on the well-known character Baba Jaga, the ‘wooden leg’ witch, who lives in an izbaand rests on hen’s legs in an enchanted wood. In particular, an attempt is made to conduct a translatological analysis of Afanas’ev’s text, within the framework of textual typology considering the translation macro-strategy, the most significant linguistic factors, as well assome potential translation strategies which help the story to fit in the target language and culture in the best possible way.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Aida Alla

There is an increasing demand for translation of children’s literature nowadays and this demand is accompanied by an increased need for the researchers to study the nature and feature of such a discipline. It is worth mention that the word “children’s literature” in English-speaking countries is a broader term covering children, adolescents and sometimes young adults. The present paper aims to highlight some comprehensive theoretical aspects concerning children’s literature translation. Special attention is paid to the issues which have generated lots of intense and ongoing debates among theoreticians as to which translation strategies and procedures would be more beneficial to the target language child reader. Before elaborating on such issues, this paper casts some light on the various definitions of children’s literature and its characteristics, its status and the role it exerts on the potential readership. Ambivalence of children’s literature – the texts being addressed to both children and adults – constitutes one of the biggest challenges for the author and the translator of children’s literature alike. Such a phenomenon is investigated in this paper illustrated with some book titles. Another feature which is tackled in this paper is that of asymmetry, which refers to the unequal communication levels between adults and children. Finally, conclusions will be drawn regarding to most popular theoretical trends of children’s literature and children’s literature translation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 22-50
Author(s):  
Karen Seago ◽  
Lavinia Springett

Savage Heroines? The Treatment of Gender and Genre in Translations of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights is the first instalment of his award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials. In this alternate-worlds fantasy and children’s literature classic, Lyra and her daemon Pan are catapulted from the relative stability of Oxford to negotiate an increasingly threatening world in a quest to protect free will from cataclysmic adult zealotry. According to prophecy, Lyra is the chosen one; she conforms to the tropes of the fantasy quest performing the paradigmatic steps of the saviour hero. Pullman’s protagonist transgresses and subverts the stereotypical expectations of the fantasy heroine whose generic destiny is coded in enclosure, passivity and endurance. Lyra is also a coming of age story and here again Pullman’s conceptualisation does not conform to the female pattern in both fantasy and children’s literature where marriage functions as the marker for maturity. Character is one of the two defining traits of fantasy (Attebery 1992) and it performs a didactic function in children’s literature. Characterisation is created through the reader’s interpretation of textual cues: narratorial description; direct and free-indirect speech. Lyra’s character subverts fantasy stereotypes and depicts a transgressive child who does not conform to gender role expectations. Genre translation tends to adapt the text to target culture norms and the didactic and socialising impetus of children’s literature has been shown to prompt translation strategies which comply with the receiving culture’s linguistic and behavioural norms. In this paper, we analyse the rendering of character cues in the French, German and Italian translations of Northern Lights: 1. Is the transgressive trope of a) the heroine following the male hero paradigm and b) the coming of age pattern maintained or normalised to conform to genre expectations? 2. Is Lyra’s transgressive character rendered in translation or is it adapted to comply with didactic expectations of behaviour? 3. Are there different notions of the role and function of children’s literature in the target environments and do these impact on translation strategies?


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 666
Author(s):  
Wenjia Zhou ◽  
Yuying Li

With the cultural turn in translation studies in 1970s, the focus of translation studies was gradually changed from traditional linguistics to culture. André Lefevere put forward to Manipulation Theory that has further broadened the field of translation studies. It holds that translation is not to realize the meaning equivalence between source text and target text, but to realize the compromise between the source cultural system and the target cultural system, in which the translation will be manipulated by some factors. Because Children’s Literature is classified specially, it may be influenced by different cultural system. Therefore, this paper chooses Chinese translation of Charlotte’s Web as a case study from the perspective of Manipulation Theory, which draws a conclusion that ideology, poetics and patronage have impacts on translation strategies of children’s literature, in order to facilitate new theoretical researches and improve Chinese translations of Children’s Literature.


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