Explicitation in the Translation of Children's Literature—A Case Study of the Chinese Version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian*

Author(s):  
B.J. Epstein

Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is arguably about the history of theUnited States in terms of slavery and race relations. How, then, can this be translated to another language and culture, especially one with a very different background in regard to minorities? And in particular, how can this be translated for children, who have less knowledge about history and slavery than adult readers? In this essay, I analyse how Twain’s novel has been translated to Swedish. I study 15 translations. Surprisingly, I find that instead of retaining Twain’s even-handed portrayal of the two races and his acceptance of a wide variety of types of Americans, Swedish translators tend to emphasise the foreignness, otherness, and lack of education of the black characters. In other words, although the American setting is kept, the translators nevertheless give Swedish readers a very different understanding of theUnited Statesand slavery than that which Twain strove to give his American readers. This may reflect the differences in immigration and cultural makeup inSwedenversus inAmerica, but it radically changes the book as well as child readers’ understanding of what makes a nation.


2005 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Browne Hutchinson ◽  
Anne Rose ◽  
Benjamin B. Bederson ◽  
Ann Carlson Weeks ◽  
Allison Druin

The challenges encountered in building the InternationalChildren’s Digital Library (ICDL), a freely availableonline library of children’s literature are described. Thesechallenges include selecting and processing books fromdifferent countries, handling and presenting multiplelanguages simultaneously, and addressing cultural differences. Unlike other digital libraries that present content from one or a few languages and cultures, and focuson either adult or child audiences, ICDL must serve amultilingual, multicultural, multigenerational audience.The research is presented as a case study for addressingthese design criteria; current solutions and plans forfuture work are described.


Author(s):  
Erin Hogan Rapp ◽  
Melissa Landa

This chapter presents the results from a collective case study of 23 undergraduate preservice teachers enrolled in a Children's Literature course at a large Mid-Atlantic university. It explores how course instruction in and around high-quality, culturally diverse children's literature facilitated both displays of culturally competent dispositions and cultural knowledge of self and others. The chapter also describes how the preservice teachers under study applied their culturally competent dispositions as they rehearsed selecting texts, planning activities, and asking questions to their future students. The Cultural Competence for Teaching Framework provided a useful metric to evaluate participants' displays of cultural competence across the course of the semester. Within this chapter, the authors describe how they embedded cultural competence education inside the course including a description of the activities, texts, and pedagogy used.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 453-471
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska ◽  

The article tackles the issue of the language of fear exploited in children’s literature, taking Ted Hughes’s Nature poems for young readers as the object of analysis. It presents a perspective of linguistic stylistics and literary semantics and as such is not meant to be a critical literary evaluation of Hughes’s poetry. Rather, it focuses on linguistic instruments of creating the aura of fear in children’s poetry and their cognitive import. The author has chosen a neuroscientific paradigm for the two closely related emotions – fear and anxiety – as propagated by American researcher Joseph LeDoux, most prominently in his work “Anxious” (2015). LeDoux maintains that the feeling of fear is not inborn but rather a cognitive construct emergent from the use of one’s native language practiced within a particular socio-cultural context. The unique atmosphere of Hughes’s poetry has been achieved by a rich lexicon of fear-related notions and a skillfully applied figuration (anthropomorphisms, similes). His poetic imagery powerfully complements the vocabulary and troping in calling to life fictional worlds, often uncanny and menacing, remote from the young readers’ experience. The author of this article perceives in the lexicon, figuration and multimodal imagery (both verbal and visual, the latter realized as illustrations in picture-books) an important didactic device that teaches children how to manage fearsome experiences. This capability will also prepare children to face anxiety, an emotion typical of adult life and related mostly to existential problems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-356
Author(s):  
Jalu Norva Illa Putra ◽  
Nina Widyaningsih

This community service activity aims to train teachers to make learning media in the form of pictorial stories with children's literary content. This article is a case study of community service at the Nakula Gugus Teacher Working Group in Wonogiri, Central Java. Children's literature in this context is defined as a medium that is used as an intermediary to convey a form of character education for children. Apart from this, children's literature is considered an appropriate medium because it is able to attract students' interest through visual and narrative forms. Children's literature is also able to have more appeal if from the beginning it comes from ideas that are owned by the children themselves. This will stimulate a sense of ownership and logic to the things that the story structure wants to instill. The method used is lectures and discussions, then in the form of workshops on picture story books. The result of this community service is a picture book with a theme that is close to children related to the use of gadgets, which are then given the title Playing with Friends.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Akanksha Bahukhandi

Archetypes are easily identifiable in works of fiction regardless of when they were penned and the relevant cultural mileu. This is because archetypes are functional units of the 'collective unconcious' which is common to all. Going by that logic shouldn't the authors of fiction be just fine with exploring various aspects and variations af various archetyes deep seated in the psyche of their readers? If archetypes provide a sound base of ready acceptance by virtue of  their familiarity to the entire human race, then what explains the rampant use of strereotypical characters and plots in fiction all across the globe and especially in children's literature? Do the stereotypes encourage prejudices and body shaming? The present paper aims to look into the possible reasons behind the use of stereotypes and caricatures, their effectiveness and their impact on the young readers.


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