Negotiating Translation and Transcreation of Children's Literature: From Alice to the Moomins

By Riitta Oittinen

This book offers fresh critical insights to the field of children’s literature translation studies by applying the concept of transcreation, established in the creative industries of the globalized world, to bring to the fore the transformative, transgressional and creative aspects of rewriting for children and young audiences. This socially situated and culturally dependent practice involves ongoing complex negotiations between creativity and normativity, balancing text-related problems and genre conventions with readers’ expectations, constraints imposed by established, canonical translations and publishers’ demands. Focussing on the translator’s strategies and decision-making process, the book investigates phenomena where transcreation is especially at play in children’s literature, such as dual address, ambiguity, nonsense, humour, play on words and other creative language use; these also involve genre-specific requirements, for example, rhyme and rhythm in poetry. The book draws on a wide range of mostly Anglophone texts for children and their translations into languages of limited diffusion to demonstrate the numerous ways in which information, meaning and emotions are transferred to new linguistic and cultural contexts. While focussing mostly on interlingual transfer, the volume analyses a variety of translation types from established, canonical renditions by celebrity translators to non-professional translations and intralingual rewritings. It also examines iconotextual dynamics of text and image. The book employs a number of innovative methodologies, from cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics to semiotics and autoethnographic  approaches, going beyond text analysis to include empirical research on children’s reactions to translation strategies. Highlighting the complex dynamics at work in the process of transcreating for children, this volume is essential reading for students and researchers in translation studies, children’s fiction and adaptation studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: May 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9789811524332

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© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020

J. Dybiec-Gajer et al. (eds.)Negotiating Translation and Transcreation of Children's LiteratureNew Frontiers in Translation Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2433-2_1

1. Introduction: Travelling Beyond Translation—Transcreating for Young Audiences

Joanna Dybiec-Gajer¹   and Riitta Oittinen²  

(1)

Pedagogical University of Kraków, Kraków, Poland

(2)

Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

Joanna Dybiec-Gajer (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Riitta Oittinen

Email: [e-mail]

Joanna Dybiec-Gajer

is a translation scholar, educator and practitioner, and an Associate Professor at the Pedagogical University of Kraków, where she is Head of the Chair for Translator Education. Her main research interests concern translation for young audiences, translator training and translation as a profession. She has published numerous articles, monographs and edited volumes in the field of translation studies. Her recent publication includes a monograph on the translation history of Heinrich Hoffmann’s controversial children’s classic Der Struwwelpeter in Poland (Złota Różdżka. Od książki dla dzieci po dreszczowiec raczej dla dorosłych [Polish Struwwelpeter. From a Children’s Book to an Adults’ Thriller, 2017]). Her other book publications include titles such as Zmierzyć przekład? Z metodologii oceniania w dydaktyce przekładu pisemnego (2013) and Guidebook Gazes. Poland in American and German Travel Guides (2004), she also coauthored, with Maria Piotrowska, Verba Volant, Scripta Manent. How to write an M.A. thesis in Translation Studies (2012). She has been a member of European Society of Translation Studies since 2011.

Riitta Oittinen

holds a PhD in Translation Studies and has taught translating (translating for children, translating the verbal and the visual as well as multimodality in translation) since 1987. In 2019 she—as artist, scholar, teacher, and mentor—received the Anne Devereaux Jordan Award given by ChLA (the Children’s Literature Association). She has taught translation in several countries in Europe and beyond and she serves as an Adjunct Professor (Docent) at the Universities of Tampere and Helsinki. She also holds the position of Senior Lecturer at Tampere University. She has written and illustrated well over 200 publications: books, articles, animated films, illustrations, and has held art exhibitions in and outside Finland. Her brand new book Translating Picturebooks, coauthored by Anne Ketola, and Melissa Garavini, was published by Routledge in 2018. Her other publications include titles such as Translating for Children 2000 (London: Garland Publishing, translated into Spanish in 2003), and papers in journals, such as in Meta (University of Montréal) in 2003 Translation for Children and in 2008 The Verbal, the Visual, the Translator in collaboration with Klaus Kaindl; in 2008 she co-edited with Maria González Davies Whose Story? Translating the Verbal and the Visual in Literature for Young Readers (Cambridge).

When we read books, watch films and listen to stories, we enter other situations, other times, other places and meet other characters and their other worlds. In this interaction, we also learn something new or maybe something only forgotten about ourselves. Moreover, the world today is full of verbal, visual and audiovisual tellings and retellings, which change our worlds every time we meet the otherness. The otherness changes us and we change the otherness. As the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin would say, we are in a constant dialogic interaction with us, with you, with them, with the whole universe of literature and human understanding.

While the purpose of this book is to deal with the dialogic otherness in the context of stories told for children, telling stories may also be depicted as travelling. All stories—whatever their ways of telling—can be depicted as journeys, journeys into the child’s and adult’s human minds. While travelling, we dive into the worlds of J. M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Charles Causley, Tove Jansson, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Heinrich Hoffmann, Joanna Nadin, Rachel Riley, Edmund Spenser, Agnieszka Taborska, and several others. Opening up these worlds to audiences across the globe has been made possible by what is commonly referred to as translation.

Traditionally, children have been considered an audience for whom translation could follow different norms from those for adults. Using again the travel metaphor, children have been treated as passengers who are allowed to travel yet on different conditions, accompanied, supervised and protected by adults: parents, governesses, nannies and chaperones. In the field of translating for young audiences these roles were taken up by various agents retelling, repackaging and otherwise mediating the worlds of the original texts: first and foremost translators as invisible story tellers (Lathey 2010) but also illustrators (cf. Oittinen et al. 2018), publishers and editors. In translation studies terms, if we apply the classical faithful–free dimension, the latter was favoured and so was domestication over foreignisation. For this reason, translation and literature scholars have preferred the term adaptation or re-writing to translation as more apt in many ways. In a historical perspective, earlier translation cultures allowed for considerable liberties in rendering texts for children, for example, toning down or, on the contrary, exaggerating the moralising zeal of the original, or modifying the elements considered inappropriate, too difficult or disconcerting for children. Adaptations, sometimes considerably effecting the conceptual and linguistic integrity of the original, were widespread and more readily accepted than today. Such modifying tendencies observable in translated children’s literature have attracted criticism from translation scholars, naming them purification (Klingberg 1986: 12) or hygienisation (Maliszewski 2007: 27), not infrequently linking them with the censorship by adults (Alvstad 2010: 23).

Investigating in a historical perspective the research on the translation of children’s literature, also known as children’s literature translation studies (López 2000; Borodo 2006), we can notice some relevant transformations and trends in the way translated texts or productions are analysed, interpreted and described. Early approaches advocate critical stance on adaptation or domestication of source texts addressed at children. For instance Bravo-Villasante (1978: 46) describes such texts as faulty, unfaithful or mutilated, Stolt (1978: 145) refers to adaptation as an unhealthy tradition while Klingberg (1978: 87) writes in this context of falsification. Later approaches seem more liberal, allowing for a more interventionist and creative actions of the translator. A turning point comes with the considerations by Oittinen who examines the possibility of deleting in translation less successful elements, which could weaken the original (2000: 163) and speculates that even tales by H. C. Andersen should be adapted to keep them readable; they must be adapted or die (Oittinen 2000: 80). Another acknowledgment and appreciation of adaptations, abridgements and censored editions of children’s texts comes with the publication of Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature (2013), arguing that [i]n the field of children’s literature [..] textual transformations have for a long time been the norm rather than the exception (Lefebvre 2013: 2). This pendulum swing (cf. Borodo 2017: 54) from prescriptive perspectives to stances highlighting manipulation and ideology and problematising authorship and fidelity in children’s texts, has motivated us to re-examine the notion of translation for younger audiences beyond the prescriptive or functionalist approaches. We believe that terminological choices reflect theoretical approaches to and understanding of the studied domain. Adopting the perspective of transcreation, our goal is to focus on and analyse the emerging break of paradigms in the study of children’s literature and foreground and examine the creative practices involved in transferring texts for younger audiences into new linguistic, cultural and historical contexts.

Remarkable, high-quality texts making up the canon of children’s literature to which both children and adults readily (re)turn are as varied as their authors and readers. Yet what they seem to share is their ability to tell stories that conjure fascinating worlds, a prerequisite for which is a large dose of creativity, both in conceptual design of these worlds as well as in their linguistic mechanics. Taking into account the shift from instruction to delight (Rudd 2010: 4) in the historical development of children’s literature, creativity gathers prominence as authors attempt to attract the attention of the modern child, more world-wise, inattentive and over-stimulated by digital environments. Even understood purely in linguistic terms, creativity can take on many forms of playful language use, from novel, non-standard forms through puns, homophonies to nonsense and the surreal. The playfulness and vividness of language with its sensory qualities is very attractive to young audiences, younger children in particular. The creative dimension of children’s literature poses translational challenges which require solutions that go beyond the traditional understanding of translation as meaning transfer. This calls for an attempt at rethinking the concept of translation and translators, whose role in this context is that of enabling adults (Chambers 1991), helping readers re-imagine the original worlds of children’s literature. For this purpose, highlighting creativity and non-normativity involved in re-writing for children, and in line with Katan’s question about the transcreational turn in translation studies (2016), the present volume re-visits the notion of translation for young audiences, probing the explanatory power of the concept of transcreation.

Readily adopted by language service providers in advertising and marketing domains, transcreation means a creative and complex service transgressing translation to communicate advertising, promotional and other brand-related messages across languages and cultures. In other words, as Pedersen (2014: 58) notes, transcreation [...] seeks to perform all the adjustments necessary to make a campaign work in all target markets, while at the same time staying loyal to the original creative intent of the campaign. In a similar vain, the ISO 17100 translation standard (2015) acknowledges transcreation as an added service provided by translators. In our understanding, transcreation falls under the umbrella term of translation, yet being its specific, or less prototypical category (cf. Halverson 1999), concerned more with effect and emotions than meaning. The fact that transcreation has become established in the creative industries of the globalised world has given the concept its due recognition and visibility. Applying it to re-writing for children can bring to the fore the transformative, transgressional and creative aspects of this activity, increasingly intertwined with commercial and global flows of products for children.

What is also of relevance from the point of view of the professions, transcreation is not only about communicating effectively, but also affectively, establishing an emotional connection between the audience/the customer and the message. The aspect of engaging emotions is likewise of paramount significance in retelling children’s literature as an act of dialogic interactions, thus allowing common ground for the professions and the academia to meet. The gap between the two in the sphere of translation has repeatedly been critically assessed, with the academia being criticised for overtheoretisation of translation whereas the translation professions tend to be upheld for effectiveness of practical solutions and best practices approaches, e.g. when it comes to translation quality assessment (Drugan 2013). The professions’ focus on emotional and textual fit in transcreation, that is on catering to the needs and expectations of the target audience actually makes transcreation not at all far removed from the tenets of the Skopos theory, proving its practical application. As we see it, transcreation is creating texts—translating texts—for a certain kind of a situation and for a certain purpose. Using a term embedded in the professional world to the study of children’s literature in translation allows us to adopt an integrational approach to the research field under consideration.

The concept of transcreation has been discussed in the literature on translation studies, leading to a variety of responses (cf. Katan 2014, 2016; Gaballo 2012; Schäffner 2012). On the one hand, transcreation has met some scepticism from more traditionally oriented standpoints perceiving it as an invention of a superfluous label already covered by the broad notion of translation and pointing to competing terms such as internationalisation, localisation, cultural adaptation, transediting or marketing translation and copywriting. On the other hand, it has been embraced as offering new perspectives on translation in a changing, globalised world. As Katan points out, [i]n theory, as a result of the cultural turn, there should be a more context-based understanding of communication, and hence a more intervenient role for the translator. At a practical level, however, normative roles follow a conduit theory of translation based on language transfer (2016: 365). Adopting a transcreational perspective, we believe, in line with Schäffner (2012: 881), that it may contribute to raising awareness of the complexity of processes and encourage rethinking the more traditional views. In the context of our volume, this can be a productive and refreshing way of looking into the stories told by great storytellers of children’s literature and the way they are re-imagined with the help of transcreation in new cultural and linguistic environs.

The title of this volume highlights two internationally recognisable children’s literature reference characters, Carroll’s Alice and Jansson’s Moomins, which can be treated as milestones in the development of the genre. As a historical vantage point, Carroll’s oeuvre marks a paradigmatic shift in writing for children, the coming to the surface, powerfully and permanently, the first unapologetic appearance in print, for readers who sorely needed it, of liberty of thought in children’s books as Darton noted many years ago (1932: 268). Also linguistically, Carroll’s Alice is liberating in many ways, especially in the use of nonsense. As a twentieth-century landmark, Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, eccentric, playful and angst ridden (Lathey 2008: 66), can be taken to stand for the dynamically growing Scandinavian literature for young audiences, encouraging philosophical and translational journeys across the Moominvalley (Dymel-Trzebiatowska 2019) even over seventy years after the publication of the series’ first volume at the end of World War II. As globally influential multitexs, Carroll and Jansson, touching upon undercurrents of existential-philosophical thematic, remain topical and fascinating authors for readers of different backgrounds and historical contexts, both young and adult. Especially Carroll’s evolving views about the child, such as Alice, are interesting from the angle of the child’s autonomy, obedience, resistance and protesting. His concept of the child is articulated not only in texts, but also in images. His own first Alice drawings seem surrealistic, somehow crude and unfinished when compared with Tenniel’s neat illustrations. In the modern world, children are facing so many things that may be difficult to cope with such as fragmentation and re-definition of family and family relations, sensory overload, commercialisation, and competitiveness. Jansson’s image of the mother, embodied in the central character of Moominmamma, can be read complimentary as an uplifting parents’ presence, providing comfort and safety of unconditional love. In the fantasy world, writes Nancy Lyman Huse, Moominmamma does provide essential values and norms, but she will not exclude those who do not meet them. Existence gives one an intrinsic right to her love (Huse 1981: 44).

Our general idea about the present collection of stories is to look at rewritten texts for children: those traditionally translated from language A to language B, those that have reached the target language via another, third, language, and those transcreated for some special situations, such as illustrating or intersemiotic translation. This book discusses professional rewritings that have become canonical readings, translations by novice translators as well as student renditions created in an educational context. In other words, we look at the term translation from quite a wide perspective. Gathered under one volume there are eleven authors from Finland, Japan, Germany and Poland, mainly translation studies scholars, some of whom combine their academic expertise with practical experience as translators and illustrators of children’s literature, acting both as retellers and visual artists. The authors offer a variety of approaches from cognitive linguistics through autoethnographic analyses to experimental studies. In other words, theorywise, our book covers quite a wide range of issues.

The chapters are divided into four sections. The first one, Translating and Illustrating for Children, is devoted to the genre of picturebooks, text–image dynamics and the interplay of illustrating and rewriting for children as a complex process of retelling. Adopting the perspective of carnivalism, cannibalism, and intersemiotic or visual translation, Riitta Oittinen investigates what the reflections of different kinds of rewriters and illustrators can tell us about the characteristics of different versions of picturebooks and their further verbal and visual renderings. In an autoethnographic approach, she analyses her own work recorded in her translator’s and illustrator’s notebooks. The analysed sets of material include the Cree Indian story The Curing Fox and its Finnish translation as well as her unpublished illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Joanna Dybiec-Gajer examines a controversial children’s classic, Heinrich Hoffmann’s picturebook Der Struwwelpeter. Focussing on the eponymous protagonist, she investigates the textual and illustrative transformations it has undergone in indirect translations and adaptations into Polish. She shows how the human figure, central in Hoffmann’s text, has been dethroned in the classics’ latest Polish edition (2017). She argues that this modern postanthropocentric transcreation, achieved by illustrative means, was inspired by the first, nineteenth-century translator’s choices. Beate Sommerfeld also examines a picturebook, focussing on a contemporary author, Agnieszka Taborska, whose texts abound with surrealistic imagery, black humour and linguistic creativity as well as postmodern narrative traits. Analysing Taborska’s book Szalony Zegar [Crazy Clock] and its German translation, she ponders on how to recreate the carnivalistic world of the author in a new linguistic setting and how to understand the concept of loyalty to the child-reader.

The second section, Rewriting the Canon, focusses on classical authors for children whose texts have been influential for the development of children’s literature. Circulating in a variety of language versions, they have become part of what is considered the canon of children’s literature. Trying to test Antoine Berman’s Retranslation Hypothesis, Aniela Korzeniowska looks at publishers’ practices of repackaging children’s classics. Responding to market demands, especially for books that are part of obligatory school reading and are driven by commercial motivation, they devise strategies that make the relation between the source and target texts obscure and play down the importance of the early translators, for example by recycling old translations without proper acknowledgement. The case in point are the translation series of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol on the Polish book market. Aleksandra Wieczorkiewicz analyses Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, the famous story of a boy suspended between childhood and adulthood, as an embodiment of classical translation problems such as creating the textual world, multiplicity of stylisations and double address. Her analysis covers two Polish translations of the novel, more than half a century apart (1913, 1994), which grows out of her preoccupation with Peter Pan as its third Polish translator. Dorota Pielorz focusses on Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and the changing image of the eponymous protagonist emerging from different rewritings. With at least thirteen full renditions, the novel is one of most frequently translated books for children in the Polish context. Examining two translations that are a century apart, the canonical and polemical ones, the author shows the evolution of translational norms and conventions and the way they impact the reception of the target text.

The genre of literary nonsense lies at the centre of the third section, "Transcreating Lewis Carroll’s Alice", devoted to microanalyses of two Carroll’s masterpieces: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Abundant with language games, destabilising coherent meanings and questioning conventional interpretative approaches, literary nonsense has been considered the trademark of untranslatibility. Transcreation may be one of the methods of making sense out of source text nonsense in interlingual rewritings. Following a cognitive-ethnolinguistic perspective, Agnieszka Gicala selects an example of situational nonsense from the Duchess’s Lullaby. She scrutinises its rewriting in both professional and student translations, arguing that the rendition of the key word beat can activate different world views and thus considerably impact the outcome of re-tellers’ work. Agata Brajerska-Mazur examines Jabberwocky, the most well-known English nonsense poem, from a linguistic perspective. Dissecting the poem’s linguistic structure—portmanteaus, blends and contaminations, as well as its sound layer—in the source text and its Polish rewritings, she argues for the poem’s translatability, as evidenced by its thirteen various translations-cum-transcreations.

Finally, the fourth, section Solving Translation Problems: From Double Address to Sound and Taboo focusses on crucial translation problems encountered in rewriting children’s literature and solutions provided by translators in different historical times and contexts, and in different genres, such as novels, fairy tales and poems. Hanna Dymel-Trzebiatowska tackles the problem of double address, also covered by such terms as ambiguity and crossover, analysing proper names in the Polish translations of Tove Jansson’s Moomin novels. Proper names in translation for children are also the subject of the chapter by Anna Sasaki. Focussing on onomatopoeic proper names in English-to-Russian translations of fairy tales, she reports results of her association experiment with children, aimed at examining how they react to various translation strategies. The data analysis suggests that the strategy of onymic replacement, preserving both the semantics and sound qualities of the source text names, allows to generate a meaningful reaction of child readers that is enabling them to establish a semantic connection to the translated item. Joanna Dyła-Urbańska discusses the problem of rendering taboo in contemporary teenage novels in the context of publishers’ policies as well as in the context of clashing expectations and conventions between the source and target cultures. In a case study of her own translation of Joanna Nadin’s The Rachel Riley Diaries into Polish, she shows the publisher’s interference to tone down references to teenage sexuality and sexual identity and perceives this as a transgression of translation ethics. The convention of breaking social taboos as well as of offering political commentary on the problems of the British society have earned the novel critical acclaim in Great Britain but have also given the novel some aspects of untranslatability and won less appreciation in the receiving culture. Ewelina Kwiatek looks at translation problems generated by the genre of poems from the perspective of translation education. Investigating Charles Causley’s ghost poems in students’ translations, she highlights constraints that proved difficult to surmount by translators-to-be such as rhyme and rhythm and as a result required a transcreative rather than translational approach. Finally, Piotr Plichta examines the problems involved in a modernising adaptation of a complex epic poem originally designed for an adult audience. He focusses on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, one of the most multilayered English works, marked by excessively archaic language, even by the sixteenth-century standards, and analyses its eighteenth-century reworking by Lucy Peacock, The Adventures of the Six Princesses of Babylon. Her sophisticated, inventive solutions aimed at mediating the complex allegorical contents of the original, involving skillful rewriting of the plot and use of alliterative plays, made her adaptation a surprisingly successful enterprise.

All in all, the book you are holding in your hands is a multitude of journeys for us all and for international audiences. It testifies to the power of imagination of translators and illustrators as the verbal and visual re-creators of the stories and to their relevance in giving stories new lives in new languages. Remaining rooted in translation studies, the volume advocates the applicability of the transcreative approach as a tool, allowing to highlight the creative and transformative aspects involved in the products and processes covered traditionally under the umbrella term of translation or, recently, more radically moved to the sphere of adaptation studies. It is our hope that the travels across children’s literature with this book will be both enjoyable and insightful. With the year 2021 being the 150th anniversary of Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice found there, and with many anniversaries to come, the publication of From Alice to the Moomins is especially topical as well. With these many-faceted stories about stories, we invite you to the wonderful wonderland of children’s literature and take you by the hand asking you to join us: Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the journey?

Secondary Sources

Alvstad, Cecilia. 2010. Children’s Literature and Translation. In Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Yves Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer, vol. 1. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Borodo, Michał. 2006. Children’s Literature Translation Studies? – zarys badań nad literaturą dziecięcą w przekładzie. Przekładaniec 16: 12–23.

———. 2017. Translation, Globalization and Younger Audiences. The Situation in Poland. Oxford: Peter Lang.Crossref

Bravo-Villasante, Carmen. 1978. Translation Problems in My Experience as a Translator. In Children’s Books in Translation: The Situation and the Problems, ed. Göte Klingberg, Mary Ørvig, and Stuart Amor, 46–50. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Chambers, Aidan. 1991/2011. Tell Me with the Reading Environment. Stroud: Thimble Press.

Darton, Joseph H. 1932. The Story of English Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drugan, Joanna. 2013. Quality in Professional Translation: Assessment and Improvement. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Dymel-Trzebiatowska, Hanna. 2019. Filozoficzne i translatoryczne wędrówki po Dolinie Muminków. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.

Gaballo, Viviana. 2012. Exploring the Boundaries of Transcreation in Specialized Translation. ESP Across Cultures 9: 95–113.

Halverson, Sandra. 1999. Conceptual Work and the ‘Translation’ Concept. Targets 11 (1): 1–31.Crossref

Huse, Nancy Lyman. 1981. Equal to Life: Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Proceedings 1981: 44–49. 

Katan, David. 2014. Uncertainty in the Translation Professions: Time to Transcreate? Cultus: the Journal of Intercultural Mediation and Communication 7: 10–20.

———. 2016. Translation at the Cross-roads: Time for the Transcreational Turn? Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 24 (3): 365–381.

Klingberg, Göte. 1986. Children’s Fiction in the Hands of the Translators. Malmö: Gleerup.

Klingberg, Göte, Mary Ørvig, and Stuart Amor, eds. 1978. Children’s Books in Translation: The Situation and the Problems. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Lathey, Gillian. 2008. Into New Worlds: Children’s Books in Translation. In Understanding Children’s Books: A Guide for Education Professionals, ed. Prue Godwin, 65–72. Los Angeles: Sage.Crossref

———. 2010. The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers. New York: Routledge.Crossref

Lefebvre, Benjamin. 2013. Introduction: Reconsidering Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature. In Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations, ed. Benjamin Lefebvre, 1–6. London; New York: Routledge.Crossref

López, Marisa Fernández. 2000. Translation Studies in Contemporary Children’s Literature: A Comparison of Intercultural Ideological Factors. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 25 (1): 29–37.Crossref

Maliszewski, Julian. 2007. Wulgaryzmy. Tabu w pracy tłumacza (na przykładzie angielskich tłumaczeń intralingwalnych). Studia o Przekładzie 23: 41–60.

Oittinen, Riitta. 2000. Translating for Children. London: Garland Publishing.

Oittinen, Riitta, Anne Ketola, and Melissa Garavini. 2018. Translating Picturebooks. Revoicing the Verbal, the Visual, and the Aural for a Child Audience. New York–Oxon: Routledge.

Pedersen, Daniel. 2014. Exploring the concept of transcreation – transcreation as ‘more than translation’? Cultus: The Journal of Intercultural Mediation and Communication 7: 57–71.

Rudd, David. 2010. The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature. London; New York: Routledge.

Schäffner, Christina. 2012. Rethinking Transediting. Meta: Journal des Traducteurs 57 (4): 866–883.Crossref

Stolt, Birgit. 1978. How Emil Becomes Michel – On the Translation of Children’s Books. In Children’s Books in Translation: The Situation and the Problems, ed. Göte Klingberg, Mary Ørvig, and Stuart Amor, 130–146. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Part IPart I

Translating and Illustrating for Children

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© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020

J. Dybiec-Gajer et al. (eds.)Negotiating Translation and Transcreation of Children's LiteratureNew Frontiers in Translation Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2433-2_2

2. From Translation to Transcreation to Translation: Excerpts from a Translator’s and Illustrator’s Notebooks

Riitta Oittinen¹  

(1)

Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

Riitta Oittinen

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

Translating picturebooksIllustrating picturebooksCarnivalismCannibalismIntersemiotic translationTranscreationLewis CarrollHugh Lupton and Niamh Sharkey

Riitta Oittinen

holds a PhD in Translation Studies and has taught translating (translating for children, translating the verbal and the visual as well as multimodality in translation) since 1987. In 2019 she—as artist, scholar, teacher, and mentor—received the Anne Devereaux Jordan Award given by ChLA (the Children’s Literature Association). She has taught translation in several countries in Europe and beyond and she serves as an Adjunct Professor (Docent) at the Universities of Tampere and Helsinki. She also holds the position of Senior Lecturer at Tampere University. She has written and illustrated well over 200 publications: books, articles, animated films, illustrations, and has held art exhibitions in and outside Finland. Her brand new book Translating Picturebooks. Revoicing the Verbal, the Visual, and the Aural for a Child Audience, coauthored by Anne Ketola, and Melissa Garavini, was published by Routledge in 2018. Her other publications include titles such as Translating for Children 2000 (London: Garland Publishing, translated into Spanish in 2003), and papers in journals, such as in Meta (University of Montréal) in 2003 Translation for Children and in 2008 The Verbal, the Visual, the Translator in collaboration with Klaus Kaindl; in 2008 she co-edited with Maria González Davies Whose Story? Translating the Verbal and the Visual in Literature for Young Readers (Cambridge).

2.1 Introduction

Every time a book is recreated, retranslated or reillustrated, it becomes different and the whole situation of understanding changes. According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1990: 426–427, glossary), this situation may be depicted as the dialogics of all human understanding. In other words, a reading experience consists not only of texts but also of the different writers, readers, contexts, and the past, present and future. Human words are never born in an empty space but always in some context. This does not only concern creating stories for new audiences, but also reading texts as such: every time we read, see or look at an image or a story, something new is created in the process of interpreting texts (Oittinen 2000: 29–32).

In translating illustrated stories, such as picturebooks for children, the voices of authors, illustrators, translators, parents, adults, and children intertwine and new meanings arise. This situation could also be depicted using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ideas about the hermeneutic circle of understanding, contributing to the multitude of voices. In other words, understanding is the merging of various horizons, those of the different readers and those of the different writers (Gadamer 1985: 271, 273; also see Bakhtin 1990: 130–133, glossary.)

Using Gadamer’s ideas, translation may be described as moving between parts and entities, from the big picture towards smaller items and the other way around. The recreators of an original story, such as translators and illustrators, have purposes, and these purposes have an influence on the way the translator and illustrator interpret the parts and entities of texts. In practice, the recreators of texts need to be aware of the ideologies, norms, conventions and poetics, prevailing in each literature, society, and culture. The ideological choices also concern both the subject matter and its form.

The main aim of my chapter is to contemplate the demands and complexities concerning verbal and visual rerenderings of intermodal texts and illustrated stories, such as picturebooks, for the dual audiences of children as