Translators of Baby Fairy Tales
Translation of children’s papers rises particular challenges owing to number of special characteristics of children’s readings and qualities of child readers. The fact that children’s literature tends to have a distant place in cultures and suffer from lack of status makes it possible to manipulate materials translated for children in different ways to make them accord 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 tongue of initial passages is often considered compulsory. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s literatures that’s why close to conform to conventional, set expressions, pictures, and language. Nevertheless, youth literature carries an evident role as a tool for education, involvement, development of linguistic skills, and spreading world knowledge. Especially in small linguistic cultures, where translation rates account for a large share of published children’s literature, children are expected to arrive into relations with literature and its educative and amusing functions mainly through interpretations. Therefore, translations may play a key role in presenting children to characters, events, and Polish translation agency, typical of fiction.
The term ‘children’s literature’ often addresses fiction aimed at readers from smallest children to young teenagers; nonfiction, such as school materials, is excluded. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a uniform kind either; its different subgenres, e.g., fairy tales and fantasy stories, criminal novels, realistic stories, differ in terms of purpose and language, which is likely to influence the scope of translation methods. Here, however, children’s stories is treated as one, albeit very heterogeneous, genre. Although teens are the initial audience, children’s books actually have an important secondary target audience – grown-ups, whose wishes and literary habits must be taken into account by both writers and translators. However, Oittinen advocates translating for children, instead of translating children’s literature, and emphasizes the significance of children’s culture and their fairy world, as well as society’s image of childhood and the translator’s own child assumptions.
Besides the definition of two target audiences, baby literature has a number of other distinguishing features, which have an effect on both the content and language of quality Russian translations: stressing ideological, educational, behavioral, and moral terms, ambivalence, aim at exceptional readability and conformity, and text–picture positioning.
Translation problems and their solutions made at the stage of language tend to explain, and result from, these hierarchically higher steps. Various approaches regulating the translation of children’s books might be aggregated under the more extensive concept of culture, or ideology in a neutral sense, referring to accepted guesses, ideas, and values shared by a separate nation or culture. Actually, ideology is the overriding constraint, an umbrella concept, writing what is allowable in children’s books. In a whole, children’s books are expected to be in some way enjoyable to children and enough easy in terms of idea, characterization, and language to be readable for smalls. These two requirements may rarely be contradictory. For instance, a maximally understandable text may be regarded as too simple to discover anything new and, in that respect, benefit the child reader. Moreover, notions of what is beneficial and understandable vary from culture to culture and change with time, which often leads to manipulation of source texts in translating.