Translating Children's Literature

Gillian Lathey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317621300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

• The first practical guide to address all aspects of translating children's literature, from prose fiction to poetry and picture books.

• 
  
  

• Features extracts from commentaries and interviews with published translators of children's literature, as well as examples and case studies across a range of languages and texts. Each chapter includes a set of questions and exercises for students.

• 
  
  

• Contains examples from some of the best known international children's classics such as the work of Lewis Carroll, the collection of stories known as the 'Arabian Nights', the fables of Aesop, Grimms' tales, Cervantes' Don Quixote and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

1
Narrative communication with the child reader

When adults write for children, they instinctively attune the storytelling voice to the sensibilities of a young readership, an act of adult-to-child communication that lies at the heart of all successful writing and translating for the young. Riitta Oittinen (2000) believes that to communicate with a child reader is to enter into an imaginary dialogue with sharper and fresher readers than adults, and that the translator should therefore reach out to children of the target culture by attempting to re-experience the dynamic intensity of childhood. She argues that translators of children’s books hold a discussion with the history of childhood, the child of their time and ‘the former and present child within themselves’ (2000: 26). With reference to Bakhtin’s concept of the anti-authoritarian freedom of ‘carnival’, she therefore advocates an approach to translation that entails both a dialogue with and immersion in the anarchic world of the child. Oittinen’s recommendation is a radical one. Not all translators will aspire to the fulfillment of her demands, but an understanding of children’s imaginative, spiritual and emotional concerns, whether through direct contact as a parent or carer, as a children’s author, or through a revival of childhood memory, is certainly an inestimable advantage to a translator writing for a young audience.

Communication with the child reader takes many forms, and was not always considered to be the two-way process that Oittinen describes. In her historical investigation into the role of the narrator in English-language children’s fiction, Barbara Wall (1991) identifies a number of modes of address to the child reader, including the distant, omniscient and didactic narrator of many pre-twentieth century texts. Asides to the child reader or comments on characters’ actions set a firm line for social behaviour as part of the enterprise to tame and socialize the young child, much as the Widow Douglas was determined to ‘sivilize’ Huckleberry Finn. Authors working under the sponsorship of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, too, have produced texts where the conversation is distinctly one-sided and ideological messages unmistakable. On the other hand, the subversive role of children’s literature – its function as an apparently innocuous channel for satirical social observation – has led to a conspiratorial voice that seeks to ally the child with the author’s critical perspective. In fiction of this kind, the narrative voice is persuasive rather than straightforwardly didactic. Wall also offers examples of dual address, where an author either directly or indirectly speaks to adults as well as to children. It is the primary task of the translator to identify the quality of the narrative voice in a children’s text, whether overtly didactic, subversive or characterized by duality. Translators with a theoretical interest in the intricacies of the layers of communication in translations for children will find illuminating examples, analysis and representation in diagrammatic form in O’Sullivan’s work on comparative children’s literature (2000).

This chapter will begin by focusing on the translator’s response to variation in narrative voice, beginning with dual address to adult and child. Discussion will go on to focus on the particularities of the narrator’s voice in children’s fiction, as well as the voice of the child narrator. Examples from texts where the translator’s voice is evident in addressing and informing the child reader will lead to suggestions as to where such intervention might be necessary. Next, a discussion of theoretical insights into reader response highlights the role of the third party, the child, in the triangle author–translator–child, with an additional discussion of Oittinen’s application of reader response theory to the process of translating for children. Finally, selected linguistic aspects of narrative communication – syntax; the age-related usage of Japanese characters; the use of gendered nouns and varying cultural practices in the use of tense – raise general translation issues as well as those pertinent to specific languages and language pairs.

Dual address in children’s literature

Children’s authors, as Wall demonstrates, often write for a second, adult readership, either covertly in the form of moral instruction or ideological content that seeks the approval of the adult reading over the child’s shoulder, or overtly as in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. In this well-known instance of a text designed to appeal to both adult and child, Milne includes sophisticated witticisms that children could not be expected to understand. Any adult who has read Milne’s books aloud to children will know how tricky it is to explain sudden fits of laughter, for example, at the existential musings of the gloomy donkey Eeyore. Both layers of meaning should be as apparent in the translation as in the source text, a task requiring considerable finesse on the part of the translator. O’Sullivan’s article on the fate of the dual addressee in the first published German translation of Winnie-the-Pooh highlights the omission of this strand of adult humour, and acts as a warning to any translator seeking to simplify the sophisticated ambiguity of a classic children’s text that is intentionally designed to produce divergent readings. O’Sullivan offers the following example of this change of tone in E.L. Schiffer’s first translation, as compared to a subsequent version by Harry Rowohlt (see O’Sullivan, 1993: 116–7; I have added a back translation of the German in square brackets):

Owl lived at The Chestnuts, an old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else’s, or seemed so to Bear, because it had both a knocker and a bell-pull.

(Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926: 43)

Eule lebte in den Kastanien in einem alten, schönen Palast, der prächtiger war als alles, was der Bär je gesehen hatte, denn vor der Tür hinge ein Klopfer und ein Klingelzug.

[Owl lived in the chestnut trees in an old and beautiful palace that was more splendid than anything the Bear had ever seen, because by the door hung both a knocker and a bell-pull.]

(Milne, 1926; Pu der Bär, trans E.L. Schiffer, 1928: 65)

Eule wohnte an einer Adresse namens ‘Zu den Kastanien’, einem Landsitz von grossem Zauber, wie man ihn aus der Alten Welt kennt, und diese Adresse war grossartiger als alle anderen; zumindest kame es dem Bären so vor, denn sie hatte sowohl einen Türklopfer als auch einen Klingelzug.

[Owl lived at an address with the name ‘At the Chestnuts’, a country seat of great charm like those in the Old World, and this address was grander than all the rest; at least so it appeared to the Bear, for it had both a door knocker and a bell-pull.]

(Milne, 1926; Pu der Bär, trans Harry Rowohlt, 1987: 54)

Schiffer omits both the parody of estate agent hyperbole in ‘old-world residence of great charm’ and the nod to the British habit of naming houses in the cliché ‘The Chestnuts’, both likely to be appreciated by the adult reader. Fortunately, in the later translation, Rowohlt reinstates the italicized emphasis and, as O’Sullivan puts it, gives the German adult reader more to smile about. Unlike Schiffer, Rowohlt attends to both child and adult readers.

Narrative voice

Finding the voice of a children’s text in order to replicate it in translation requires particularly careful reading; even the traditional omniscient adult narrative voice assumes a number of guises and may be used ironically. Many authors adopt the voice of the oral storyteller, as is the case in Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, where in the opening lines of the tale Collodi predicts his readers’ response in an imaginary dialogue:

C’era una volta …

–Un re! – diranno subito I miei piccolo lettori.

No, ragazzi, avete sbagliato. C’era una volta un pezzo di legno.

(Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio, 2002: 5)

Once upon a time there was …

‘A king!’ my little readers will say straight away. No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.

(Collodi, 2002; The Adventures of Pinocchio, trans Lawson Lucas, 1996: 1)

In such instances the translator has to imagine telling the story to an audience of children, using the intimacy of spoken language and standard storyteller’s phrases in the target language. A more distant, omniscient and didactic narrative stance may be the subject of parody in modern children’s fiction. C.S. Lewis, for example, warns readers four times within the first three chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of the dangers of the wardrobe on which his plot depends, inserting a bracketed and tongue-in-cheek comment on Lucy ‘(She had, of course, left the door open, for she knew that it is a very silly thing to shut oneself into a wardrobe)’ (Lewis, 1950: 14) in a reference to the avuncular narrator of the nineteenth century.

Seeking the appropriate voice to replicate, for example, the double-layered address of A.A. Milne, the storyteller’s voice adopted by Collodi or the knowing aside of Lewis is an essential challenge for the translator. This may sometimes involve reading other fiction by the author of the source text or research into his or her biography to gain a stronger sense of that unique voice and the face behind the page. German author Erich Kästner speaks to young readers in a conspiratorial tone that debunks the adult world both in prefaces to the child reader and as his narratives unfold. Knowing that he wrote bitingly satirical poetry during the Weimar Republic, lived through the Third Reich under a publication ban and placed all his faith in children assists readers and translators to understand the satirical edge to his narratives. Kästner’s famous – if sometimes longwinded – prefaces to children are often missing from translations, as they are from the early Swedish and English versions of his international hit Emil und die Detektive (1929). This represents a considerable loss, since a preface of this kind establishes the tone of the rest of the narrative. It is worth noting that a translator’s discussions with editors should therefore include the role of an author’s preface or afterword.

An example of the kind of authorial irony that characterizes Kästner’s prefaces is embedded in the text of his Das doppelte Lottchen (literally ‘double Lotte’), the basis of the multiple Hollywood ‘parent trap’ films. The novel was at the time of its first publication in 1949 a groundbreaking, light-hearted tale of the effects on children of parental divorce. Kästner pre-empts criticism of his treatment of this controversial subject by advising his young readers to tell any disapproving adult the following story:

Als Shirley Temple ein kleines Mädchen von sieben, acht Jahren war, war sie doch schon ein auf der ganzen Erde berühmter Filmstar, und die Firmen verdienten viele Millionen Dollar mit ihr. Wenn Shirley aber mit ihrer Mutter in ein Kino gehen wollte, um sich einen Shirley-Temple-Film anzuschauen, liess man sie nicht hinein. Sie war noch zu jung. Es war verboten. Sie durfte nur Filme drehen. Das war erlaubt.

(Kästner, Das doppelte Lottchen, 1949: 64–5)

When Shirley Temple was no more than seven or eight she was already a film star, famous all over the world. And she earned many millions of dollars for the film companies. But when Shirley wished to go with her mother to a cinema and take a look at a Shirley Temple film, she was not admitted. She was still too young. It was forbidden. She could only make films. That was not forbidden.

(Kästner, 1949; Lottie and Lisa, trans Cyrus Brooks, 1950: 52–3)

Kästner trusts his young reader’s ability to appreciate an implicit comment on the paradoxical attitude of adults and, fortunately, the English translator follows suit; indeed, Brooks emphasizes the point of the story through the judicious use of italics. Children appreciate such comments on adult inconsistencies, and must learn to appreciate ironic undertones if they are to become sophisticated readers.

Kästner is not the only children’s author to point out adult folly, since Swedish author Astrid Lindgren does exactly that throughout her classic story Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Longstocking). When Lindgren introduces the children of Pippi’s neighbours, who act as foils to the outrageous Pippi, she emphasizes their good behaviour in a dry little comment:

Aldrig bet Tommy pånaglarna, nästan alltid gjorde han det hans mamma bad honom. Annika bråkade inte när hon inte fick sin vilja fram.

[Literal translation by Gunnar Florin: Never did Tommy bite his nails; he nearly always did what his mother asked him. Annika didn’t fuss when she didn’t get her way]

(Lindgren, Pippi Långstrump, 1945: 9)

The translator of the published English version again resorts to italics to assist those reading the story aloud:

Tommy never bit his nails, and always did what his mother asked. Annika never fussed when she didn’t get her own way.

(Lindgren, 1945; Pippi Longstocking, trans Edna Hurup, 1954: 12–14)

Thus the translator draws attention to the humour inherent in Lindgren’s description of behaviour that is too good to be true: the conduct of other real or fictional children is always of burning interest to young readers.

Irony depends on a narrative voice that conspires with the child reader to unmask ridiculous aspects of adult expectations and behaviour. There are, however, linguistic constraints in some languages that may affect the manner in which the narrating subject conveys this subversive tone. Noriko Shimoda Netley (1992) has analyzed narrative stance in Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988) in order to make a comparison with the Japanese translation by Mineo Miyashita. Netley demonstrates how Dahl shifts perspective from the use of ‘we’ on the first page of the novel, thus aligning the narrator with the child’s point of view, to ‘I’, a cynical adult narrator on the second and subsequent appearances of the narrating subject. A third narrating subject also appears, signalled by the neutral pronoun ‘one’ that could include the child reader, but is certainly more distant than the inclusive ‘we’. Netley found that in the Ja...