Although fairy tales are characterised by simplicity and pervasiveness, they also carry with them significantly cultural and ideological elements. Throughout the years, there have been myriads of variations upon variations justified by different historical periods and cultural settings, thus making it rather complex to refer to original stories. Childrenās stories and fairy tales have been translated, rewritten and/or adapted to suit the socio-cultural, historical and ideological needs of each single target audience and to fulfil several purposes.
This work explores the issues of ideology and manipulation, and more precisely, the cultural and ideological shifts that take place when translating childrenās literature (ChL). When ChL is translated, the text is inevitably rewritten and recreated by translators from a target-oriented perspective and their mediation may reflect a certain degree of ideological manipulation. Translation, therefore, becomes a form of rewriting and adaptation and this is particularly true in the case of ChL whose stories and fairy tales are known and enjoyed worldwide. Due to socio-economic, political, cultural, historical and ideological reasons, childrenās stories have gone through many transformations, which have largely contributed to their acceptability and survival throughout the years. However, are the stories and tales that people currently read the same as the original ones? Among the classics, for instance, Snow White and Cinderella have endured hundreds of revisions and retellings, which inevitably reflect specific cultural, historical and ideological aspects of the time when they were translated, rewritten or adapted.
Childrenās literature is an umbrella term, which includes nursery rhymes, songs, storybooks, poems, riddles, fairy tales, folk tales and picture books. For the purpose of this work, ChL is used to refer to all those books written specifically for children, bearing in mind both the ambivalence and the dual readership of such texts. Childrenās literature is regarded as the Outsider (Hunt 1990: 1) or the Cinderella of literary studies (Shavit 1994: 5) and its translation can be complex and challenging for several reasons. First of all, the translation of childrenās literature requires a specific knowledge of all the features and functions of fairy tales as well as a solid understanding of cultural values in both the source culture (SC) and in the target culture (TC). Secondly, translation is a very complex activity and, especially in the case of ChL, more and more attention should be paid in terms of language usage and lexical choices, along with violent or strong content features. Thirdly, ideological and cultural assumptions may lead to translation manipulation of ChL as a result of censorship, taboos and other moral and ethical issues to consider when the target audience is young and innocent.
The translation of ChL is affected by many variables and agents involved in its production. Translation is not a neutral activity and, throughout the years, scholars have largely debated about its role and quality. Translation is a complex activity which is undoubtedly influenced by many factors, such as context, history, politics, target audience, target language conventions and ideology, to mention a few. For years, translations were considered as derivatives and copies. With the emergence of poststructuralist and functionalist approaches, the focus of attention was shifted towards the issues of translatorsā subjectivity and agency, thus questioning their (in)visibility and role in the translated work. Bassnett (1996: 22), for instance, called for a reassessment of the translatorsā role through an analysis of their intervention in the linguistic transfer process by claiming that āonce considered a subservient, transparent filter through which a text could and should pass without adulteration, the translation can now be seen as a process in which intervention is crucialā. Ćlvarez and Vidal (1996: 5) believed that behind any translatorās choice and strategy āthere is a voluntary act that reveals his history and the socio-political milieu that surrounds him; in other words, his own culture and ideologyā. Scholars who view translation as an ideological activity believe that translation is in itself a political act. Tahir-GĆ¼rcaÄlar (2003: 113), for instance, asserted that ā[t]ranslation is political because, both as activity and product, it displays process of negotiation among different agents. On micro-level, these agents are translators, authors, critics, publishers, editors, and readersā.
This work supports the theory that translation is an ideological activity whose purposes and results may vary on the basis of several factors, such as cultural and linguistic norms and acceptability, and it targets a domestic rather than a foreign audience. In this respect, ...