Translating to Baby Books
Translating of child literature poses special issues owing to some special values of children’s readings and qualities of child audience. The fact that children’s book tends to have a peripheral place in cultures and disadvance from lack of status allows to manipulate texts translated for children in different ways to enable them accord with the expectations of the receiving surrounding. Beside that, children are not expected to temper as much strangeness and foreignness as grown-up readers, and therefore, changing of the content and tongue of source texts is often judged compulsory. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s books thus tend to conform to conventional, accepted forms, models, and language. Nevertheless, youth literature has an important part as a tool for education, involvement, development of linguistic skills, and widening global knowledge. Especially in small language societies, where translation price account for a large share of published children’s literature, children are likely to arrive into relations with literature and its upbringing and entertaining functions mainly through interpretations. Therefore, translations may play a key role in presenting children to characters, situations, and Polish translation company, typical of fiction.
The term ‘baby literature’ often addresses fiction targeted at readers from preliterate children to already teenagers; nonfiction, such as school materials, is excluded. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a uniform kind either; its various subgenres, e.g., jokes and dream-books, detective novels, realistic stories, differ in terms of purpose and language, that is pretended to affect the scope of translation methods. Here, however, children’s fiction is treated as one, albeit very complicated, genre. Although teens are the initial readership, children’s books actually have an crucial secondary target audience – grown-ups, whose wishes and literary tastes must be taken into account by all authors and translators. However, Oittinen insists on translating for children, rather than translating children’s literature, and emphasizes the importance of children’s culture and their fairy world, as well as society’s image of childhood and the translator’s own child image.
In addition to the existence of two target audiences, children’s literature has a number of other distinguishing features, which have an influence on both the content and language of English Russian translator: stressing ideological, educational, ethical, and moral terms, ambivalence, goal at high readability and speakability, and text–picture positioning.
Translation issues and their solutions made at the level of language tend to reflect, and result from, these gradually higher steps. Various approaches regulating the translation of children’s books might be subsumed under the more broad vision on culture, or ideology in a general sense, addressing accepted guesses, ideas, and values shared by a particular society and group. Actually, ideology is the overriding unit, an umbrella idea, writing what is allowable in children’s literature. In general, children’s books are expected to be in a specific way beneficial to children and sufficiently simple in terms of idea, characterization, and language to be comprehensible. These couple of requirements may rarely be contradictory. For instance, a maximally understandable book may be treated as too simple to discover some new and, in that view, benefit the child reader. Beside that, notions of what is beneficial and understandable differ from nation to culture and change with time, which frequently leads to manipulation of source texts in translation.