Translating of Baby Books
Translation of children’s literature poses special challenges owing to number of special characteristics of children’s books and qualities of child readers. The fact that children’s literature tends to have a peripheral place in cultures and suffer from not enough of status allows to manipulate materials translated for babies in different ways to enable them accord with the expectations of the accommodating culture. Beside that, children are not expected to temper as much strangeness and foreignness as grown-up readers, and therefore, modification of the content and language of source texts is often judged compulsory. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s books thus tend to agree to spread, accepted forms, pictures, and language. However, children’s literature plays an important role as a tool for education, involvement, development of linguistic skills, and spreading world knowledge. Especially in small linguistic cultures, where translation rates constitute a large share of printed children’s books, children are expected to arrive into relations with literature and its upbringing and entertaining functions generally through translations. That’s why, translations may have a key role in presenting children to characters, situations, and Polish translation service, typical of fiction.
The term ‘children’s books’ often addresses fiction aimed at readers from smallest children to young teens; nonfiction, such as school textbooks, is left aside. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a uniform genre either; its different subgenres, e.g., jokes and fantasy stories, detective novels, realistic stories, differ in terms of idea and language, which is pretended to affect the scope of translation methods. Here, however, children’s fiction is treated as one, albeit very heterogeneous, genre. Although teens are the initial audience, children’s books actually have an important secondary target group – grown-ups, whose preferences and linguistic tastes must be taken into account by both authors and translators. However, Oittinen insists on translating for children, instead of translating children’s literature, and emphasizes the significance of children’s culture and their magical world, as well as society’s image of childhood and the translator’s own child image.
In addition to the definition of two target groups, children’s literature has a lot of other special features, which have an effect on both the content and language of Russian translation: strong ideological, didactic, behavioral, and moral norms, ambivalence, aim at exceptional readability and conformity, and text–picture relationship.
Translation problems and their solutions made at the stage of linguistic skills tend to reflect, and result from, these hierarchically higher levels. different approaches regulating the translation of children’s books can be aggregated under the more broad concept of culture, or ideology in a neutral sense, addressing accepted assumptions, beliefs, and views shared by a particular nation or group. Actually, ideology is the overlapping constraint, an umbrella idea, writing what is allowable in children’s books. In general, children’s books are expected to be in a specific way enjoyable to children and enough easy in terms of idea, situation development, 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 anything new and, in that view, benefit the child reader. Moreover, notions of what is beneficial and comprehensible vary from culture to nation and change with time, which frequently leads to changing of initial texts in translating.