Translators of Child’s Fairy Tales
Translating of children’s literature poses particular challenges owing to some special characteristics of children’s books and qualities of child audience. The situation that children’s book tends to have a distant position in cultures and suffer from not enough of status allows to manipulate materials translated for children in different ways to make 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, changing of the content and language of source passages is often judged necessary. Instead of being creative, translated children’s literatures that’s why close to conform to conventional, set forms, pictures, and language. Nevertheless, youth writing plays an important part as a tool for education, socialization, development of linguistic skills, and spreading world culture. Especially in small linguistic societies, where best rate translation constitute a large share of printed children’s books, children are likely to come into contact with literature and its educative and amusing functions mainly through interpretations. Therefore, translations may have a vital role in presenting child readers to characters, events, and English Polish translation, typical of fiction.
The term ‘children’s literature’ usually refers to reading targeted at readers from smallest children to already teenagers; nonfiction, such as school materials, is excluded. Children’s fiction is, actually, not a uniform kind either; its various subgenres, e.g., jokes and fantasy stories, criminal novels, realistic stories, differ in means of purpose and language, which is pretended to influence the choice of translation methods. Here, however, children’s fiction is judged as one, albeit very heterogeneous, genre. Although children are the initial audience, children’s books actually have an important secondary target audience – adult readers, whose preferences and linguistic tastes must be taken into account by both writers and translators. But, Oittinen insists on translating for small ones, rather than translating children’s literature, and underlies 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.
In addition to the existence of two target audiences, children’s literature has a number of other distinguishing features, which have an effect on both the content and language of English Russian translator: stressing ideological, educational, ethical, and moral norms, ambivalence, goal at high readability and speakability, and text–picture positioning.
Translation problems and their findings made at the stage of linguistic skills tend to explain, and result from, these hierarchically higher steps. Various norms regulating the translation of children’s books can be subsumed 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 and culture. In fact, ideology is the overlapping constraint, an umbrella concept, writing what is acceptable in children’s literature. In a whole, children’s books are likely to be in a specific way beneficial to children and sufficiently simple in terms of plot, situation development, and language to be comprehensible. These couple of requirements may rarely be contradictory. For instance, a maximally understandable text may be regarded as too simple to teach anything new and, in that respect, benefit the child reader. Beside that, notions of what is advantageous and understandable vary from nation to nation and change with time, which frequently leads to manipulation of initial texts in translating.