| Up into
the cherry tree |
Who should
climb but little me?
|
I held the
trunk with both my hands
|
And looked abroad on foreign lands.
|
(Robert
Louis Stevenson)
|
Before studying it on the MA in Literary Translation, I
hadn’t really given much thought to the issue of translating for children. Which
is strange, perhaps, given that one of the stories I loved most as a child was a
translated one: Erich Kästner’s Emil and
the Detectives (also a favourite of the writer Michael Rosen, who is due to
give a talk on the book at the Brighton Festival in May.)
The fact that Emil
and the Detectives had been translated from German really didn’t matter to
me when I read it as a child. What I was interested in were the characters, and
the twists and turns of the plot. I certainly don’t remember being put off by what
was ‘foreign’ in the story. The question of foreignness in a translated text
and how it impacts upon young readers is one I find fascinating, having now
explored some of the issues surrounding children’s literature and translating
for young readers in more depth.
Do children dislike foreignness in texts, tolerate it, or
positively relish it? And is that even a valid question to ask, since it lumps
all children together under one umbrella? Children’s reading tastes vary enormously,
just as adults’ do; some young readers are more willing to tolerate uncertainty
than others, some love strange names or made-up words, some like fantasy and
some like football stories. Factors such as age, gender and reading confidence may
well come into play here, and a translator needs to bear these in mind when
thinking about the target audience for any given translation. But even an
individual child’s reading tastes can vary from week to week or from book to
book. We should not assume we can always predict what children will enjoy or
want to persevere with. Author Gillian Avery celebrates ‘the encouraging
thought that you never know what [a child] is going to make of the material
with which you confront him’ (1976:33).
Translators for children need to be careful, then, not to
jump to conclusions about which elements of a source text their target audience
will be interested in or able to cope with. This includes elements specific to
the source language or culture – such as names of people or places or historical
or literary allusions – that could potentially be unfamiliar to young readers
in the target culture (what Ritva Leppihalme refers to as ‘culture bumps’,
1997). When I translated part of a German children’s book called Jette (aimed at readers of twelve and
over) I came across several culture-bound elements which I felt might pose a
problem for English-speaking readers of my translation.
Names of people and places didn’t actually fall into this
category – I retained most of the characters’ original German names unaltered
in my translation, knowing that children ‘can and do take delight in the sound
and shape of unfamiliar names’ (Lathey, 2006:7). I did adapt the spelling of a couple
of names – for instance, I changed the protagonist’s name, Jette (pronounced
‘yetter’), to Etta – but I only adopted this strategy when I felt that the spelling
of the German name would cause major pronunciation difficulties in English.
However, when it came to some of the other
culture-specific aspects of the text, I felt that a little more intervention
was needed. The historical references found at several points in the book were
a case in point. The extract I translated contained references to Hitler, the
fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ‘Ossis and Wessis’ (nicknames referring to the
citizens of East and West Germany in the era of the Iron Curtain). I was
determined not to delete the references altogether, even though I knew they
would quite possibly prove challenging for English-speaking child readers. My
feeling was that part of the value of translating this particular book was
surely to give English-speaking children an insight into Germany past and
present. Göte Klingberg maintains that ‘one of the aims of translating
children’s books must be to further the international outlook and the
international understanding of young readers’ (1978:86). While I don’t think
that this necessarily holds true for every translation, I felt that in this
instance the historical references were so central to the text and to an
understanding of Germany that it wouldn’t be appropriate to remove them.
Equally, though, if I’d retained them in translation exactly
as they were I would have been failing to acknowledge an important fact: that
the historical events in question are unlikely to be as familiar to UK children
as to German children. I therefore decided to make some additions which would
to help explain the references, and make them more accessible to my young
target audience. At the same time, I didn’t want to turn an exciting story into
a history lesson. I needed to work the explanations into the narrative unobtrusively.
It is perfectly possible to do this in translation: Gillian Lathey notes that
‘[a] neatly disguised insertion conveys the necessary culture-specific
information without jarring the narrative or alienating the young reader’
(2010:179). I inserted extra information ‘disguised’ as dialogue and free
indirect discourse, in the hope that this would prevent the translation
sounding too didactic while still helping readers to understand the cultural
allusions.
Van Coillie and Verschueren point out that today ‘more
and more translators, out of respect for the original text and because they
want to bring children into contact with other cultures, choose to retain a
degree of ‘foreignness’ in their translations’ (2006: viii). To me this shows
an encouraging faith in children’s ability to tackle what is new and
unfamiliar. Yes, ‘foreignness’ in a text may present a challenge – but it may
also appeal to children’s curiosity, fire their imaginations, enable them (to
borrow Robert Louis Stevenson’s words) to ‘look abroad on foreign lands’. And
that is an opportunity I don’t think we should deny them.
Romy Fursland translates from German and French into
English. She is studying for the MA in Literary Translation at UEA and is
currently translating a selection of contemporary German poetry for the Translating ‘Live’ Poetry project
organised by UCL and Poet In The City (www.ucl.ac.uk/spanishlatinamerican/news_events/repository/translating-live-poetry).
References
Avery, G. in Fox
et al (eds) Writers, Critics and
Children, 1976
Leppihalme, R. Culture
Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions, 1997
Lathey, G. The Translation of Children’s Literature: a
Reader, 2006
---- The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers, 2010
Klingberg, G. in Klingberg et al (eds) Children’s Books in Translation: The
Situation and the Problems, 1978
Van Coillie, J. and Verschueren, W. Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies,
2006
No comments:
Post a Comment