Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literatures and Cultures

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature seeks contributions for a special issue on the translation and transmediation of children’s literatures and cultures. Mediation – whether in the form of adaptation, translation or remediation – allows for a reevaluation of a variety of notions ranging from authenticity, textuality, authorship, audience agency, age appropriateness, creativity, and storytelling. Henry Jenkins’ definition of “transmedia storytelling,” in particular, encapsulates the worldbuilding strategies of most of today’s popular children’s literary/cultural products. The lure of Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter, or the Moomins is considerably enhanced by the plethora of interconnected media platforms – novel, film, animation, computer game, fanfiction, cosplay, collectibles, etc – all of which maximize audience engagement by unfolding an increasingly elaborate fictional reality. The way in which each media “adds a new cultural layer, supporting more diverse ways of communicating, thinking, feeling, and creating than existed before” (Jenkins, Clinton, McWilliams) resonates with how translation as an inventive “act of both inter-cultural and inter-temporal communication” (Bassnett) allows us to see in different ways the original text that always already “bears in itself all possible translations and gets richer with each additional reading-rewriting,” as Walter Benjamin put it.Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

• • de/reconstructing fictional realities and expanding storyworlds through media/language change

• • domestication and foreignization as strategies of translating/transmediating children’s literature

• • the visibility and/or the invisibility of mediators of children’s literature

• • intergenerational dynamics in translation and transmediation (crossover fiction, family adventure film, dual audiences, age appropriateness)

• • image-textual dynamics (translating illustrated stories, picturebooks, novelizations and subtitlings of children’s cinema)

• • translation/transmediation of children’s/YA literature as a negotiation process (between publisher demands, parental expectations, social norms, children’s cognitive abilities, emotional needs, and imaginative worlds)

• • importing and exporting children’s literature and culture through translation and transmediation: global challenges, glocal specificities, East meets West

• • interfacing the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of translation and transmediation

• • mediators’ changing the image/voice of the child reader

• • metatextual and metamedial self-reflectivity in the service of audience engagement

Full papers should be submitted to the editor, Björn Sundmark (bjorn.sundmark@mah.se), and guest editor, Anna Kérchy (akerchy@gmail.com) by 1 November. Please see Bookbird’s website at www.ibby.org/book-bird for full submission details.