Children's Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies (review)

Though the study of children's literature is now well established as an academic discipline, the study of its translation has only recently begun. One reason for this neglect in the English-speaking world is the very small amount of foreign children's literature currently translated into English, and the domination of foreign markets by translations from Anglo-American children's books. Latterly, however, issues of multiculturalism, and recognition of the global influence of children's books (revealed by, for example, the unprecedented success of the Harry Potter series), have led to questions about the principles that should govern such translations, and about their cultural impact.

'Never has there been a greater demand to be able to read books from other areas of the world,' writes Ronald Jobe in his contribution to Peter Hunt's International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature; 'children need to read the best literature other countries have to offer. We must meet this challenge by respecting and providing the best in translations or they will be cheated out of part of their global heritage.' The essays in the collection under review recognize the missionary aspect of translation for children as well as reflecting the increasing scholarly interest in it. In particular, they address issues arising from what they see as a shift in focus from the source text tothe target text and therefore to the target readership. But because children's literature is characterized by a dual audience (of adults as well as children), translators' choices are inevitably coloured by their desire to cater for adult views on childhood, and by an adult understanding of what it means to write for children. This collection explores the field of translating for children by considering not only general theoretical issues but how individual translators have engaged with specific texts and with particular problems that arise from character names, intertextuality, slang, or sexual content.

Reflections on the specific choices translators make, it is supposed, add to our understanding of the nature of children's literature itself.In the first essay, 'The Translator Revealed: Didacticism, Cultural Mediation and Visions of the Child Reader in Translators' Prefaces', Gillian Lathey reminds us that choices regarding audience have been made from the earliest history of translating books for children. Charles Hoole, who in 1672 translated what is widely regarded as the first picture book for children, Jan Amos Comenius' Orbis Sensualium Pictus, added four pages on the benefits of Comenius' method. Translators' prefaces, although doubtless of no interest to the children themselves, reveal how translators expected their work to be received and the methods they used to ensure this, and also reflect changing views of childhood over time. Lathey attends closely to Mary Wollstonecraft's translation of Elements of Morality for the Use of Children, a German work by Christian Gotthilf Salzman. Issues still facing translators today – reasons for choosing a particular text, its adaptation to the target culture, the handling of contemporary allusions – are addressed by Wollstonecraft in her 'Advertisement'. In the interests of providing moral and social instruction she anglicized both characters and setting, and for a parable about a German Hussar substituted a story about the humanity of native Americans. Other prefaces described by Lathey outline claims to mediate alien culture or to engage the curiosity of child readers. Her last example is the preface by Anne Lawson Lucas to her 1996 translation of Pinocchio, which reveals the difficulties of trying to reach three very different audiences at the same time: scholar, general adult reader, and child. Lathey concludes that a translator must elect to write for a single audience, particularly if the choice is between scholarly and child readers.

The third essay in the collection (the second will come later) is Riitta Oittinen's discussion from an ethical point of view of 'domestication' and 'foreignization' techniques, the question of dual audience, and the image of the child. She notes 'the ideological, economic and status components...