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Translated into British: European Children's Literature, (In)difference and Écart in the Age of Brexit
- Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 56, Number 1, 2018
- pp. 10-18
- 10.1353/bkb.2018.0002
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
This paper tackles the theorisation of translated children's literature in the particular context of post-Brexit Britain. There is a tendency, I argue, to think about translation as a healthy and necessary exposure to 'difference'; however, in the case of translated children's literature in Britain – a notoriously paltry market – narratives of difference are excessively at work: unlike the mostly 'indifferent' market of children's translation elsewhere in Europe, in Britain such literature is always already set apart by its difference from a perceived norm. Furthermore, translated children's books in Britain come to existence unsystematically and unpredictably. I propose that we should adopt a flexible theoretical attitude when dealing with such literature, taking into account the political commitment of all actors involved – from publishers to translators – and use for that purpose the concept of écart developed by sinologist François Jullien, which allows us to think about how such literature plays with the in-betweenness of languages and cultures.