Translation to Baby Books
Translation of child books poses special challenges owing to some special values of children’s books and qualities of child readers. The fact that children’s literature tends to have a distant place in cultures and disadvance from lack of status makes it possible to manipulate texts translated for babies in various ways to make them accord with the predictions of the accommodating culture. Furthermore, children are not expected to temper as much strangeness and foreignness as adult readers, and therefore, changing of the content and language of initial passages is often judged necessary. Instead of being innovative, translated children’s books that’s why tend to agree to conventional, accepted forms, pictures, and language. Nevertheless, children’s writing carries an evident part as a tool for upbringing, socialization, development of linguistic skills, and spreading world knowledge. Especially in small language societies, where best price translations account for a significant share of printed children’s literature, children are expected to arrive into relations with literature and its educative and amusing functions mainly through translations. Therefore, translations may have a key role in introducing children to characters, events, and Polish translation agency, typical of fiction.
The term ‘baby books’ usually refers to fiction aimed at readers from smallest children to young teens; nonfiction, such as school textbooks, is omitted. Children’s fiction is, in fact, not a monolithic genre either; its various subgenres, e.g., jokes and dream-books, criminal writing, realistic stories, differ in means of purpose and language, which is likely to affect the scope of translation methods. Here, however, children’s fiction is judged as one, albeit very heterogeneous, genre. Despite children are the primary readership, children’s books actually have an important additional target group – grown-ups, whose preferences and linguistic tastes must be taken into account by all authors and translators. But, Oittinen advocates translating for children, instead of translating children’s literature, and emphasizes the importance of children’s culture and their magical world, as well as society’s image of childhood and the translator’s own child assumptions.
In addition to the existence of two target groups, children’s literature has a number of other distinguishing features, which have an effect on both the content and language of Russian translation: strong ideological, didactic, ethical, and moral terms, ambivalence, aim at high readability and speakability, and text–picture positioning.
Translation issues and their findings made at the level of linguistic skills tend to reflect, and result from, these hierarchically higher steps. different approaches mediating the translation of children’s literature might be aggregated under the more extensive vision on culture, or ideology in a general sense, addressing accepted assumptions, beliefs, and values shared by a particular society or group. In fact, ideology is the overriding constraint, an umbrella idea, writing what is allowable in children’s books. In general, children’s books are likely to be in a specific way beneficial to children and enough simple in terms of idea, characterization, and language to be readable for smalls. These couple of requirements may sometimes be contradictory. For instance, a maximally understandable book may be treated as too simple to teach anything new and, in that view, benefit the child reader. Beside that, notions of what is beneficial and understandable differ from nation to culture and change with time, which frequently leads to changing of initial texts in translating.