Introduction

This thematic issue gathers together papers on the analysis of translations of children’s literature, often drawing on parallel corpora, corpus linguistic methods, and narratological or stylistic categories to inform the investigations.

Translation generally is a mysterious business, and literary translation no less so. I am allergic to “models” or “theories” of translation that profess to have solved the problem of translation by specifying the rules by which it can be undertaken. In a typically combative section of The Language Myth (148-9), Roy Harris cautioned that “ultimately, there is no gap separating the translator’s problem from the kind of problem which may face the participants in any monoglot conversation” (when, e.g., one party asks another what they meant by the phrase take back control or sovereignty or British values or language complexity). Harris says that if we ask an interpreter to invite a Frenchman to “sit down on that chair” it will not do for the interpreter to refuse to proceed, complaining that we are forcing him to mistranslate on the grounds that French has no word for “chair” as such (cf chaise: “chair without arms”; fauteuil: “armchair”). The interpreter, Harris says, can do whatever he wants-maybe just “recite in French the cardinal numbers from one to ten”-in order to get the Frenchman to sit down. As long as the latter is achieved, the result we required has been reached, for our purposes on that occasion-even if, for other situations, reciting the numbers one to ten in French is not a reliable means of securing a similar or comparable goal.

The example is sufficiently scandalous to merit further contemplation: is Harris right? In his chosen ground of discussion I believe he is: for a particular purpose, getting our put-upon Frenchman to sit on a chair, very many strategies may work, because translation is not, despite language-myth imaginings to the contrary, a process of “decontextualized matching of one fixed code with another” (149) as in an English-French glossary. But what if we change the grounds, from a pedestrian (well, sedentary) speech act to, say, the translation of the final couplet of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 into a language that might convey something of the effect of the original (however “unfaithfully”, however imperfectly) to an UFSC Humanities undergraduate sitting in their Trindade apartment late one sweltering evening in December 2017?

Shakespeare concluded with So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,// So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. One internet version proposes for this Enquanto homem respira, ou olho enxerga // Assim isso vive, e a ti dar a vida. So many patterns, so many potentially significant choices in the Shakespeare: how to choose among them, as desiderata to be reflected or “maintained” in the translation? Take one, the identical bi-gram that opens both lines, So long….So long, which is not maintained in the translation above, and seems impossible to maintain. Another place to start might be with the inversion in lives this-if this is judged worth preserving in the translation, as a priority, perhaps as part of a maintenance of the V-S S-V chiasmus (lives this…this gives) across the caesura (thus not isso vive, but vive isso or perdura isso, perhaps). Or one might very well decide that the line-final rhymes are the first priority, above all others, honouring the fact that these are the only adjacent rhyming lines in the original. Accordingly you now consider Enquanto o homem poder ver ou respirar na terra //Essas palavras vão durar, e portanto você viverá. Two admired Brazilian translations (from Barbara Heliodora and Jorge Wanderley respectively) render the lines by E enquanto nesta terra houver um ser,// Meus versos vivos te farão viver; and Enquanto o homem respire, o olhar aqueça,//Viva o meu verso e vida te ofereça. These have the much-desired final rhyme, matching the original, although in one case by retreating from the physicality of breath and eyes to the non-specific houver um ser (“there is a [human] being”) and in the other by a shift in sense, from can see to “the warm look”. And both use an explicit noun phrase, meus versos/o meu verso, where Shakespeare uses, a second time, the potentially ambiguous this, whose syllable onset is echoed in the final word, thee. It is all a matter of priorities, but parallel corpora, collocational evidence, and linguistic classifications can make more kinds of evidence available for consideration in your listing of priorities. These shuffled practical priorities give rise in time to the abstract concepts now often invoked: explicitation, foreignization, domestication, normalization and simplification, and so on.

For Durão and Kloeppel, a top priority is level of language complexity and whether this is matched or not between source language and target language text, so they have devised a thoughtful hybrid model to track a number of the factors widely judged to be contributory to complexity, refining the complexity/difficulty instruments of Nation and Gunning along the way. Their model enables them to show, by numerous careful measures, that two published Portuguese translations of The Secret Garden are more linguistically complex than the original.

Pagano, Ferreira de Paula, and Ferreguetti explore the logico-semantic relations in children’s picturebooks, using an English-Brazilian Portuguese parallel corpus. Using systemic linguistics and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, they find that expansion by extension (rather than by elaboration or enhancement) is the most frequent verbal-to-visual semantic relation in both source and translated books. The classification and annotation of the semantic relations between segments of text (writing) and images in picturebooks is a notoriously complex undertaking, threatening to become impossibly unwieldy or labour-intensive (some of the objections one heard as regards corpus analysis, prior to computers and digitization). The present is a significant proposal to meet this need, available for application and testing by others on a variety of texts.

In “The construction of the character Aslan and his relations with the Christian world in English and Portuguese”, Serpa, Soares, and Rocha consider the representation of the character Aslan in Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1994) and in the Portuguese translation by Mendes Campos (2002). Drawing on lexicology, corpus linguistics and corpus-based translation studies, the authors particularly examined the influence of the Bible as intertextual source of idioms and phrases. Both source and target texts are shown to exploit intertextual relations with the Bible, and specifically implicating parallels, by such verbal association, between Aslan and Christ.

B.J. Epstein’s article considers some of the challenges of producing a Swedish translation, suitable for younger readers, of that greatest of American novels, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While we might argue that Huckleberry Finn is as much “for all time” as Shakespeare’s Othello or Faulkner’s Light in August, nevertheless it is also inescapably of its time in its representations of race and slavery. On virtually every page of Huck Finn there is potential for the modern reader-particularly the modern reader of African heritage but all of us really, of every gender, who can imagine enslaving or being enslaved-to be offended and appalled. But also to be amused, shamed, upset, and uplifted. Mark Twain is continually yanking our chain (as the American idiom graphically has it), going far beyond the usual bounds of irony to present us with diverse kinds of unpunished abuse and wickedness, and unrewarded decency. Some of this is carried by character’s voices, rendered in direct speech, where there is unmistakeable contrast between the representation of standard dialect (even Huck is mostly standard) and the non-standard dialect that Jim uses. Non-standard dialect (and ‘broken’ or ‘mesolectal’ language, pidgin-anything non-native and non-fluent) was once firmly associated not only with those of little or scant education and lower status but even of lower worth, as people; this absurd association is weaker, but persists. At the same time, the translator of Mark Twain is like a steersman at the upriver end of an unwieldy raft, the translated text, inescapably carried by that mighty flood we call American history and culture. In these circumstances, how can the translator’s rendering of Jim’s non-standard speech, alongside the near-standard speech of Huck and various adults, steer Swedish child-readers little versed in America’s racist history, away from a misinterpretation of those young men? These are the issues Epstein reviews.

Anna Čermáková’s article is a demonstration of corpus stylistics, as applied to the translations into Czech of two classic book series of children’s literature in English, published sixty years apart: the Harry Potter and the Winnie the Pooh books. A particular interest is the thorny topic of lexical repetition-avoidance of which without “good cause” is often enjoined in writing manuals and often seems to motivate the introduction of substitutions and shifts in translations. One of the things Čermáková demonstrates is the usefulness of corpus linguistic software for the identification of near-repetitions, for example in three- and four-word strings (clusters). She suggests that corpus methods can help us proceed from the “how” and “what” of translation to the “why”.

Kirsten Malmkjær’s article is based on the keynote lecture that she gave in the Symposium on this thematic issue’s topic, at UFSC in June 2016, funded by the Newton Advanced Fellowship awarded for 2015-16 to Professor Lincoln Fernandes, UFSC, and Professor Michael Toolan, University of Birmingham. Malmkjær argues that with the benefit of the corpus analyses now possible-and really only with such corpus confirmation--a clear lexical patterning can be detected operating throughout Hans Christian Andersen’s extensive oeuvre, distinguishing what is genuine and what is artificial. The distinction is central to Andersen’s worldview, so that translators of his stories need to be mindful of it, and make suitable room for it in their translations.

In my own contribution, I offer some suggestions as to topics that are of interest to stylisticians generally, which could prove rewarding to pursue when analysing and evaluating the translating of children’s literature, equipped with parallel corpora and user-friendly software, such as the COPA-TRAD tool that has been developed at UFSC. The topics I nominate for further consideration, using Eoin Colfer’s The Eternity Code and its Portuguese and Spanish translations for exemplification, include keywords, emotion words, textual indices of reader “immersion”, verbs of mental processing and the narrative representations of character thought (especially Free Indirect Thought).

An interview with a practicing professional translator follows: Anna Olga Prudente de Oliveira invites Eliana Bueno-Ribeiro to reflect on the translating into Portuguese of the children’s tales gathered by Perrault.

As translators we rack our brains to find the suitably juiced mot, or phrase, or entire sentence, that might pass for “commensurable” with the source version, as “equivalent”, even though we know that all the kinds of knowledge and ignorance of our target readers, their ineradicable and necessary and welcome difference from the source text’s original readers, make this strictly impossible. Every translation is a punt, a gamble, a hazarded venture. As translators we know we are wretched go-betweens, posties, or mediators between two singles whom we intend to marry each other despite their reluctance, their incompatibility; or we are like some kind of functionary who not only introduces a stranger to a specific community but must also embody that stranger to that community. The prospect would make you laugh, and give up altogether, only you know it’s just a pronounced form of what we do all the time, every day. Like language generally, life generally, there is no manual which can guarantee success in translation. Crib books, thesauri, specialist dictionaries-the internet now-can all help, but at the core of the activity are ethical and pragmatic decisions (best not to call them calculations, if that suggests something potentially automated), especially of relevance: best efforts at adapting and improvising, mindful of the total speech act in the total speech situation, as we coordinate a source text and an imagined audience or readership.

Michael Toolan, Birmingham, 1 November 2017

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Professors Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, José Roberto O’Shea, and Mailce Borges Mota, all of UFSC, for their help with aspects of this introduction; any detected absurdities are entirely my own responsibility.

References

• Harris, R. (Ed.). (2013).The language myth in western culture Routledge

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan 2018