Translation of Children’s Literature: Translations of Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” into Latvian

When we deal with translation of children’s literature—or rather translating for children—we need to ask questions about what it is and flesh out what that means. It is not just defining children’s literature as such, but rather textual abstractions like style and vocabulary.
Writers and translators of children’s literature often consider such literature as a pedagogical tool. Some say that literature for children should educate and entertain. There is no doubt about its role in leading children into a particular ideology and specific set of values. Children tend to be less experienced readers than adults. Until they have been taught to read critically, they believe much of what they read, the ideas and assumptions implicit in texts.
According to Ritta Oittinen [6], situation and purpose are an intrinsic part of all translation. “Translators never translate words in isolation, but whole situations. They bring to the translation their cultural heritage, their reading experience, and, in the case of children’s books, their image of childhood and their own child image. In so doing, they enter into a dialogic relationship that ultimately involves readers, the author, the illustrator, the translator, and the publisher.” [6, 3]
Translating for children shares one major problem with translating for adults: translation, it is anonymous, even invisible. She writes that we do not basically think of translators as human beings with their own child images. Yet translators cannot escape their own ideologies, which here means: their child images. [6, 4] She says that child image is a very complex issue: on the one hand, it is something unique, based on each individual’s personal history; on the other hand, it is something collectivized in all society.
Anything we create for children — whether writing, illustrating, or translating – reflects our views of childhood, of being a child. It shows our respect or disrespect for childhood as an important stage of life, the basis for an adult future. What children themselves want to see, hear, experience mirrors their personalities and backgrounds, the choices they have had. Children’s culture has always reflected all of society, adult images of childhood, the way children themselves experience childhood, and the way adults remember it. [6, 41]
This raises the question whether children as audience are really so different from adults in their role of reading, hearing and understanding a text. When children’s books are being translated for children, the original content is already adapted to the world of thought of children. So the translator could focus on its task of presenting the original text in another language.
In a varying degree all texts include general language and specialist language features. Language is a resource used for many different purposes, and the words themselves do not show their background. They only get their real meaning when seen within a text. In the process of understanding, we will have to consider the text as a whole. Originally we will only get an individual understanding of a text and before we may be able to present the message responsibly we need further corresponding research. Afterwards, the professional translator would acquire more routine and would be able to infer the relevant knowledge right from the beginning. Thus the translator would have a double perspective on texts: viewing their cultural embedding and analyzing the text structure to find confirmation for the initial intuitive understanding.
In the particular paper, the author will write about main problems of translating for children. One of the main aims of this work will be to compare and analyze two different translations of Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” into Latvian. The text will be analysed according to the devices, approaches and theories given by Ieva Zauberga [1] and the authors of the book “Basic Translation” [5]. To the author’s mind those are the best approaches available to analyse a written translations.
To show the problems of translating for children, the author of this work will talk about writers who had done research in translation of children’s literature. And emphasize the guidelines which the translator should follow and review such issues as simplification of vocabulary; should the literature be educational and at the same time entertaining and what influence should make literature on children and adults.…