This book offers fresh critical insights to the field of children’s literature translation studies by applying the concept of transcreation, established in the creative industries of the globalized world, to bring to the fore the transformative, transgressional and creative aspects of rewriting for children and young audiences. This socially situated and culturally dependent practice involves ongoing complex negotiations between creativity and normativity, balancing text-related problems and genre conventions with readers’ expectations, constraints imposed by established, canonical translations and publishers’ demands. Focussing on the translator’s strategies and decision-making process, the book investigates phenomena where transcreation is especially at play in children’s literature, such as dual address, ambiguity, nonsense, humour, play on words and other creative language use; these also involve genre-specific requirements, for example, rhyme and rhythm in poetry. The book draws on a wide range of mostly Anglophone texts for children and their translations into languages of limited diffusion to demonstrate the numerous ways in which information, meaning and emotions are transferred to new linguistic and cultural contexts. While focussing mostly on interlingual transfer, the volume analyses a variety of translation types from established, canonical renditions by celebrity translators to non-professional translations and intralingual rewritings. It also examines iconotextual dynamics of text and image. The book employs a number of innovative methodologies, from cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics to semiotics and autoethnographic approaches, going beyond text analysis to include empirical research on children’s reactions to translation strategies. Highlighting the complex dynamics at work in the process of transcreating for children, this volume is essential reading for students and researchers in translation studies, children’s fiction and adaptation studies.

From Struwwelpeter to Peter Rabbit, from Alice to Bilbo—this collection of essays shows how the classics of children’s literature have been transformed across languages, genres, and diverse media forms. This book argues that translation regularly involves transmediation—the telling of a story across media and vice versa—and that transmediation is a specific form of translation. Beyond the classic examples, the book also takes the reader on a worldwide tour, and examines, among other things, the role of Soviet science fiction in North Korea, the ethical uses of Lego Star Wars in a Brazilian context, and the history of Latin translation in children’s literature. Bringing together scholars from more than a dozen countries and language backgrounds, these cross-disciplinary essays focus on regularly overlooked transmediation practices and terminology, such as book cover art, trans-sensory storytelling, écart, enfreakment, foreignizing domestication, and intra-cultural transformation.

History is constantly evolving, and the history of children’s literature is no exception. Since the original publication of Emer O’Sullivan’s Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature in 2010, much has happened in the field of children’s literature. New authors have come into print, new books have won awards, and new ideas have entered the discourse within children’s literature studies. Historical Dictionary of Children's Literature, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries. This book will be an excellent resource for students, scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in the field of children’s literature studies.

Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations. Offering five distinct sections, this volume: Familiarizes students and beginning scholars with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature Describes the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children Considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content Maps how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice Explores the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.

This book tackles the interface between translation and pragmatics. It comprises case studies in English, Greek, Russian and Chinese translation practice, which highlight the potential of translation to interact with pragmatics and reshape meaning making in a target language in various pragmatically relevant ways. Fiction and non-fiction genres merge to suggest a rich inventory of interlingual transfer instances which can broaden our perception of what may be shifting in translation transfer. Authors use an emic approach (in addition to an etic one) to confirm results which they often present graphically. The book has a didactic perspective in that it shows how pragmatic awareness can regulate translator behaviour and is also useful in foreign language teaching, because it shows how important implicit knowledge can be, in shaping the message in a foreign language.

This collection focuses on the specific issue of controversy as a cross-sectional aspect of contemporary children’s and YA literature, in a spectrum stretching from national experiences, to explore the impact of specific historical, economic and social environments on the rise of controversies; to inter-national exchanges in which controversies are generated specifically by the interactions between cultures; to international contexts that deal with controversies relevant on a global scale. By adopting controversy as an adjustable lens for a joined consideration of literary themes, narrative or aesthetic solutions, translation choices, publishing and marketing decisions, and discursive practices, the volume establishes a diversified collection of chapters that offers new insight into functions of children’s and YA literature in contemporary culture.

This book examines many facets of transcultural poetics in the English translation of Chinese literature from 12 different expert contributors. Translating Chinese literature into English is a special challenge. There is a pressing need to overcome a slew of obstacles to the understanding and appreciation of Chinese literary works by readers in the English-speaking world. Hitherto only intermittent attempts have been made to theorize and explore the exact role of the translator as a cultural and aesthetic mediator informed by cross-cultural knowledge, awareness, and sensitivity. Given the complexity of literary translation, sophisticated poetics of translation in terms of literary value and aesthetic taste needs to be developed and elaborated more fully from a cross-cultural perspective. It is, therefore, necessary to examine attempts to reconcile the desire for authentic transmission of Chinese culture with the need for cultural mediation and appropriation in terms of the production and reception of texts, subject to the multiplicity of constraints, in order to shed new light on the longstanding conundrum of Chinese-English literary translation by addressing Chinese literature in the multiple contexts of nationalism, cross-cultural hybridity, literary untranslatability, the reception of translation, and also world literature. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of translation studies, Chinese literature, and East Asian studies.