Appunti di Lingua inglese II

Modulo A

It is not easy to write a book for children, and neither is translating. It is not easy to work with children who not only have a different language but a different culture.

Analysis of linguistic and visual books

We will analyze books different from a linguistic and visual point of view. In books like “Alice in Wonderland”, the focus will be put on both pictures and text, and how pictures depict the text and vice versa (the language of Carroll is a language of another century with which he plays).

Roald Dahl is the author of “The Chocolate Factory” and “The Big Friendly Giant (GGG)”, and uses an innovative and fun language.

“Hiroshima no pika” by Toshi Maruki, who is a Japanese writer and illustrator, and explained what happened in Hiroshima during the Second World War, and to do so he had to use illustrations, but how do you explain horror to a child age?

There were many versions of “Harry Potter”. Some versions, from the cover, are understood to be for kids, and some others are meant for adults (the cover is dark, there’s nothing compelling or nice about it). More versions of “Harry Potter” were even in the shape of a picture book (in the book there are pictures, but also interactive elements: they capture the attention also of the readers that do not like to read a lot making the book look more like a game than a book).

CERN (Centro di Ricerche Internazionali) managed to render the topic understandable for children by creating a pop-up, explaining something that seems very complicated making it understandable to children. It is needed to learn how to transform the information so that it is accessible to children.

“Paddington suitcase” (traditional British character), there is a paper suitcase that reminds the children of the character, and inside there are small picture books.

It will be put focus on the translation of names. One of the examples is “Neville Longbottom”, one of the main characters of the “Harry Potter” saga, and that in Italian has been translated as “Neville Paciock”. The name recalls the characteristics of the character (it is based on the way he looked).

Translation studies

Starting from the twenty-first century there has been a rising interest in translation. Physics and mathematics are very old studies. The field of translation was established in the 1970s: Susan Bennetts, who is considered one of the founding fathers of the discipline, was born in the 1940s and started writing something important towards the end of the 1970s.

From the twenty-first century, translation started to be seen as an instrument because of a few reasons:

• Global changes in the last forty years, there has been more mass migration, mostly from third world countries, in which the language and the culture are not well known. Mass migration is a never-ending problem: think about Afghanistan refugees trying to make themselves understood in another language in another country. People in mass migrations do not only cross countries, but they also cross cultures.
• 9/11 attack, which can be considered a turning point. That is when the American administration realized that there was a side of the world, South-Eastern countries, that they did not know. People wanted to know more about these cultures.
• Global warming: a threat not only to rich countries, but that touches everyone. We are trying to communicate to find a solution and to do that we have to translate from one language to the other.
• Interlocking economic system: the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lasted from 1954 to 1991, the year in which Gorbachev dismembered the Soviet Union. There is an interlocking economic system that leaves languages the job to solve the problem and avoid conflicts.
• Expansion of global communication systems: in the last 20-25 years, there has been something to provide effortless worldwide communication, the Internet.

The assumptions about the fact that translations are easy are wrong: translating is not easy, especially because there are gaps. Theories in translators started acknowledging the difficulties that translators have when they try to reach the total equivalence between source language (language from which the translator translates) and target language (language to which the translator translates).

Cicerone already distinguished between a word-for-word translation and a sense-for-sense translation. A word-for-word translation is what is normally defined as a literal translation (translation of every word); a sense-for-sense translation establishes that there is the need to focus on the meaning, on the concept that it can be carried across into another language or culture. Sometimes there are not going to be equivalent words, indeed the translator has to find another way to translate things, and concentrates on the delivery of meaning.

There is an every-lasting discussion about if the translator should go for a word-for-word translation or focus on delivering the concept, but Cicerone underlines that what is important is that the message is sent across.

Culture and translation

Another debate in translation studies is the importance of culture, and one of the most important scholars on this topic is Eugene Nida, who said that a language cannot be understood outside the total framework of the culture, of which the language in question is an integral part. He started understanding the importance of the culture and the context in which the translator translates when he started working on the translation of the Bible, considering that he had to change the words or sometimes even the story to send the message across to other cultures since cultures perceive things in another different way.

He wrote an important book, “Customs and Cultures” (1964), that is brilliant since he tries to state the importance of context for a translator, and one of the stories that he recalls is the one of a remote village in Combo, which rejects Western missionaries asking women to be dressed since in those remote villages the fact that a woman is fully dressed means that she has money to buy clothes because she is a prostitute. This is an example that explains the importance of context: there is the need to be careful with translations because there are going to be different understandings depending on the context.

How much can I diverge from the original text? What was typical in 1600 is that translation was represented as a woman: a translation could be beautiful and unfaithful or ugly and faithful. There is a lot of creativity going on in translations. When do I have to stop diverge? When is the translated text too far from the original?

• Linguistic untranslatability: one word in a language has no equivalent in another language. In this case, the translator either deletes that section of the book or needs to be creative and find a substitution.
• Cultural untranslatability: there are different ideas of the word “bathroom” (Finnish people think about the first picture, the second picture is the idea of “bathroom” for Japanese people, the third people is how Italians depict it); depending on the culture of the person, there may be multiple views.

When working in translation, there is the need to know more cultures and more societies. Lawrence Venuti said that a translator should not be invisible. There is something called “the illusion of transparency” (a good translation that flows, that it is so good that it is not even realized that it was a translation) (if the glass is completely clear between the original book and the translated book, that means that the translation was done so well that the reader thinks that there hasn’t been any translation).

Bassnett and Lefevre underlined the impact of translation in a given culture at a particular moment in time. For example, going back in time and thinking about the Bible that was translated from Latin into vulgar languages, the translation had an enormous impact, especially in the UK: that’s when the English language started to establish.

Whenever something that is foreign is translated, something foreign in a raw culture is brought. Information that is lost in translation: for example, in the case of the Treaty of Waitangi the agreement was translated into the local language, but the translation was not correct, and a lot of elements got lost in translation.

The importance of children's literature

Every year circa 90,000 new titles for children or young adults are published. How can children’s literature be defined, and most of all how can the best books for children be chosen among all those books? It is thought that it is easy to recognize a book for children and distinguish them from books for adults or young adults, but it is wrong. Definitions of what children’s literature is vary from culture to culture, critic to critic, and reader to reader. It is about the century in which people are living that leads them to think about children’s literature in a certain way, and about the culture in which people are born and grown up in.

It is needed to talk about storytelling: stories for children have always existed, since ancient times, since men were gifted with words and language. Older generations tell stories to young generations to teach them something. In Medieval times most people did not know how to write and read, they gathered in one part of the home, mostly the fireplace, and the older generations would tell stories, that were not only for children but for adults as well. The stories were sometimes scary, sometimes were folk tales, and sometimes depicted real life with all the harshness, violence, and death that characterize it.

Blurring boundaries in children's literature

One might be tempted to say that a child’s book is a book that a child is reading and that an adult’s book is a book that adults should read. This is a very simplistic way to see things. It does not work that way, because the boundary between children’s literature and young adults’ literature/adults’ literature is really blurred: books that would be expected being for adults can be read by children, and books that would be expected to be read by children are enjoyed also by adults.

• “The Little Prince” is one of those books that seem to be written for children because it is nice and easy to understand, but many messages that are in the story are meant for adults.
• “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” is not a book for children, even if it is given to children because it is simple and short, and there are pictures. The child does understand the story, but not the complete messages that the author is proposing to the readers.

Children even today continue to read books that are meant for adults. Instead, some books that have been written for children have been claimed as their own by adults.

• “The Lord of the Rings” is for adults, but “The Hobbit” was written for children (middle school children, that are in the “transition year” in which they transit from children’s literature to adults’ literature), but it is bought by adults.
• The first “Harry Potter” books written by J.K. Rowling are for children, while the last books are for young adults, and it is understood by the language that is used, and the much more obscure themes. J.K. Rowling has thought about the story as an evolving story: the characters are growing in the story, they are becoming teenagers, and readers are expected to become older as well.

Children today appear to be more sophisticated than a few generations ago. The material that they are exposed to has changed dramatically because of television, and YouTube, which has exposed them to new realities, and this has forced adults to re-consider over the years what is appropriate in children’s literature. The content of children’s literature is limited by children’s experience in understanding.

Enjoyment in children's literature

Reading children’s books should be fun, it should be an enjoyable experience. Children’s literature should not be obligatory educational, and there are books that are only for enjoyment. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is a book created just for fun. It is a book that today has been re-written several times, since in the original version the language is outdated, and it would be complicated for children today to appreciate the story and the language, but when the book came out it was all for the fun of reading and the fun of language. Lewis Carroll creates a new language, playing with it and creating rhymes: he was not trying to teach something to children, who should only concentrate on enjoying the book.

Educational values and imagination

By reading, books children are let to experience emotions and are taught different ways of thinking, and how the world works: the experience of children is limited, and everything they know comes from their routine. They know nothing about different life experiences. Through narrative, they experience different stories and emotions and are taught how to think.

Opportunity to understand human behavior and the immense versatility of experiences. People all live in this world and must understand how to live in it. Children’s literature can teach children how to live in the world. A book may take the child reading it to a different place. The child goes together with the main character of the book on an adventure and feels for the first time the same feelings as the character. By experiencing the same things, the child starts to understand how people usually behave, so how the child should behave in life as well.

Imagination:

• Literature can develop children’s imagination the most and therefore every child should be pushed to read or listen to stories at a very early age. It helps them consider people, and ideas in different ways: if the writing of the book is good, it can pick the child’s curiosity and develop imagination.
• Children can entertain ideas they have never considered before and ask themselves “what if...?”.

New experiences

• Children can be given new perspectives of the world. There are books that can take the child to a very distant place, teaching the child how different people from different cultures and different parts of the world live.
• New feelings: Adventure, Excitement, Struggle.

Educational values in children's books

A lot of people may think that all children’s books should be educational, but there is no need to teach them something all the time, some books can be read as just pure fun. A lot of material is created to educate children, to teach them something. The years in which the language is learned are exciting: the language is learned starting from the day the child is born but is earned starting from age two/three/four (but this does not mean that before this age the mind is not understanding language).

During this period children are linguistic geniuses because they make sense of all linguistic elements, and it is in this period that they need to be exposed to children’s literature because it helps them to learn the language. The children that have grown up reading a lot of books or whose parents read to them a lot are the children that are going to be the best writers and speakers since they have the best and most variable vocabulary.

The child has fun hearing those words and will try to repeat them because they sound funny. Children are forced to practice the sounds of words, and this is educational (children are taught without even realizing it). “Winnie the Pooh” is for enjoyment, but it is also educational from a linguistic point of view. Winnie the Pooh is a nice little bear who loves, just like a child, to create poems, whose sound is nice. It is educational because the protagonist teaches poems and poetry, and rhythm as well. The child is going to memorize what Winnie the Pooh sings in the story.

• Development of fluency and understanding of language. A child should be exposed to about forty-five books per year, but children today read on average two books per year. Children should be pushed to read books in different forms.

In the United States, there is something called “literature across the curriculum”: in American schools, teachers of different subjects inform the English teacher about the topics that are discussed in their subjects, so that the English teacher can propose to the students a story that is connected to those topics.

Protagonists in children's literature

Children’s literature usually has a child protagonist. Adults do not take part in the story: they exist, but do not disappear until the very end of the story when the adventure has already taken place. This is because the protagonist must grow and change during the story, and if the adult was present, the adult would prevent and stop the child from doing things that the child protagonist would have otherwise done if it was not for the presence of the adult.

In young adults’ literature, a young adult is the protagonist. In the first book of the “Harry Potter” saga, Harry Potter was twelve, while in the seventh volume he was seventeen. The character has evolved throughout the story, and this is one of the reasons why the last volumes are more intended for young adults than for children.

There is the need to be careful since children as protagonists are also found in adults’ literature. “Oliver Twist” is one of the first books in adults’ literature with a child as the main character. The story is tremendously sad, and indeed children are not meant to be exposed to this kind of horrors of society.

Children are usually protagonists when there is the need of:

• An evocation of childhood, autobiography;
• An ironic contemplation of children;
• An indirect criticism of adult society.

The “Lord of the Files” is an example of an adult literature book in which adult society is criticized, and to do that William Golding used children as protagonists. A child would not understand the hidden meanings that are in the book. Typically, animal protagonists are found in children’s literature.