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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2013

Key cultural texts for a key audience

Adriana Şerban
Paola Artero

Résumé

In this paper, we outline the research questions as well as a number of conceptual and methodological issues involved in the creation of a multilingual corpus for the study of the translation and reception of children’s literature, with special reference to Gallie’s (1965) notion of essentially contested concepts and their expression in the texts we identify as key.As is the case for literature in general, an established canon of literary texts for children and young audiences exists and cannot be overlooked. Thus, a European-educated person is likely to have read the stories collected from the German folklore by the brothers Grimm, those written by Hans Christian Andersen, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the stories of Charles Perrault (not written for children, originally), and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, among many other classics widely translated across the world, some of whom have become household names in cultures remote from those where the texts first originated. The novels of North American writers such as Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper are also likely to be part of the list of famous, well-read and well-loved books internationally. Aspects of the creation, circulation and reception of these texts have attracted the attention of translation scholars such as Dollerup (1999), Gouanvic (2003), Malmkjær (2003 and 2004), Nord (2003), Stolze (2003).Our corpus-based project focuses on 20th and 21st century initial texts belonging to several genres, and their translations. The languages with which we start are, in alphabetical order: English, French, Italian and Romanian; others will be added as the research develops. While we take contemporary children’s literature to begin after World War II, we have decided to include texts from the first part of the 20th century also, such as L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. Literary works and authors we have chosen, already part of the canon, are: Le Petit Prince, several Dr Seuss books, C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, J. R. R.Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Roald Dahl, and the Harry Potter series. We will also identifyless famous texts which, we believe, have the potential to become key, or the issues they engage with already are.Renewals, retranslations and adaptations of older texts, sometimes into another semiotic code such as film and other new media, will also be studied, since the texts are effectively given a new birth. At the same time, through the phenomenon of intertextuality which involves contact points between texts and different generations of readers, texts we do not include in the repository are likely to come to the surface anyway. They constitute a tremendously important cultural heritage (Oittinen 2000), and the dialogue between the old and the new can only be a never ending one.The key contested concepts we want to focus on are childhood and education. Through contextualised, fine-grained qualitative analysis complemented by quantitative research, we hope to gain insights into the evolution of assumptions with respect to what children’s texts stand for, changing or persisting concepts of childhood and the historicity of the concept of child across and between cultures, children’s identities and cultures (e.g., beliefs, myths, the play dimension), ethics and changing morality as represented by children’s literature, pedagogy and subversion (see, for instance, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials), and the topics which are introduced or maintained.Two levels of change will be considered: the older canon versus more recent texts, and the initial texts versus their translations/adaptations/renewals.The project will make the object of a grant application in France.
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Dates et versions

hal-02164136 , version 1 (24-06-2019)

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Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - Pas de modification

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  • HAL Id : hal-02164136 , version 1

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Adriana Şerban, Paola Artero. Key cultural texts for a key audience: Contemporary children's literature in translation. Colloque international : "7e congrès de la European Society for Translation Studies : Centres and Peripheries", Université Johannes Gutenberg de Mayence, Germersheim, 29 août - 1 septembre 2013, 2013, Germersheim, Germany. ⟨hal-02164136⟩

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