From 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' to 'Diario Di Una Schiappa': a Case Study In
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Università degli Studi di Padova Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Lingue Moderne per la Comunicazione e la Cooperazione Internazionale Classe LM-38 Tesi di Laurea From 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' to 'Diario di una Schiappa': A case study in the translation of children's literature Relatore Laureanda Prof. Maria Teresa Musacchio Matilde Vangelisti n° matr.1105128/ LMLCC Anno Accademico 2015 / 2016 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of contents 3 Introduction 5 Chapter I – Overview on the history of children’s literature in England 9 1.1. The origins of children’s literature 9 1.2. Children’s literature in the Classic World 13 1.3. Children’s literature in the Middle Ages 15 1.4. The Modern Period 19 1.4.1. Children’s literature in the Puritan era 20 1.4.2. The eighteenth century 22 1.5. The 19th century 26 1.6. Children’s literature in contemporary days 32 Chapter II – The role of translation in children’s literature 39 2.1. What is translation? 39 2.2. The status of translation in children’s literature 40 2.3. The act of reading 43 2.4. Transaction and dialogue between readers and texts 46 2.5. The reading child versus the decisive adult 48 2.5.1. The child reader 48 2.5.2. Adults’ authority 49 2.6. The question of equivalence and the status of adaptations 51 2.6.1. Equivalence and situation 51 2.6.2. Adaptations and transformations 53 2.7. The world of pictures in translation 57 3 2.8. The dimension of performance in children’s books 60 Chapter III – The role of translators in children’s literature 63 3.1. Who is a translator? 63 3.2. The illusory invisibility of translators within texts 68 3.3. The didactic role of translators in children’s literature 70 3.3.1. Translating women 74 3.4. The revelation of translators and their mediating role in children’s Literature 75 Chapter IV – From Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Diario di una Schiappa 79 4.1. The book 79 4.2. Translating cultural references in children’s literature 81 4.2.1. Food 92 4.2.2. Names 94 4.2.3. Titles 102 4.2.4. Units of measurement and currency 103 4.2.5. Social institutions: education 104 4.2.6. Customs and practices 105 4.2.7. TV programmes and videogames 106 4.2.8. Nursery Rhymes 107 4.2.9. Idiomatic expressions 109 4.2.10. Onomatopoeias 115 Conclusions 119 Bibliography 121 Riassunto 127 4 INTRODUCTION The present dissertation presents a comparative analysis between the American children’s novel Diary of a Wimpy Kid and its Italian translation Diario di una Schiappa. The first three chapters, theoretical in nature, aim at exploring how children’s literature has developed through the centuries until nowadays, where translation plays a fundamental role in bridging the gap not only between languages but also cultures; in the last chapter, on the other hand, the analysis of the series is carried out. Specifically, Chapter One offers an overview on the history of children’s literature in English by focusing on five main periods in world history, that is the Classic World, the Middle Ages, the Modern Period, which also includes a brief excursus in the Puritan era, the 19th century and contemporary days. This chapter also aims at showing how the uses and the goals of children’s books have changed throughout the centuries: indeed, in the past, books for children used to be written with the sole purpose of instructing young readers, teaching them good manners and helping them become successful and prominent figures. Today, on the contrary, children’s literature is also used to let children travel to unknown places and explore different cultures, and this confirms once again the importance translation has acquired in both shaping identities and allowing children to discover new worlds and peoples. The role played by translation is better explored in the Chapter Two. After clarifying the concept of translation, I have focused here on the role and status of translation in children’s literature. Books and texts written for a young readership have always been placed at the margins of the literary polysystem, thus failing to recognise the importance such stories have for the child’s upbringing. Literature has indeed proved to be fundamental in shaping one’s cultural identity as well as ideological affiliations, and the same can be said about translation, which contributes to broaden children’s knowledge about the world. However, when translating for children, translators have to pay particular attention to all of the elements that make a clear reference to the source culture, since children may fail to 5 understand the connotations attached to them due to their lack of knowledge and inexperience. Hence the need to explore one of the main controversies in translation studies – here analysed with regard to children’s literature – that is the question about equivalence and the status of adaptations. In addition to this, Chapter Two will also focus on other issues regarding children’s literature, such as the challenges involved in the translation of images and the problems parents may encounter when reading stories aloud. In Chapter Three I shifted my attention to the role of translators, who would better be defined as cultural mediators due to mediating role they play in adapting texts from one culture to another. Their action on texts seems to be invisible, as Venuti (2011) describes it, however it will be shown that such invisibility is only illusory, given the incredible process of transformation texts go through. Indeed, translators often have to adapt their translations according to the needs and conventions of the receiving culture, also respecting the ideological norms at the time they are translating the text. In addition to the need to conform to the conventions of the target culture, the alterations a translator makes prove to be necessary for the child’s understanding as well. The strategies translators dispose of when dealing with culture-specific items will be better explored in Chapter Four, where the first nine books of the series Diary of a Wimpy Kid will be analysed. For my analysis, I decided to focus on all of the elements that made a clear reference to the uses and customs of the American culture and which therefore posed some problems to the Italian translator Rossella Bernascone. In particular, I decided to analyse the translation strategies adopted when dealing with food, names, units of measurement, social institutions, titles, idiomatic expressions, onomatopoeias, customs and practices, TV programmes and nursery rhymes. My analysis will be introduced by the theoretical rules translators have to adhere to when translating cultural references and will be supported by examples from the texts. The controversy about whether cultural references should be adapted to the conventions of the receiving culture or not is reflected in the choices the translator Rossella Bernascone has made. Where children are 6 believed to understand the connotations attached to a culture-specific element, then a literal translation is provided, otherwise an equivalent referent in the target culture has proved to be necessary. The adoption of such a dual strategy can enhance the child’s curiosity about diversity and the ‘foreign’, and at same time it provides young readers with familiar elements that prevent him or her from getting lost in the book. 7 8 CHAPTER I OVERVIEW ON THE HISTORY OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN ENGLAND 1.1. The origins of children’s literature ‘Ever since there were children, there has been children’s literature’ (Lerer, 2008, p.1). Two conditions were believed to be fundamental in order to let the genre flourish and spread: the awareness that childhood, since it is different from adulthood, requires special treatment, and the social conditions that allowed children to be educated enough to read and enjoy books (O’Sullivan, 2006, cited in Frimmelova, 2010). However, children’s literature started to become more and more popular even when these two factors were not yet in operation, since children simply used the literature of the entire culture (Frimmelova, 2010). It is rather unimaginable to raise a child without the help of the stories parents are used to reading before bedtime; it is difficult to think about children learning how to live and behave without the morals their beloved animal friends teach them, and, above all, it is only thanks to the stories they were told when they were infants that parents have become who they are. Even the most ordinary words become magical when read aloud at bedtime and it is there that they develop the power of teaching something (Lerer, 2008). Although each word might hide hundreds of meanings, children are slowly led to a process of discovery firstly through the soft voice of a mother and then by themselves, and this is exactly what literature aims at, that is driving children from the disclosure of the essence of words to that of life itself (Kahn, cited in Lerer, 2008, p.4). First of all we should start by asking ourselves what childhood is; a widespread definition suggests that childhood can be defined “in relation to other stages of personal development 9 and family life” (Lerer, 2008, p.2). Wartofsky, on the contrary, suggests that children develop thanks both to the idea other people have of them and the idea children make of their own; this idea changes as the child interacts with others, and so does literature. Even though it is possible to detect the presence of books and manuals exclusively written for children in the Classic World, most historians believe that children’s literature as we know it today began in the mid 18th century.