Negotiating Translation and Transcreation of Children's Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction: Travelling Beyond Translation—Transcreating for Young Audiences

   • Joanna Dybiec-Gajer, Riitta Oittinen

   Pages 1-9

3. Part I

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 11-11

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   2. From Translation to Transcreation to Translation: Excerpts from a Translator’s and Illustrator’s Notebooks

      • Riitta Oittinen

      Pages 13-37

   3. Postanthropocentric Transformations in Children’s Literature: Transcreating Struwwelpeter

      • Joanna Dybiec-Gajer

      Pages 39-55

   4. Remixed Fairy Tales, Distorted Legends: Agnieszka Taborska’s Surrealistic Picturebook Szalony Zegar (The Crazy Clock) and Its German Translation by Klaus Staemmler

      • Beate Sommerfeld

      Pages 57-69

4. Part II

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 71-71

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   2. On the Morally Dubious Custom of Rewriting Canonical Translations of Children’s Literature

      • Aniela Korzeniowska

      Pages 73-88

   3. Translators in Kensington Gardens: Polish Translations of J. M. Barrie’s First Peter Pan Novel

      • Aleksandra Wieczorkiewicz

      Pages 89-106

   4. Does Each Generation Have Its Own Ania? Canonical and Polemical Polish Translations of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables

      • Dorota Pielorz

      Pages 107-121

5. Part III

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 123-123

      PDF

   2. How Can One Word Change a World? Black Humour and Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its Polish Translations from the Cognitive-Ethnolinguistic Perspective

      • Agnieszka Gicala

      Pages 125-138

   3. Portmanteaus, Blends and Contaminations in Polish Translations of “Jabberwocky”

      • Agata Brajerska-Mazur

      Pages 139-159

6. Part IV

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 161-161

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   2. The Dilemma of Double Address. Polish Translation of Proper Names in Tove Jansson’s Moomin Books

      • Hanna Dymel-Trzebiatowska

      Pages 163-175

   3. Translating Sounds: A Study into the Russian-Language Translations of Onomatopoeic Proper Names in the Twentieth-Century English-Language Children’s Literature

      • Anna Sasaki

      Pages 177-195

   4. Taboo in the Polish Translation of Joanna Nadin’s The Rachel Riley Diaries

      • Joanna Dyła-Urbańska

      Pages 197-208

   5. Translation or Transcreation? Ghost Stories in Charles Causley’s Poems for Children

      • Ewelina Kwiatek

      Pages 209-225

   6. French Faeries and Alliterative Plays in Lucy Peacock’s Adaptation of Edmund Spenser’s Poem The Faerie Queene

      • Piotr Plichta

      Pages 227-238

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.

• Children’s Literature and Translating for Children
• Transcreation and Adaptation
• Translation Ethics and Double-address
• Alice in Wonderland
• Moomins
• Winnie-the-Pooh
• translation studies

• Pedagogical University of Kraków, Kraków, Poland

  Joanna Dybiec-Gajer, Małgorzata Kodura

• Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

  Riitta Oittinen

Joanna Dybiec-Gajer is a translation scholar, educator and practitioner, and an Associate Professor at the Pedagogical University of Kraków, where she is Head of the Chair for Translator Education. Her main research interests concern translation for young audiences, translator training and translation as a profession. She has recently published a monograph on the translation history of Heinrich Hoffmann’s controversial children’s classic Der Struwwelpeter in Poland (Złota Różdżka. Od książki dla dzieci po dreszczowiec raczej dla dorosłych, [Polish Struwwelpeter. From a Children’s Book to an Adults’ Thriller, 2017]). Her other book publications include Zmierzyć przekład? Z metodologii oceniania w dydaktyce przekładu pisemnego [Measuring Translation. Assessment Methodology in Translation Education] (2013) and Guidebook Gazes. Poland in American and German Travel Guides (2004); she also co-authored, with Maria Piotrowska, Verba Volant, Scripta Manent. How to write an M.A. thesis in Translation Studies (2012). Joanna Dybiec-Gajer was Head of the Organizing Committee of the international conference “From Morals to the Macabre in Translation for Children” held at the Pedagogical University of Kraków (April 4-5, 2017). She has been a member of European Society of Translation Studies since 2011.


Riitta Oittinen holds a PhD in Translation Studies and has taught translating (translating for children, translating the verbal and the visual as well as multimodality in translation) since 1987. In 2019 she – as artist, scholar, teacher, and mentor – received the Anne Devereaux Jordan Award given by ChLA (the Children’s Literature Association). She has taught translation in several countries in Europe and beyond and she serves as an Adjunct Professor (Docent) at the Universities of Tampere and Helsinki. She also holds the position of Senior Lecturer at Tampere University. She has written and illustrated well over 200 publications: books, articles, animated films, illustrations, and has held art exhibitions in and outside Finland. Her brand new book Translating Picturebooks, coauthored by Anne Ketola, and Melissa Garavini, was published by Routledge in 2018. Her other publications include titles such as Translating for Children 2000 (London: Garland Publishing, translated into Spanish in 2003), and papers in journals, such as in Meta (University of Montréal) in 2003 Translation for Children and in 2008 The Verbal, the Visual, the Translator in collaboration with Klaus Kaindl; in 2008 she co-edited with Maria González Davies Whose Story? Translating the Verbal and the Visual in Literature for Young Readers (Cambridge).


Małgorzata Kodura holds a PhD in Linguistics. A certified translator for English and a translator trainer, she is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the Pedagogical University of Kraków. She is a staff member of the Chair of Translation Education, whose translation programme is included in European Master's in Translation network initiated by the European Commission. She teaches practical courses in translation, including literary translation, and courses in translation theory. Her interests in the area of translation studies focus on translator training and new technologies for translators.

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