Abstract
Translation studies of children’s literature deserve meticulous attention today not only in the wake of active global publishing activity of books for children but due to the culture-specific information the latter may contain. Fairy tales are usually the first narratives children are introduced to and often these stories with a long-reproduction history reveal some features of national culture that form a child’s worldview. From this perspective, the research is set out to identify culture-specific items in fairy tales that originated from oral tradition and to determine what translation procedures should be used and what factors may influence the choice of the translation method. The corpus of the research includes the titles of East Slavic fairy tales limited by culture-specific items and their translations into English and German. Despite the period when translations were made and gender of translators, findings of our research show that in both languages source language-oriented translation procedures prevail in rendering proper names with denotative meaning, and target language-oriented translation methods are dominant for culture-specific common expressions and descriptive elements of proper names. The current research has allowed us to distinguish the factors that may influence the choice of a translation procedure. To this end, a scale of source language- and target language-oriented translation strategies of culture-specific items from fairy tales with the account of target reader’s age and genre has been provided for the translators to reveal the efficiency of certain translation procedures. Given the above, the study of culture-specific items in fairy tales requires a greater focus and thus further lines of inquiry are suggested in this paper.
Highlights
The effective cross-cultural communication is widely considered to be one of the overarching issues today in any sphere of human activity that involves interaction between nations
We initiated this research to determine the efficient translation strategies applied to culture-specific items from fairy tales that come from oral tradition
The two major objectives within the framework of the research are: 1) to study theoretical and practical findings regarding the notion of culture-specific items with the aim of determining the most relevant investigations for our research; 2) to re-examine the traditional approaches to rendering cultural references and to specify the translation solutions that may be effective for a fairy tale genre
Summary
The effective cross-cultural communication is widely considered to be one of the overarching issues today in any sphere of human activity that involves interaction between nations. It cuts down hard on relevance of the original text, as the target audience will not understand cultural background of a certain ethnic group This is especially true in case of folklore, in particular fairy tales with a wide range of CSI. This research calls into question the faithfulness of both traditional strategies in the context of translating CSI from fairy tales and we are intended to determine the spectrum of translation procedures that will yield adequate perception of the culture-specific text by the target audience. We rely on the principles of the comparative approach aimed at identifying the similarities and differences between translation strategies and procedures used in English and German target text titles of fairy tales. CSI from Russian and Ukrainian Fairy Tale Titles: Newmark’s Translation Approaches
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