How Bert got into Ned's head: domestication in the translation of literature for young readers

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to discover to what extent the American translation of the Swedish children's novel Berts dagbok had been adapted to its audience as a result of the translator's initial norm. Previous research has found that while translators of children's literature traditionally mainly employ domesticating strategies, recent research has shown that current translations of canonized children's literature, and literature aimed at a slightly older demographic segment, have been more source-oriented. We therefore decided to investigate whether the translator's initial norm had been to domesticate the text, i.e. adapting any unfamiliar cultural context with regard to the new audience, American children and young teenagers. Through the analysis of coupled pairs it was concluded that the translator's initial norm was still to domesticate the text, and, as a result, a majority of the extracted examples had been replaced by something more familiar to the new audience, which consequently moved the story from Sweden to USA.