Kamil Kilani’s Adaptation of Shakespeare in Arabic Children’s Literature: Acculturation Versus Enculturation

Abstract

Children’s literature is a young literary genre which is guided by a complex set of motivational, cognitive and metacognitive considerations. In the Arab world, children’s literature emerged in tandem with the modern translation movement but has started to prosper as an independent literary form only recently. Translating for children is an arduous task with myriad challenges on the linguistic, sociocultural and educational levels. This paper aims to research Kamil Kilani’s Arabic adaptation of King Lear as a model to translate for children. Kilani’s translations are significant because they are adapted in a way which responds to the needs of children without simplifying the lexical and stylistic components of the source texts or compromising their cultural content. The paper adopts a descriptive methodology supporting the main argument with comparative examples from the source text and the target text. The analysis shows that Kilani’s adaptation revolutionized the source text’s form and structure, while preserving its conceptual content, language level and style exquisitely. The results suggest that translating for children does not have to embrace cultural adaptation strategies and can instead embrace a model of acculturation between the source text cultural content and the target text readers.