Przekład towarzyszący. O pozycji tłumacza w świecie literatury obrazkowej dla najmłodszych

Abstract

Translating picture books for children seems to pose a whole range of additional challenges that the translator would not necessarily have to deal with when working on fiction literature targeted at the adult reader. The traditional communication model which pictures the translator as a bridge between the author and the reader is here enriched by a new mediator (an adult reading to the child) and a parallel message (the visual content linked closely to the text). The article is intended to detail some of the main aspects specific to translation of this type of literature. The corpus of examples is composed of French-language picture books for the youngest readers released recently in Poland. Examples of translation excerpted from the corpus have been confronted with the visual content of the translated books to examine to what extent, in what situations and how exactly it may support the translator’s work or make it more complicated. The analysis has shown that the main challenges which the translators have to face in such a situation can generally be divided into two groups. The first one contains problems relevant to all literary translations and resulting naturally from grammatical, syntactic or idiomatic differences between the French and Polish languages, which may be further complicated by the visual content accompanying the text. The second group consists of issues specific to illustrated literature that are connected, among others, to the visual literacy of the translator and the technical aspects of the publishing process, such as potential interference in the visual content of the original work. The author proposes to define the specific conditions of the translator’s work with the term “accompanying translation”, which is intended to emphasize not only the indelible presence of the visual content accompanying the translator at work, but also the collective character of that activity.