What Changes Have Been Made? A Textual Comparison of Chinese Translations and English Texts of Thirteen Picture Storybooks

Abstract

Translation as an academic subject has been a particular area that involves studies of language and culture, practical training, and professional knowledge that crosses various disciplines. In most studies that have been done in the field, considerable attention has been placed to determine the inappropriateness of a translation, and a lot of effort has been made to prove the point that the translator did not make a good translation. What has been ignored is the thinking process that translators might go through in the process of making final decisions of how a text should/could be translated. This paper made an attempt to conduct a textual comparison to document the changes that had been detected in the Chinese translations of the thirteen children's picture storybooks and present an analysis that interpreted the possible reasons for making text alterations. The study concluded that most patterns of changes observed in the thirteen books fell into three main categories: book title, word replacement and sentence and paragraph organization. Text alterations were made mainly to serve the functions of attracting buyers, settling differences in grammar and syntax between English and Chinese, compromising differences between two cultures, meeting the expectations of Chinese readers, and achieving higher acceptability in reading. The study furthermore confirmed that adaptation and paraphrase are the two commonly used translating strategies for children readers.