La traduction jeunesse sous contrainte : adapter le texte ou l’image ?

Abstract

TRANSLATING CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: ADAPTING THE TEXT OR ADAPTING THE IMAGE?

Children’s literature is particularly fruitful when it comes to exploring the relationship between text and images. Indeed, it is a type of literature that uses images a lot because their target audience – children – is usually not able to read yet (this is the parent’s role). However, the child can see and understand an image, making them a reader, though in a different semiotic system: the visual one. Translation is interlingual when it allows to go from one language to another. It can be intersemiotic too when the illustration becomes an ally in the case of an untranslatable element in the text. This article studies two types of untranslatability in British children’s literature (namely, puns and poetry) in order to show how the visual elements have been used to serve the translation of the text. Then, it makes an analysis of some books by Enid Blyton where the illustrations have been modified, be it to correspond to some constraints in the publishing industry, or to deal with cultural references that are hardly translatable.