Relations texte-image-son dans la traduction vers le polonais des albums pour enfants d’Hervé Tullet

Abstract

TEXT-IMAGE-SOUND RELATIONSHIPS IN POLISH TRANSLATIONS OF HERVE TULLET’S PICTUREBOOKS

Picturebooks are a multimodal space in which text, images and sound merge to create a unique reading experience. They pose a challenge not only to translators, who must preserve the essence of these complex interactions while adapting them to a new language and culture, but also to translation publishers. This case study includes my reflections from an interview with Marek Włodarski, founder of the Babaryba publishing house, which publishes Polish translations of picturebooks by French author Hervé Tullet. This is the first in a series of in-depth interviews I plan to conduct with publishers of translated picturebooks. It aims to verify whether publishers are aware of multimodal relationships and whether (and how) they take them into account in the translation publishing process. To properly prepare for the interview, I first analyzed three of Tullet’s picturebooks in the original French version and the Polish translation, using a multimodal analysis scheme based on Anna Kochanowska’s typology of relationships between word, image, and sound (2021). This method allowed me to determine how the text co-creates the message with the image and sound, and how these relationships were treated in the translations. The interview shows how important role the publisher can play in the multimodal translation process of picturebooks. Their decisions often change the complex relationships between text, image, and sound contained in the original works, which in turn affects the reception of the books by readers of the target culture.