Von kleinen Gespenstern, Gurkenkönigen und Konservenkindern – Probleme der Übersetzung deutschsprachiger Kinder- und Jugendliteratur in die romanischen Sprachen

• Main Author: Cordula Neis
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Beate Kern / Christoph Behrens / Joris Lehnert / Stefan Serafin 2018-12-01
• Series: apropos [Perspektiven auf die Romania]
• Subjects: Kinder- und Jugendliteratur; Übersetzung (einbürgernde vs. verfremdende); Les belles infidèles; Fingierte Mündlichkeit; Phantasiesprachen
• Online Access: https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/apropos/article/view/1264/1129

Children’s and youth literature constitutes a challenge to translation for several reasons: As the relationship between the author and his young readers is an asymmetrical one characterized by diverging cognitive, linguistic and developmental stages, the translator has to be able to bridge these differences by adopting various strategies. If we can generally distinguish between two diametrically opposed approaches, the naturalizing translation on the one hand and the exoticizing translation on the other, in most cases translators of children’s literature use the naturalizing strategy which enables them to reduce the alterity of the source text and ensure its comprehensibility. The use of different registers, dialects, jargons, youth language or fantasy‐language constitutes another obstacle to overcome. There remain other challenges to be mastered such as those offered by fictional orality, a narrative strategy deliberately used to create a particular atmosphere and to confer local color to a text. In this paper, I will analyze the above‐mentioned problems in translations into Romance languages of children’s books by Otfried Preußler (Das kleine Gespenst) and Christine Nöstlinger (Konrad oder das Kind aus der Konservenbüchse; Wir pfeifen auf den Gurkenkönig).