Taking Home the Gold: Ed Young’s Manipulation of Expectancy Norms when Translating Lon Po Po (1989)

• Main Authors: Serena Hillery, 范萱
• Other Authors: Chang, Doris
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/2c4rh2

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所翻譯學碩士班 === 105 === Chinese American children's illustrator and author, Ed Young, was awarded the Randolph Caldecott Medal in 1990 for Lon Po Po: A Little Red Riding Hood Story from China (1989). This award is a prestigious honor that exists uniquely in children’s literature. It guarantees the winner both phenomenal sales and notoriety. Young’s work was labeled as a translation on both the front and last page of Lon Po Po’s Penguin Putnam edition, yet the author and title of the Source Text are missing. Thus, Lon Po Po is not a translation proper according to Jakobson's definition. Regardless of whether Lon Po Po is a translation proper, Young is still “translating” a cross-cultural tale and his “translation” occupies a central position in the polysystem of multicultural children’s literature. This study examines how Young translated the cross-cultural masterpiece that is “Little Red Riding Hood” and how he manipulated the expectancy norms of the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s to allow for the success of Lon Po Po. This is new territory, as translation studies on Lon Po Po are scant. In order to answer why Lon Po Po was labelled a translation as opposed to an adaptationor retelling, as many of Young's other works are, this study uses Andrew Chesterman's (1997) conception of the expectancy norms in translation studies and explores how the success of Lon Po Po as a Caldecott winner allows scholars to examine the expectancy norms present during the 1990s in children's literature that allowed Lon Po Po to take home the gold. Through a thorough analysis of the Caldecott winners from 1938-2016, my research points to multiculturalism and belonging to the genera of folklore as proponents that led to the text's success. Multiculturalism highlights ethnic or racial diversity in a positive light and it has been used in intercultural education since the 1920s in the United States. This thesis argues that the 1980s favored a rise in multiculturalism in children's literature and that Young's Lon Po Po being a cross-cultural translation of a classic fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood,” cherished by western scholars and psychologists who recognize the psychoanalytic staying powers of the tale, such as Jack Zipes (1993), helped it win the Caldecott and thereby manipulated the work to succeed within a polysystem.