Den franske författaren Jean-Claude Mourlevat var i stort sett okänd i Sverige innan han fick Almapriset. När engelska dominerar översättningar av barn- och ungdomslitteratur är Almapriset viktigt för att lyfta böcker på andra språk, skriver Valérie Alfvén och Charlotte Lindgren.

This article deals with the reception of the translations of the Belgian picture book illustrator and writer Kitty Crowther in Sweden, from the moment she got the prestigious ALMA-prize 2010. The analyse of the reception of her translated work to Swedish through press articles and professional critics shows that she was unknown in Sweden before she gets the prize and that it permitted her to quickly win a high status in the Swedish literary field for children. We also found that the articles linked willingly Crowther and her illustrations to Scandinavian. We argue that in fact, giving her the prize is making a self-consecration (Casanova). By doing this, Sweden reinforces its role as a consecrator in the world field of Children’s literature and strengthens the autonomy of its position in it.

This chapter focuses on the recontextualization of images and the translation of simultaneous action expressed multimodally in picture book translations. It analyzes several spreads from the globally translated and distributed picture books about Grandpa Pettson and Findus by Swedish author-illustrator Sven Nordqvist and compares their French and Dutch translations using a social semiotic multimodal text analysis examining both words and images. Within the theoretical framework of social semiotics, but also drawing on central thoughts within Descriptive Translation Studies, the authors see translation and the act of translating as motivated by and within its specific social and situational context, depending on the signs that are culturally available within this context. The results of the analyses show that the translated picture books about Pettson and Findus can be described as ‘glocal’ artefacts, combining globally spread images with new meaning depending on the local choices made in the different translations, in this case as expressed through the depiction of simultaneous action.