Retranslation is important for the dissemination of canonical works and for building (inter)national literary identity. This chapter demonstrates the complexity of defining retranslation in the context of children’s literature. With reference to earlier research on retranslation, it proposes a broader definition by insisting on the multimodal essence of children’s literature and the impossibility of dissociating the verbal from the visual. The chapter then critically engages with the retranslation hypothesis, a central yet contested hypothesis within research on (re)translation, and its relevance in relation to children’s literature. Further it offers a comprehensive survey of contemporary research endeavours within the field, examining the multifarious factors that underpin the retranslation process in children’s literature. These factors encompass, but are not limited to, the effects of ageing, ideological considerations, societal and cultural norms, as well as economic imperatives. Additionally, current research also shows the influence exerted by external factors such as the personal histories of authors and illustrators, literary awards, cinematic adaptations, and the significance of multimodality. Finally, it explores recent studies on the reception of retranslated children’s literature and suggests avenues for future research, including the application of concepts such as remediation and transcreation.

Anne of Green Gables (1908) by L.M Montgomery has been translated into French four different times (1924, 1964, 1986 and 2020). However, it was not until the success of the Netflix series “Anne with an E” (2017-2018) that Montgomery's text really became a success among French young readers. It took almost eighty years for the books to be published in its entirety (1986) and the text was retranslated in 2020 in a lavish edition with a clear reference to Netflix on the cover. This reception study intends to outline what happened to Anne of Green Gables in French and why this work didn’t have the same success as in the English-speaking world. I argue that this unsuccess has its origin in different causes: 1) Children’s literature is not easy to circulate from “periphery” to a “core”, 2) the representations of Canada of the book didn’t correspond to the French ones, 3) the genre romance doesn’t exist in French, 4) the Canadian view on French was censured. The last translation of Anne of Green Gables from 2020 got a different reception, a larger public and marked a turn in Anne’s French journey, feeling that finally Anne belongs home.

References

Korzeniowska, A.(2020). On the Morally Dubious Custom of Rewriting Canonical Translations of Children’s Literature. In Dybiec-Gajer, J., Oittinen, R., & Kodura, M. (Eds.). Negotiating translation and transcreation of children's literature: From alice to the moomins. Springer Singapore.

Pedersen, Daniel. 2014. Exploring the concept of transcreation – transcreation as ‘more than translation’? Cultus: The Journal of Intercultural Mediation and Communication 7: 57–71.

White Gavin. 1995. L.M. Montgomery and the French. Canadian Children’s Literature (CCL) 78: 65–68. http://www.ccl-lcj.ca/index.php/ccl-lcj/article/view/3085 

Rémi, Cornelia (2019), « From Green Gables to Grönkulla: The Metamorphoses of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables in its Various Swedish Translations », Barnboken, vol. 42 [online], https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v42i0.447

Warnqvist, Åsa (2019), « Don’t be too upset with your unchivalrous publisher: Translator-Publisher Interactions in the Swedish Translations of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne and Emily Books », Barnboken, vol. 42 [online] https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v42i0.449

Alfons Åberg, or Alfie Atkins as he is called in English, is a famous Swedish children's book character created by author Gunilla Bergström in 1972, when the first book about Alfie was published. The Alfie Atkins series consists of 26 books, and books about Alfie have been translated into 40 languages and dialects. Despite Alfie’s great popularity all over the world, the first translations into the two major languages French and Russian came in 2020 and 2022 respectively. Interestingly, the same three Alfie-books have today been translated into the two languages, raising suspicions of collaborative practices as co-edition or co-production.

Much research in the history of translations focus on the genetic translation process,i.e. Genetic Translation Studies (GTS) (see e.g. Nunes et al. 2021) but as far as we know very little research has been devoted to the why of, or the reasons behind, a translation in a genetic perspective. Some studies are looking closer at cultural mediators as “key figures in literary and cultural history” (Meylaert et al. 2017: 67) or at the trajectory of an author within another literary system through “multiple mediatorships” (Schwartz 2017), but few studies are tracking the pre-translation genetic of a translation. By integrating ethnographic fieldwork (such as e.g. interviews), this study is a tentative reconstruction of post-translation documentation with the aim to establish why Alfie reached the French and Russian book markets so late, but also the events that led up to the translations. 

Furthermore, from a transnational literary perspective and considering translation as a cultural product, it is particularly relevant to consider the delayed translation into these important literary fields. Indeed, Alfie Atkins and his father may be seen as “representatives of Scandinavian social democracy” (Waage 2015: 234) or proposing a Swedish representation of childhood. Our research questions are therefore: 1) How and why this series was translated to Russian and French? 2) Who took the initiative to the translations? 3) Why were they translated so late? 4) Is this an example of a collaborative practice? The pre-translation genetic dossier we propose may contribute to understanding the social and cultural delay of the translations.  

References

Meylaerts, R., Gonne, M., Lobbes, T., & Roig, D. S. (2017). Cultural Mediators in Cultural History: What Do We Learn from Studying Mediators’ Complex Transfer Activities in Interwar Belgium? In E. Brems, O. Réthelyi, & T. van Kalmthout (Eds.), Doing Double Dutch: The International Circulation of Literature from the Low Countries (pp. 67–92). Leuven University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt21c4rzf.6

Nunes, A. , Moura, J. , & Pacheco Pinto, M. (Ed.). (2021). Genetic Translation Studies: Conflict and Collaboration in Liminal Spaces. London,: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350146846

Schwartz, C. (2018). From Nuoro to Nobel: the impact of multiple mediatorship on Grazia Deledda’s movement within the literary semi-periphery. Perspectives, 26(4), 526–542. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2018.1439979

Waage, L. R. (2015). The Apocalypse of Scandinavian Social Democracy? A Reading of Johan Harstad’s Novel Hässelby. Scandinavian Studies, 87(2), 234–254. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.87.2.0234

Despite that English book market is closed, in this meaning that translations are less numerous than the national production (Even-Zohar 1990), this presentation aims to show that Swedish literature for children’s and young adults succeed in finding its place – even small – in this well-known hermetic market. It means that there is a circulation of books from a semi-peripheral language (as defined by Heilbron 2000) and a consecrator country as Sweden is, to a hypercentral language and dominating global market. Since the thesis of Broomé (2014) which examined the role and function of Swedish fiction in English translation on the British book market at the beginning of 2000s, there are no specific studies and collected data in both United-Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) especially on translated children’s and young adult’s literature and even less from Sweden. This presentation feels this gap by mapping Swedish children’s and young adult literature translated into English. It presents as well data on which actors publish this literature in the aim to further understand how and what kind of Swedish children’s and young adult’s literature circulate and which actors may have an impact on their circulation. Mapping those translations flows is a way to determine how intensive the exchanges are but above all it is a way to find patterns in the translated production from Sweden to the English-speaking market and to understand what is circulating between those countries. A hypothesis is that books that fit certain stereotype or representations about Scandinavia are more easily published in these two English-speaking countries. 

This article studies the translation flows of picture book series between Scandinavia (Sweden and Norway) and France between 2011 and 2021. According to studies on literary flows, countries having so-called « dominated » and « peripheral » or « semi-peripheral » languages, for example Norway and Sweden, should import more literature from the core (France) than the other way around. However, the present study shows that this theory does not hold water regarding picture books for children aged 3-6 years, where the literary flows from the core to the (semi-)periphery are uneven, or even non-existing. We are able to ascertain that the status of the picture book series is maintained as they cross the borders between France and Scandinavia. Moreover, the series translated to French are almost always characterized by a high literary legitimacy (symbolic recognition of authors and works, limited number of titles per series, affirmation of graphic and authorial creativity), with often a representation of a Scandinavian perspective. The fact that the books originally are part of a series is rarely foregrounded as a marketing device in Scandinavia, but on the contrary, this could be the case in France. The translation flows concerning picture book series show that seriality, sales figures and literary legitimacy are compatible.

Cet article explore les flux de traductions de l’album sériel entre la Scandinavie (Suède et Norvège) et la France dans la période 2011-2021. Selon les études structurelles sur la circulation des œuvres, des pays de langues dites « dominées » et « périphériques » ou « semi-périphériques », comme la Norvège et la Suède, devraient plus importer d’ouvrages du « centre » (ici la France) que l’inverse. Or, notre étude montre que dans le cas de l’album sériel pour les 3-6 ans, cette hypothèse ne se vérifie pas et que les flux sont déséquilibrés, voire inexistants du centre vers la (semi-)périphérie. Nous constatons que le statut de l’album sériel est conservé lors du passage des frontières entre ces pays. De plus, les albums sériels traduits vers le français présentent presque tous un indice élevé de légitimité littéraire (reconnaissance symbolique des auteurs et des œuvres, nombre limité de titres par série, affirmation d’une créativité graphique et auctoriale) et souvent une mise en relief du contexte scandinave au plan des univers représentés. La fonction sérielle en Scandinavie est rarement mise en avant alors qu’elle peut devenir un argument de vente en France. Les flux de traduction des albums sériels montrent que sérialité, ventes et légitimité littéraire ne semblent pas incompatibles. 

Considering translation as a cultural product, it is possible to explore environmental imaginary (Kato and Allen 2014) through translated literature. Sweden, as a Scandinavian country, has a specific link to nature that may be different from the rest of the world (Duckworth 2021). This presentation aims to explore Swedish picture books translated into English (United-Kingdom) for the last decade and analyse how this translated children’s literature may create an understanding of the environmental challenges and contribute to sustainable development. The study is based on an original database which identifies Swedish picture books translated to English (UK) since 2012 and categorizes them according to two major movements: books which directly talk about environmental challenges and those which evoke them indirectly. From this corpus, an analyse based on concepts from ecocriticism (Goga 2018) will focus on which solutions that are proposed (e.g. activism or romantic sustainability) and the role children play in sustainable development. Finally, the analyse will focus on what the choices of translated picture books from Swedish to English tell us about English conceptions on children’s role in environmental topics. 

“Anne of Green Gables” (1908) by L.M Montgomery has been translated into French four different times (1924, 1964, 1986 and 2020). However, it was not until the success of the Netflix series “Anne with an E” (2017) that Montgomery's text really became a success among French young readers. It took almost eighty years for the books to be published in its entirety (1986) and the text was retranslated in 2020 with a clear reference to Netflix on the cover. 

This paper seeks to investigate how the French translation of “Anne of Green Gables” from 2020 relates to the retranslation hypothesis (Berman 1990) and to the concept of transcreating which is “often appl[ied] in advertising and marketing context” (Pedersen 2014). I will focus on the newest translation of the first volume of the book series, but I will also compare to the older translations from 1964 and 1986. 

My research questions are therefore: How much does the Netflix series (marketing context) affect the translation itself? Is there room for transcreating and how does it take place? I will rely on Korzeniowska who assumes that transcreating takes “place when a translator recreates the given text for a specific audience, this mainly being within the field of advertising, when promoting brand-related products or preparing video games for foreign markets, etc.” (2000:73). I will also use the retranslation hypothesis by Berman (1990) and Chesterman, which presumes that “later translations tend to be closer to the source text” (Chesterman 2004:8). Many studies show that this hypothesis holds, but that it has no universal value. It seems that in the case of translation of “Anne of Green Gables” to French, transcreating makes the text readable for a young public, even if it takes liberties with the original text, and by this way brings it back to light.

This article sheds light on translated children’s literature in Sweden during the period 2015−2020. A relatively large portion of children’s literature in Sweden (36% in 2020), from books for toddlers to young adult literature, comes from translations. It has been shown in polysystem research, that ‘semi-peripheral’ countries such as Sweden, or places having a so-called ‘dominated language’, are known to import much literature because, for example, their internal production is rather limited, which a priori is not the case in Sweden. We first present a panorama of the kinds of books that are translated to Swedish and the languages they are translated from. We then focus on the particular position in Sweden of African children’s literature from French-speaking regions and assume that French is used as a tool that enables this literature to reach a Swedish audience, as part of the global phenomena of serial books and the emerging wimmelbooks. We conclude that even if Sweden’s national production is greater than book importing and translation, there is still a not insignificant number of translated picturebooks through which authors and illustrators from French-speaking regions occupy a stable share of this production, and may in this way transport cultural values from more peripheral countries.

Le présent article s’intéresse aux difficultés de traduction des jurons dans la version française du roman suédois Här ligger jag och blöder (2010) de Jenny Jägerfeld (Mère forte à agitée, 2015). Il s’agit de comprendre si les jurons ont résisté à la traductionet à quel degré. Les questions centrales de cette présente étude sont de savoir quels sont les procédés utilisés par les traductrices et s’ils préservent les fonctions des jurons. De plus, nous avons étudié quelles conséquences ces choix de traduction ont dans le texte cible. Nos résultats indiquent que les traductrices restent proches du texte source par un constant équilibre entre différentes stratégies de traduction, mais qu’elles font aussi preuve de créativité et d’originalité, ce qui permet au texte français de garder la spécificité du texte suédois.