L'ABC dei traduttori di letteratura per ragazzi

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Borders of Children’s Literature: The Reception of Picture Books in Italy and the Question of Reading Aloud

The article opens with the concept of the “world republic of childhood” without geographical and political borders, as conceived by Hazard and promoted after the Second World War. According to O’Sullivan (2004, 2005), this concept of childhood, and consequently of children’s literature, is idealistic and does not address real problems connected with the process of translation. As a matter of fact, translating a book for children from one language into another is not as easy as it might seem: frontiers and custom houses do exist (Bertea 2000: 94). A peculiar cas limite is the reception of the picture book in Italy. Introduced thanks to the pioneering work of the Emme Edizioni publishing house and its translators, the genre was later rejected. Italy had to wait a decade to see the same and similar picture books republished, but it is still paying the price for having initially closed its borders, despite the fact that the translators had paid customs- and import duties. These were determined not only by the child image dominant in the Italian society, but also by the different image of the adult, who was meant to read picture books aloud and who was ready to put on a performance for the child recipient (Oittinen 2000). In particular, the article investigates examples of the discrepancy between the adult and child images of the source and target texts selected from American and English picture books and their Italian translations

Evidence (re)presentation and evidentials in popular and academic history: facts and sources speaking for themselves

The paper pivots around the different roles of evidentials and the different ways in which evidence is represented in the discourse of popular and academic history, thereby exploring the dynamics of both genres from a discourse analytical perspective. The analysis is based on two corpora of academic and popular articles on history. In particular, it is focused on those lexico-grammatical resources for tracing the speaker’s source and mode of information that constitute the distinguishing features of the two genres. The analysis shows that the high frequency of saw in popular articles refers to the narrative of history, and to the evidence provided by historical characters and sources, rather than by the speaker. The frequency of the attributor according in academic journal articles, on the other hand, clearly qualifies as evidentiality in the narrative of historiography, and acts as a marker of the importance of sources in historical reasoning. The different frequencies thus seem to be related to the different communicative and social functions of the two genres and to be closely connected with the triptych of narratives (Bondi 2015) involved in historical discourse

“Bridging the Sensorial Gaps: Theory and Practice in Translating the Voice of the Adult Aloud Reader in Pre-school Picturebooks”

The translator of picturebooks has to cope with many considerable textual demands as they, being conceived for an oral rendition, seriously challenge his/her ability, even if their structure can deceive. Within the lines of their full-page images and within their other visual and verbal elements, there can be found directions which build up the story to be read aloud by the adult. As picturebooks are aimed at illiterate children, this sort of instructions, guiding the aloud reading of the story, are absolutely essential for the text fruition but the translator is not always aware of their presence or able to face the, leading in this way to performative or stylistic contradictions

Translating crossover picturebooks: the Italian translations of "Bear Hunt" by Anthony Browne

This chapter sets out to explore the challenges posed by the translation of crossover picture books, that is, works addressing the child and the adult alike. Building on recent research on the translation of picture books and on aspects related to performativity and read-aloudability in children's literature, the investigation focuses on the Italian translation (1990) and retranslation (1999) of Bear Hunt by Anthony Browne. The case study shows how the two translators adopted different solutions when tackling the relationship between visual and verbal, the read-aloud situation put on by the adult reading aloud, and the different layers of meaning of Browne's picture book. Grounded on O'Sullivan's scheme on narrative communication for translation, the comparative analysis also attempts to account for the differences between the implied child reader and the implied adult reading aloud in the source text and in the target text

"Quello stregone che non era altri che lui, James Joyce di Dublino": le traduzioni di The Cat and the Devil in italiano

This article sets out to explore the dynamics through which Joyce’s version of the legend of the “devil’s bridge”, narrated in a letter addressed to his grandson, Stevie, entered the world of children’s literature in Italy. This occurred just after the legend’s publication in the USA and the UK under the title The Cat and the Devil. It was immediately turned into a picturebook, a sophisticated literary product aimed at very young readers. In fact, far from being a mere text for toddlers, the Italian Il gatto e il diavolo is at the centre of several intersemiotic and interlinguistic translations that enhance the interpretative potential and richness of Joyce’s narration, already at the crossroads between folkloric and modernist translation. The comparative analysis of three different Italian translations of the story expressly addressed to children (the first by Enzo Siciliano, published by Emme Edizioni in 1967; the second by Giulio Lughi for Edizioni EL in 1980; and the third and more recent one by Ottavio Fatica for ESG in 2010) has highlighted that the differences between them can be ascribed to distinct translation projects, aimed at building bridges between young readers and Joyce’s work in various periods of the history of the Italian literary market for children